MIT: Computers that power self-driving cars could be a huge driver of global carbon emissions. So what! So wrong!

When elite universities come out with wrong predictions! This alarmism and hysteria at its finest! Laughable!

We need more energy not less! Why do these MIT engineers not work on carbon capture, nuclear breeders, nuclear fusion etc.!

I bet these smart aleks at MIT did not properly account for all the energy and lives saved due to autonomous vehicles. E.g. less traffic congestion. Add to this drone deliveries and work from home etc.

Leading climate models are junk. They can neither accurately backcast nor forecast! Too much about the very complex natural phenomenon climate is still largely unknown!

Some of the latest machine learning models have already dramatically reduced computational resources and energy consumption and so forth!

"In the future, the energy needed to run the powerful computers on board a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world today.

That is one key finding of a new study from MIT researchers that explored the potential energy consumption and related carbon emissions if autonomous vehicles are widely adopted. ..."

From the abstract:

"While much attention has been paid to data centers’ greenhouse gas emissions, less attention has been paid to autonomous vehicles’ (AVs) potential emissions. In this work, we introduce a framework to probabilistically model the emissions from computing onboard a global fleet of AVs and show that the emissions have the potential to make a nonnegligible impact [???] on global emissions, comparable to that of all data centers today. Based on current trends, a widespread AV adoption scenario where approximately 95% of all vehicles are autonomous requires computer power to be less than 1.2 kW for emissions from computing on AVs to be less than emissions from all data centers in 2018 in 90% of modeled scenarios. Anticipating a future scenario with high adoption of AVs, business-as-usual decarbonization, and workloads doubling every three years, hardware efficiency must double every 1.1 years for emissions in 2050 to equal 2018 data center emissions. The rate of increase in hardware efficiency needed in many scenarios to contain emissions is faster than the current rate. We discuss several avenues of future research unique to AVs to further analyze and potentially reduce the carbon footprint of AVs."

Computers that power self-driving cars could be a huge driver of global carbon emissions | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Study shows that if autonomous vehicles are widely adopted, hardware efficiency will need to advance rapidly to keep computing-related emissions in check.

Data Centers on Wheels: Emissions From Computing Onboard Autonomous Vehicles (no public access; what a hilarious paper title!!!)

Credits: Marktechpost AI Newsletter