alt Hacker NewsFirst ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment"
GUYS
PLEASE
The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?
There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
Replies
There was a chart on Twitter comparing the water usage of AI datacenters to that of the California almond farms and the golf courses all over the country. AI’s water usage is tiny compared to those.
Care to elaborate? Just taking the impact of data centers on locals is enough to validate his point. (Noise pollution, heat pollution and emissions from on-site gas turbines)
Yeah, it's weird, nobody's saying "we should make all the data centres use closed loop cooling even if it's more expensive for them!", but a lot of voices are yelling "AI uses water!", referring to the same thing.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown.
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.