alt Hacker News"waste"
All of a sudden we are selectively squeamish with computer resource usage, when we were fine having all that fun with computers and hardware, 3 monitor setups, using graphic cards to play games (dear lord!) and tinkering around with home rigs of every proportion and wattage for no reason at all.
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Presumably you're fine with using electricity to heat/cool your house, yes?
Would you, then, also be fine with running three extra air conditioners/space heaters that do nothing but sit outside on the lawn?
"People are OK with the energy usage already happening, so they should be OK with adding 32,767 AI datacenters too" doesn't make sense. It's essentially a reductio ad absurdum. Of course we're "selectively squeamish with computer resource usage"; some usage is obviously useful to us (with entertainment also in the "useful" category—we're not robots!), while for many, many of us, the extra datacenters are having anywhere from a neutral to a profoundly net-negative impact on our lives even before you consider the resource usage.
Driving a car consumes 25+ more energy per hour than gaming. So urban planning which encourages people to drive likely results in an order of magnitude more waste than all home computer use.