AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions

Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?

Everything has a downside attached. Most things are terrible for the environment if you look at the raw numbers, and if you're not interested in them or they're things you don't use then it's easy to just dismiss them as pointless nonsense that we should stop doing.

However, if you're only looking at the downside then you're being dishonest. The point is never "Let's stop this because it's bad for the planet", but "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"

That could still be a no for AI, but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI. Notably golf. It's a terrible waste of land and water, and boring.

Their estimated water usage by AI data centers for 2030 is about 9.8 trillion liters. The global almond crop is estimated to use ~8 trillion liters. So I vote we just ban almonds. Problem solved!

Also, I find the framing of water usage in terms of “the water needs of Sub-Saharan Africans” to be manipulative and misleading. It appears they just picked a poor part of the world where per capita water usage is very low, so they could make it sound as bad as possible. But virtually none of these data centers will have a deleterious effect on water availability for those people.

Alternative headline: “Despite massive growth globally, AI is projected to only use about a third as much water in 2030 as Turkmenistan”

(~28 trillion liters, mostly to grow cotton in the desert).

Or here’s another fun one: the entire annual global water usage of all of AI in 2030, including the water needed to generate all the power for AI, is about what golf courses use daily.

So dumb.

AI presents an existential threat to the continued existence of Homo sapiens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_crisis

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