alt Hacker NewsThey refuse it because if they would say "1 million liters a year!" the knee-jerk reaction will be completely predictable even though that's just tiny compared to a small swimming pool or industrial or agricultural site.
The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.
Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).
Replies
> They refuse it because ...
It is completely irrelevant why they choose to refuse to provide this information.
From what I understand, disclosing this data is not optional. It is a law. And if they have willfully chosen to operate in a country where such a law applies, they have to obey that law.
If they are taking reasonable steps to mitigate consumption and pollution then they should be able to clearly explain that to the public. The fact they won't suggests they aren't.
Just because people haven't cared about the environment before doesn't mean they shouldn't start now. And just because there are worse existing polluters doesn't mean we shouldn't resist new ones.
A new golf course used to be seen as a great thing to have in your back yard and now we know their pesticide use increases the risk of Parkinson's. People are waking up and caring more. We need to have a sustainable society, not a profit obsessed one.
Well, water usage is usually metered in cubic meters. A thousand m^3 per year sounds much less than a million litres.
The people who don’t care about environmental impact and resource use are the same people pushing for more and faster datacenter deployment. The Republican Party is the one getting rid of environmental protection rules, it’s the party most financed by fossil fuel companies, and the party that was/is against solar and windmill development. The party that gutted all the regulatory agencies and is colluding with the AI industry.
There is a very obvious pattern here
>Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way.
In the Netherlands it is not just about AI datacenters, even before the rise of AI pushback against Meta's planned datacenter made them cancel it. There has been a lot of criticism of the municipality that allowed Microsoft to expand its datacenters. The argument is that this is a small country that already has to make tradeoffs to get to its desired energy mix (wind turbines near cities on land) and then these datacenters are built that consume the power that is generated by sacrificing the little remaining open space. In the last few years there is actually a electricity shortage in some regions so "we can hook up this 200 MW datacenter but not your house" is a bad look.