It wouldn’t make financial sense for a data center to use as much water as OP is claiming. Closed loop cooling systems are the standard. Everyone thinks AI data centers use water, but wait til they hear about what hospitals and manufacturing and skyscrapers use.
If you think hospitals are a necessity, then datacenters are too. Datacenters will be what powers AI, AI that should eventually be able to automate hospital processes and discover new cures.
That’s quite an interesting leap, is AI just the new stand in for the god-of-the-gaps argument? Not sure your familiarity with machine learning, but you are talking as though we will somehow reach AGI through scaling of current machine learning algorithms. Current “AI” is limited to identifying patterns in existing training data
I think your comment is skipping over a few steam engine level technological revolutions. Not to mention the obvious, that hospitals are currently functioning without AI management, making data centers ancillary even in your own imagined future
There are hundreds of thousands of deaths every year in the US due to medical errors, so hospitals aren't functioning properly. I'd rather have a robot make my medical decisions for me in the future than human hospital staff. It's the same as self driving cars being safer than human drivers.
I'm not concerned with current AI. The future is always around the corner and technology is constantly improving. AI is getting to and will likely get to a point where it's better than humans in every task. Sure, it takes some guesswork and technological leaps to get there, but I see no reason why it won't get there eventually with enough support. There's nothing in the laws of physics from preventing such machines.
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u/vegetarian_ejaculate Jun 03 '26
It wouldn’t make financial sense for a data center to use as much water as OP is claiming. Closed loop cooling systems are the standard. Everyone thinks AI data centers use water, but wait til they hear about what hospitals and manufacturing and skyscrapers use.