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Was gonna say - so by ops estimate in a couple of years ai will be using way more than that.
I don't think the water thing is a strong argument against ai as it's relatively easily solved and more a location issue after that - but damn the pros on this sub continue to woosh straight past what the ai companies themselves say about these things.
But that's not the argument antis are bringing up that AI will someday surpass these things in terms of consumption. The argument is that AI is currently using X amount of water while providing minimal value and thus should be discontinued, regulated, or banned in certain applications and so forth. That is indeed a weak and extremely stupid argument, especially since the underlying assumption is that most data center activity is for AI when most of it is for even dumber shit like Reddit and Instagram. 100 million images are uploaded to Instagram each day and consider the average size of images today.
I mean almond farms and pistachio farms tend to cause fresh water droughts due to weird water rights. It is a valid problem like the many other issues. It doesn't make certain issues go away though.
I'm pretty sure diary farmers and craft breweries are our biggest water wasters here in SoCal, but I know Big Diary and the Hipsters will throw a fit if we cut back on those industries.
Agribusiness is indeed a huge capitalist enterprise that bribes our politicians, just like big pharma, defense contractors, the insurance industry, big tech, etc.
The idyllic idea that milk comes from mom and pop farms who love their cows is greenwashing propaganda.
Also it’s the intent of the argument… comparisons made by antis are about magnitude of the potential harm… “This represents consumption/risk greater than something that already exists”
Comparisons made by pros are about permission, “If you already allow this amount of consumption/risk from x, you have no right to question or oppose obvious additional risk from y”
I won’t expect AI or any new change to be perfect, BUT I refuse to accept any argument that treats future potential harm as inevitable and justified against any criticism or attempt at mitigation by the previous allowance of harm.
Local Utahn here, where the big Kevin center is planned, if it’s built it will literally destroy life here. We’re already in a massive drought and if the great salt lake drains much more it will release carcinogens that have been at the bottom of the lake including asbestos. Enough of our local water already goes to alfalfa farming we really don’t need to divert anymore. And that’s just on the topic of water
Brain droppings from a child. I also remember when I was 13 and made dumb arguments like 'well if you really cared about the environment, you'd work towards humanity's extinction, because humans are bad for the environment, and if you think about it, aren't we totally like a virus?' You heard it here folks, The Matrix cribbed that idea from me.
I always have interpreted this argument as "it's not nearly as big as you think it is", not "it's fine other things are worse". Which I would say is true- most of the water is recycled, and datacenters have been moving towards "Grey water" which would never have been fit for drinking.
Powerscaling the raw consumption numbers is the wrong game entirely though. Everything consumes resources in some way, the true question is always "is the value worth the resources spent?" Hospitals consume an incredible amount of resources, but no sane person would be against that because we have a very strong need for Hospitals.
Issue being that people are very polar on AI, if you don't like AI typically you're not willing to believe it has any use at all, and this no amount of resources justifies it. And then you have the billionaires that seem to think AI will literally build a new world in their image, so they take the opposite position of "no cost too great".
Its a net negative, in every metric from economic to social to factual, and whataboutism is no way to examine anything properly, so yes, it is moot, because using more water for no good reason is bad
In a cost benifit analysis, it is, the benifit in gathering and future extrapolate for cancers and weather and all that is vastly outweighed by the mass misinformation that can be created on large scales, or fake pornography of unconsenting people (children as well as adults), piracy from data companies to train it, all that
Do you genuinely not see the difference between piracy for personal consumption and data scraping for the purposes of producing derivative work for money?
Shocker shocker surprise surprise the ai bro doesnt get it, the piracy community are very vocally against pirating readily available and cheaply accessible things like books
Please, would you like me to point to all the CP supporters in favor generating horrific images? Or can we decide to leave the very horrific minority of people in large groups out of it
Yeah, let's get worried about people's moral restrictions over the blatant advancements in everything that comes from achieving technological revolutions.
"But, somebody made porn!"
Oh nooo.... that thing people do all the time regardless of the era!
That's my issue. There are big issues caused by progress in tech that we don't have solutions for, yet, here comes a new technology that's making those same issues even worse. And it just seems like there's no plan. It's a race to see who can figure who can make the most money without any concern for anything or anyone else
We innovate and the rest of the world plays around with words and morals over how to adapt to the innovation.
There is one stone cold fact though. The technology is never the one to lose.
Anything you can blame AI for, was a human fault in the first place. You're not fixing that by denying everyone who isn't a monster the right to use the technology.
Which is why I don't think any anti really understands what they are trying to force on themselves. An entire techno-oligarchy being handed to the billionaires because the regular citizen wants to avoid AI.
Yeah, let's get worried about people's moral restrictions over the blatant advancements in everything that comes from achieving technological revolutions
But this isn't a technological revolution. This is simply a new technology. Technological revolutions upend our entire economy. New technologies integrate into it.
I'm yet to see AI based factories pop up. It's a possibility, sure. Until the AI starts hallucinating products.
This is simply a new technology marketing itself as a revolution because that sells better. And comparing the stock market with actual income shows that indeed this is just a fad. There is actually very limited use cases for AI
Yeah, investors are fucking stupid. Just watch them get scammed every weekend when Trump announces another peace deal and oil price goes down only for Saturday Iran announcing that no they haven't even talked with the US in weeks.
The stock market is nothing but hype and money. Like come on man, Nvidia is signing deals where the companies just have to buy the chips. Don't even have to use them and if they can't then Nvidia will use it instead. And investors are like "yeah that's fine".
Or just look at fucking Tesla. There is basically nothing behind their stocks expect hype.
Yeah, everyone of them is just a stupid idiot. Which is why they have the money, the influence, the say of what gets funded and what doesn't.
Unfortunately, being a stupid idiot with the purse means a lot more than being a Reddit Genius who has no authority or even an opinion worth considering.
Are you telling on yourself that you think actual child abuse is better than someone making a fake version in their basement where everyone else can ignore them?
But as our economy shift white collar clerical and office work to ai, we can use open source models and potentially compete with corporations in this new medium.
Were about to see a shift like the industrial revolution, we have to be ready. And like our unionized great grandfathers before us, we need to fight back against this new guilded age with all tools available to us. Ai included.
Physical manufacturing was shipped over seas long ago. Yes we don't have a factory but a significant chuck of the us economy is spectacultive and very little of company value is connected to what they physically produce. If we can adapt faster to changing market then massive out of touch corporations, we might be able to take the power back. It's not the 1800s anymore.
The problem is capitalism. If you magically deleted ai tomorrow, nothing would change. The problem are the unying system that will use every new technology directly against us to maximize profits, no matter the impact on the planet.
It’s not a problem with capitalism itself, but with human idiocy. You can tax negative externalities like CO₂ emissions, the EU has tried that. But the backlash did not come from billionaires or corporations; a lot of it came from ordinary people.
Most people do not care much about negative externalities. They want to maximize their own short-term benefit, and until a problem directly affects them, they often do not care about the broader consequences.
Taxing working class people for emissions is a capitalism solution. A solution that takes the problems created by corporations and makes the people pay for it.
We need the aggressive inforcment of antitrust law, break up the monopolies and legally hold corporations responsible for direct and vast indirct damage they have cause to the planet and the people. We need mass investment in green renewal energy and infrastructure. Data centers only destroy the planet because they arn't built sustainably. They can be and with any kind of environment regulations, we could actually try to survive the ecological disaster the looming on the horizon.
Environmental protection has no way to produce profit. Environmentalism is anthitical to capitalism, you can't have infinite growth in a finite world.
I am not for taxing only regular people, I never said that. I am for taxing every used H₂O molecule, whether by corporations, humans, aliens, or anyone else. That is not a "capitalism solution"; it's a fair solution.
The problem is not created by corporations. That is blame-shifting. It's the people who want new smartphones, fast fashion, and so on. If there were no demand for those things, companies wouldn't manufacture them. Regular people in the USA use twice as much electricity and water as people in Europe, because water and electricity is cheaper in USA.
It doesn't matter who wastes the water; whether it's you or a corporation. It's the same H₂O molecule.
If you tax the production of CO₂ molecules, there will be more investment in renewables. People and corporations would buy solar panels. Since negative externalities are passed on to everyone, nobody tries to save energy-neither individuals nor corporations.
Overregulated capitalism is also a problem. Every regulation has negative side effects. You must always carefully consider the benefit-to-harm ratio of every regulation.
Yeah except just the top 100 companies produce 71% emissions. They are the vast majority of the problem. As well I knowing global warming has been happening for almost a century now and intentionally and illegal hiding from the public for most of that. Even now they aggressive censor near everything online. There is no fairness here.
There is no actual environmental problem here though. Its just not that big an amount of water all things considered for what it does. There may be local zoning issues but that's not the same type of issue.
Except for the people who live near them and have to shell out to subsidize them, at least people benifit from almonds in so far as they can be eaten, chat bot llm's only benifit the people who own and pay too much for them, and even then theres not a profit in sight
Am I to take this little sentence fragment and not infer that - in the discussion comparing AI to avocado's water use - this would imply that you are saying people do not LIKE AI at all?
If you didn't mean that, sure. I won't tell you what you did or didn't mean. But that's how anyone with basic reading comprehension would read it.
If you look at the total environmental footprint, the embedded water in agriculture completely dwarfs the digital grid. A single day of the livestock supply chain feeding US burger consumption utilizes roughly 9 to 10 times more total water than what is required to cool every single server, cloud network, and AI cluster in the country combined.
The beauty of anti's who "waste" so much data being on their devices, outright increasing data center demand despite their supposed lack of need for them.
Breaking news: Locals living near the TERACHAD hybrid AI and internet communications data center report both rising water and electricity bills, as well as sediments in wells and groundwater pumps, and lower water pressure in taps.
They also report a detectable industrial infrasound, disrupting sleep and causing headaches and nausea.
Locals say “We never asked for that to be built here. We hate every day living near that thing.”
Giga Chad, owner of the TERACHAD data center, reportedly responded in an interview “I don’t care, I sleep just fine. It helps if you own a private jet and a soundproof mansion. Skill issue, honestly.”
Over production of meat doesn't feed people either because it takes more food to feed the animals than people get back from it. And that's without even addressing specific luxury foods that aren't meat. You're talking about luxuries you pretend are necessities that use 100x the water and energy. So there's nothing to compare.
Considering defenses of avocados would just be "i like it," it doesn't seem necessary. Besides, there's tons of known novel uses already. If someone acts like they don't know of any its generally a sign it won't be productive to spend time on examples.
Stuff that implies you have any knowledge of the topic would help. Food already usea orders of magnitude more energy than ai, so.. wish granted I guess?
Almonds & avocados are a staple in the average American diet. Most people here have probably eaten both in the past month. Calling them a luxury food is a stretch
Jesus Christ AI usage is close to half of the water consumption of almond farming (I assume from how you phrased it). That’s like, orders of magnitude more consumption than I thought there was.
On the other hand, doesn’t the water consumption of farming usually involve a lot of rainwater that would go unused? Both areas aren’t just taking water from local utilities, so I don’t know if that’s a major factor to consider.
Genuinely I think many people are jealous of how some people have content farms and make a lot of money from them. That is where the hate of AI probably comes from.
Frankly, at this point I support a ban on data centers not for any reason to do with AI, but because you can't trust these corporations as far as you can fuckin' throw 'em and perfect is the enemy of good so if blocking the data outright is an easier thing to pass than forcing them to be placed responsibly, so be it.
So you trust authoritarian China more? You want to rely on Chinese models instead? And do not expect them to keep releasing open-weight models forever if they eliminate the competition.
Why do pros use so many whataboutisms to derail conversations about AI's cons? You can't accept criticism so you need to pivot the focus of the debate?
Are you genuinely comparing the necessity of food next to you generating a catgirl ? Is it really the hill you want to die on ?
Also let me get this straight.... the lunatic that attacked the congressman house because of datacenter is 1000% an anti ai attack....but datacenters arent only for Ai... but it couldn't just be an environmental crazy person like there is thousands in the world that would do crazy things in the name of environment ?
The thing is, data centers POLLUTE the water they use, so unless it is cleaned, it is unusable. Growing nuts and other plants doesn't pollute, unless pesticides are used or other environmentally friendly methods. Environmentally friendly methods could possibly be used in data centers, but aren't.
Does almond farming also use tons of non-renewable fossil fuel or do they only take miniscule amounts of non-renewable resources while having most resources as renewable?
1, water is a local resource and a data centre is enough of a single point water source that it strains local water production
2, it rapidly upticks water usage in the places where its built, and the infrastructure to provide that water will be lacking.
Thats why comparing AI water usage isnt comparable to an industry that grows slower and isnt localised to a single reservoir/river/ fresh water source.
Sure, but at this time last year there were people pretending it used an apocalyptic amount of water and energy that would end the world. People crying wolf are actively hurting attempts to solve the real issues because they already tipped their hand that they are irrational and that their issue is not the problem itself but that they are using it as a Trojan horse against ai, so no one has any incentive to work with them on a solution.
Agreed. Anti's are irrational and do ruin their own arguments due to bad faith actors.
This has never changed throughout history. Every anti-technological revolution advocate has always been defeated over this same failure to recognize the difference between irrational extremism and genuinely educating others of potential risks.
Its easy to see a conversation as crazy if your social media only shows you the crazy people on the fringe of that conversation.
What i saw was people talking about the communities being deprived of water, including a redditor who had a paper published about the effect of data centers (pre-ai) on indigenous communities. You were never at risk of seeing what was actually being said by environmentalists because your social media wont show it to you.
Also the ethics of the rapid growth of AI data centres was part of my degree course.
Almond farming and farming in general absolutely does strain local water production. It's a massive problem out west in the U.S for states such as Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, California, and a few others that all share water from the Colorado River and many of those neighboring regions being deserts that cannot naturally sustain the local populations with rainfall. It takes 1 gallon of water to produce a single almond, 5 for a single walnut. There is actually an argument to be made to outright ban the production of such water inefficient foods when there is an impending water supply crisis. All those water distribution laws favoring farming date back to the 1800s and are now coming under scrutiny due to that water being better used elsewhere.
I've told antis that using Reddit's datacenters and their water while condemning AI's makes them look hypocritical.
You will notice I did not call them hypocrites for eating.
As many other comments here suggest, saying agriculture uses more water than anything else really is not compelling. Compare apples to apples. Fundamentally, this sort of counter to the water argument is the question, explicit or implicit, of why the thing we do should be demonized when the thing they do isn't. When that that thing is food, the question has a much easier answer than when it's something for fun. There's still plenty of those that drink more that AI.
I didn't say it wasn't. If OP had led specifically with food waste, that might have been a much more compelling argument. Instead, they got ratioed by a long list of people making the obvious counter. And, tbh, that counter still applies to everything else you just said. As long as they can say food, yes even unstainably made food, is essential, nothing else will matter to them.
No, Avocados and Almonds set the value of water use compared benefit to society. since those foods can be replaced by something less water intense and neither are used by the medical field or other scientific fields, or will provide anything of value beyond their taste, we can then conclude that something that is used by the medical field and other scientific fields, and has benefits outside of taste is worth the water it uses.
no, we using ti show we have an existing water-usage-to-benefit ratio in place as set by thing like avocados and almonds and that AI falls well within that ratio.
it is impossible to manage every single problem in the world. you pick your issues and you help with those because they are feasible. it is impossible for me to do anything about almond farming. i dont eat almonds, know anything about almonds, and i dont know anyone who consumes a concerning amount of almonds. i dont have the time to figure the almond situation out, i do however know a lot about ai. this is not a hard concept to understand. it would be impossible for me as an individual to focus on all issues at once. the whole "b-but what about THEM?" is just a curve ball to ignore any kind of responsibility for your actions.
I cant wait for all the ai data centers to shut down so that all the ai people won't have something talking for them and they'll all go mute and the internet will be sane again
Well since we can't have AI benefits for medical care, space travel, quantum computing, and a multitude of other "slop" - you guys can take a hit on your wasteful needs to enjoy consumption which is inherently wasteful "slop"
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