Comment by tomwphillips
6 months ago
Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!).
I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption.
If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe.
It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view.
I really recommend the book.
The fact that certain specific data centres are being proposed or built in areas with water issues may be bad, but it does not imply that all AI data centres are water guzzling drain holes that are killing Earth, which is the point you were (semi-implicitly) making in the article.
What is it that you imagine happens to the water after it goes through the data center?
Clearly it vanishes without a trace and simply leaves the water cycle.
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I’m sure there was some planning commission process involved with the development of these sites. I’m curious if anyone has bothered to look at those meeting minutes to see if there are some material misrepresentation of the water and power needs. I’m going to guess that answer is no.
An update: there seems to be a critical error in the reporting of metrics in this book for the water issue. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mis....
I do think the whole water issue as pointed out in the book is completely discredited with this call out.
The author Karen Hao acknowledges this:
https://x.com/_KarenHao/status/1990412118584144113
Thanks for the recommendation, added to my reading list.
The mistake you are making is letting the author choose your points of comparison, without having a high-level picture of where water usage goes. Comparing water usage to a city is misleading because cities don't use much water; large-scale water use is entirely dominated by agriculture.
I'm conflicted. Zooming out, the problem isn't with AI specifically but economic development in general. Everything has a side effect.
For decades we've been told we shouldn't develop urban centers because of how it development affects local communities, but really it just benefited another class of elites (anonymous foreign investors), and now housing prices are impoverishing younger generations and driving homelessness.
Obviously that's not a perfect comparison to AI, which isn't as necessary, but I think the anti-growth argument isn't a good one. Democracies need to keep growing or authoritarian states will take over who don't care so much about human rights. (Or, authoritarian governments will take over democracies.)
There needs to be a political movement that's both pro-growth and pro-humanity, that is capable of making hard or disruptive decisions that actually benefits the poor. Maybe that's a fantasy, but again, I think we should find ways to grow sustainably.
Not just the poor, how about the bottom 99%? This is what's so frustrating to me about the culture wars and identity politics. Regardless of ones views on the hot button cultural issue du jour, at best they are a distraction, and at worst actively exploited by moneyed interests as a political smokescreen to prevent changes that would be obvious wins for super majorities of the population if analyzed and viewed through a more sober and objective lens of the net effects.
IIRC Google chose to pull out altogether to punish the locals for standing up to them— even though they happily built air-cooled data centers elsewhere.
I mean yes, almost all corporations that have a choice do this. Walmart is one of the better known ones that will put a store right on the edge of a municipality that doesn't want one and cause all kinds of issues for the city at hand.
None of which have to do with AI or AGI.
Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer.
It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case.
What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.
I think the point is: where does this end? Do we continue to build orders-of-magnitude bigger models guzzling orders-of-magnitude more water and other resources, in pursuit of the elusive AGI?
At some we need to end this AGI" rat race and focus on realizing practical benefits from the models we currently have.
Well then vote with your wallet and convince everyone you know to stop the train.
As long as there’s a market, machines are going to continue toto displace labor. That’s not going to stop
Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"? God help us.
My interpretation was "If an industry that actively works to harm the global health of humanity through their addictive and unhealthy food products is using way more water and we're OK with it, maybe we should give a pass to the industry using a fraction of that water to improve human productivity."
Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries, of course, but to a first approximation they are accurate.
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No it’s a red herring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring)
It’s a fundamentally flawed argument
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