Comment by Petersipoi
7 hours ago
> have to eat to live
Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
7 hours ago
> have to eat to live
Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
Yes, and now please cut the non-essential philosophical discussion, the server hosting this site doesn't run on thought experiments alone either.
This comment could have been someone's hamburger!
This site, if not overly wasteful, fits onto a single 1U server. A single car is more damaging than such a server.
HN does untold societal damage.
HN could run on a cellphone with a good connection. The YouTube video I am watching in another window probably burns more electrons than this entire forum.
If we're shipping the alfalfa to China, I assume that means it's supporting some Chinese person's food source, whether they are directly eating the alfalfa, or some animal is eating it that later becomes food.
If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.
Pointing to agriculture as a necessity while also wanting water usage to be "productive" is a little contradictory here. We grow things because there is a demand for those products in similar way that there is a demand for datacenters, the nutrition aspect is secondary and has been for a long time now. Would you say that almond growing is a productive use of our water? How about bananas, or beef, or avocados? All of these products use an abnormally large amount of water compared to other agricultural endeavors and if we compare that to data center water usage data center's are a drop in the bucket. We don't 'need' all of products we produce through agriculture to survive anymore, we grow them because we like them.
Lots of Colorado river water goes to supplying year around lettuce. If we didn't have lettuce they would just eat something else. Given the supply constraints of the region, "but someone is eating it" is a really bizarre argument. It can be grown elsewhere without water problems.
The southwest is basically exporting its water very cheaply in the form of agriculture. Why when its such a constrained resource here?
What makes AI use "illegitimate", and any food use automatically "legitimate"?
People have all kinds of needs in addition to those for food and water.
One difference is that AI data center locations are not constrained by soil quality, length of growing season, climate, availability of cheap seasonal manual laborers, and access to transportation networks able to regularly handle a large physical volume of goods.
Once operational they just need electricity, cooling, internet, and enough local infrastructure to support up to a couple hundred employees. It should be possible to place all of them in locations where electricity and water are so abundant that no one cares about their use.
Heck, people are seriously talking about putting them in space (although I don't see how they will be able to solve the cooling problem).
They are pointing out that some locations are not a good place to grow specific things and that there is a lot of water wastage in doing so. Attempting to grow crops in the desert vs. in a temperate climate probably uses more water for the same amount of crops (unless they are desert plants, I guess). This is what's being pointed out. If I decide to grow tomatoes on the moon and then ship them back to Earth to be consumed, it's fair game for people to point out how much of a waste of resources that is vs. just growing them on Earth.
My wife works with farmers professionally as part of a conservation district and just responded "THIS PERSON KNOWS FARMING" when showing her the discussion. I genuinely have no idea what you guys are talking about but she immediately got heated.
Based in Colorado.
Don't be disingenuous. They already were dividing things out by type of usage, like talking about water park usage vs. the usage of an entire city for all purposes. They are already admitting that "water usage of a city" isn't only about quenching thirst and maintaining hygiene, it's not a stretch to assume that they also realize that they can be water wastage in agriculture as well. They can't split out every instance of wastage that could be eliminated, and it's ridiculous to expect them to.
There was massive controversy about that so I don't know how good counterexample it's that. Unless the argument is "we already waste a lot why would you care about wasting more??" Which is not a great argument.
The point of the counterexample is a huge component of US agriculture, massively dwarfing data centers in water use, doesn't serve the core needs proposed by the top comment.
The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.
I'd be on board if for every data center a farm gave up the amount of water to use in that data center. Instead of carbon offsets, we'll let them purchase water offsets. Of course that's not a serious answer.
2 replies →
It's not explicitly a great argument, but it's an excellent premise to set.
Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into.
It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people talking about how terrible this is for the environment deserve to be ignored first, scorned later.
Bob: "I hate <company> and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that"
Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as <other company> to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them"
Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.
3 replies →
There aren't a million better places to put efforts into. This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched, and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.
3 replies →
The point is that we should start by working on the bigger waste. If agriculture represents 1000x the consumption of AI, even cutting the AI water usage by half would have the less impact than reducing agriculture water usage by 0.02%