Comment by cmarschner
10 hours ago
We can’t build out data centers that are not running on renewable energy. It’s too critical to get global warming under control, and the AI build-out is going in the opposite direction of where we need to be heading, and at a huge scale.
It’s just greediness unhinged by lack of policies. And the voters have finally had a say.
You’re making the wrong argument. Making a pitch for renewable energy-powered data centers shouldn’t be about the environmental impact. If you do that you’ll only convince people who already agree with you.
I think you’ll have better luck by arguing the economics and cost predictability. Not everyplace has a natural gas field next door, and in those places you’ll have a compelling argument.
But I’m not entirely convinced that all of the anti-data center voter backlash was about the physical infrastructure and power usage. I think a large fraction was general anti AI sentiment. And you’ll have a much harder time getting people who hate all AI to think putting a datacenter powered by anything is a good idea.
Anecdotally my hunch is voters care about what impacts their wallet primarily, even if they won’t admit it.
People don’t want these in their backyard but also care about lot about their energy costs.
And their 401ks
And by anti-AI sentiment it's really more like "anti- oligarchs controlling everything and making us live in the sewers."
Not for nothing, but voters also have a say in what kind of car they buy. I checked the Q2 numbers -- when gas prices were high. In the US, 8% of people bought fully electric cars. Around 22% bought some sort of hybrid.
Each of these people made a choice about how they were going to affect the environment. The vast majority "voted" to use fossil fuels.
This is disingenuous if you don’t note that in the US we essentially subsidize/ encourage fossil fuel.
I could write an essay of pure rage about how many overtly liberal people in my life and online still decide against electric over minor or non-existent inconveniences or extra upfront cost (for people who definitely aren't broke).
These people will yell and complain about anything and everything destroying the Earth, but then when it's their turn?
"We just couldn't figure out how to make the extra 30 minute charge stop on our annual vacation work..."
You should stop tying your emotions to other people’s purchasing habits. For your own mental health. And its kind of narcissistic to be offended that people aren’t spending their money how you think they should.
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This is why it shouldn't be only consumer choices but intentional policy guiding production and product availability. The government should be mandating EVs.
As an individual, your impact is minor. The problem is that there are hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road.
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Do you also get mad when people who are upset about the deficit don't donate extra money to Treasury?
This is a pretty typical coordination problem where people are reluctant to make personal sacrifices when they know others will not make similar sacrifices which are necessary to achieve the goal.
Global warming is only a problem for a biosphere. Advancements in AI may mean that civilization relies less and less on a biosphere.
A truly terrible thing, and if we were to proceed by putting civilization first over the biosphere, it would show how truly terrible we are.
That's the general pattern of technology. It makes us rely less on the biosphere, and in turn makes us more dependent on it. But since it is destructive, it also actively destroys the biopshere, which is the way technology grows 'organically'. It's a disease.
Wut?
A robot civilization? Because last I checked, humans were passed off said biosphere.
Ah, the pro-extinction TESCREAL ideology rears its ugly head. What a time we live in. You guys know you're doing Christianity for atheists right? Heaven and god's infinite grace is coming for those that believe.
The "rapture for nerds" quip is relevant for people who think they'll survive the rise of machine intelligence and be uploaded or whatever. Me, I'm pessimistic we'll survive it, but also pessimistic the current trajectory is stoppable.
You have to be kidding me
Whatever you do, never look at the energy cost of shipping.
Global shipping uses the equivalent energy of a Hiroshima bomb every two minutes - that's about 4000TWh over the course of a year.
ALL data centre use, worldwide, totals 490TWh - that's inclusive of AI data centres.
AI data centre use - 155 TWh.
All data centre use, worldwide, accounts for less than 0.5% of CO2 emissions.
This is "use paper straws to save the whales" territory.
so what you're saying is... tariffs are great for fighting climate change?
Yes, like any other tax, it destroys economic activity. Which is "good for the environment", or at least you can argue that (given what people always do when they're losing money it obviously isn't, but let's not get into reality here, this is politics)
It keeps surprising me that Trump got elected as politician on the promise of introducing new taxes. Tariffs. Republicans at the midterms seemed very surprised that extra taxes affected their election chances negatively. I mean you wouldn't believe it but it's pretty clear who is the pro-tax party now, isn't it?
I mean you couldn't make this up. You'd almost think Trump is like some sort of llama, or perhaps a Russian camel (do those exist?) spitting in the face of his voters, kicking them in the balls to get elected. And it worked.
Twice.
But we can't do without! Without shipping cheap crap from China (and now South America) to Germany, and cheap gas from Russia, oh and without checking labor laws, environment laws, ... normal Germans (and Europeans) would have more jobs, be paid more, it would be a lot more comfortable living on the countryside AND politicians would make less. There would be no German politicians getting very high wages from Putin without Europe paying billions to Putin for his war in Ukraine.
What is the problem with a few thousand terrawatt-hours if it allows politicians to get paid?
WILL SOMEONE think of the politicians?
What the hell happened to this place?
These are some of the silliest takes I've ever seen. HN used to be full of intelligent people.
Data centers don't use a particularly large amount of energy compared to literally any other commercial human activity. You likely use more energy driving to the store once than you do firing off AI queries for an entire year.
> Data centers don't use a particularly large amount of energy compared to literally any other commercial human activity. You likely use more energy driving to the store once than you do firing off AI queries for an entire year.
But they do use a lot of energy when you consider all the development and resource extraction that they necessarily imply, a factor that most people don't put into their calculations.
For a datacenter is not just a datacenter; it's an incentive and pressure to get others to develop competing datacenters, new models, new products based on them, etc; and the resulting pollution and energy usage from that is astronomical.
I'm sorry you're wrong. The more tasks we move to the digital world, the less carbon emissions will be emitted on net.
This is bad for human social cohesion imo, but objectively good for C02 levels if you claim to care about that.
Nothing physical we build for use cases in the digital world emits carbon on the scale of anything we build for use cases in the physical world.
And compute gets exponentially more efficient and uses less and less resources per unit of output over time. Combustion engines and humans in general don't get exponentially more efficient over time, for example.
You don't actually care about the thing you're pretending to care about if you're saying that AI is bad for the environment. It's probably bad for traditional social structures and institutions, but actually fantastic for the environment.
Notice how the comparison is never to the absence of data centers.
It's always "Data centers don't use a lot of energy compared to using a particle accelerator to transmute lead into gold."
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Of course you as a person don't use a vast amount of energy, but in aggregate all AI usage does. You have to look at the impact at the macro scale; talking about per-person usage in this instance is absurd.
3% or so of electricity
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Huh? That doesn't negate the point? Yes in aggregate transportation still takes up 100X more energy than data centers.
Here's the hard truth.
Old economy: 20 white collar workers drive their SUVs 30-60 mins in traffic into an office building that needs to be heated and cooled 24/7, then drive home.
New AI economy: 1 guy works from home and agents in a data center do the work, using up 1/1000th the amount of energy.
If you actually cared about carbon emissions you'd be screaming that we should run toward the new AI-based economy.
Anyone saying otherwise is not a serious person. Now, of course you can complain about AI ruining in person socialization around the water cooler. That is real.
But energy (or water) usage as a complaint is not only wrong and counter-productive to the thing you claim to care about, but its also insincere virtue signaling to mask what is fundamentally just fear of a new technology.
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