Comment by bemtevi
2 hours ago
> 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."
Well of course not. People still need to process information, just like they need to get around.
Imagine, way back when, when trains were invented, and people kept saying “we should stick with horses and carriages!” or “everyone should walk and carry their load on their bodies!”
You can’t reason about this stuff unless you put it in terms of productivity.
Objections to data centers based on energy and water consumption are red herrings. For the most part, people aren’t saying these things because they actually care about these things. They are objecting because either 1/they don’t want to live right next to a data center, 2/they object to DCs being built without the necessary (and ideally clean) generation capacity being built first, or 3/they fear, dislike, or otherwise object to AI for other reasons and don’t want more AI capacity being built at all.
My reply above highlights the unthinking assumption that data is best processed in a centralized manner that runs roughshod over democratic processes.
Imagine, way back when, before automobiles were adopted, if car manufacturers lobbied for subsidies and bought out all supplies of steel for years in advance with a promise to pay with yet-to-be realized profits rather than compete based on merit.
"terms of productivity" indeed. The inefficient mode of transmutation was chosen because I find slop's value proposition dubious. The merest hint of regulation shakes the industry like a rotten tree.
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AI just today proved that quantum computers are a bad idea, so maybe we will stop dumping resources into that? Surely there will be other knock on effects like this.