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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#81

Post by roywiggins »

fmbb wrote: post #62
Aransentin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

Depends on what the datacenters are used for. AI has no utility. Almonds make marzipan.

ok in that case you don't need to pick on water in particular, if it has no utility at all then literally any resource use is too much, so why bother insisting that water in particular is a problem? It's pretty energy intensive, eg.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#82

Post by buellerbueller »

simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

Fine, fine: get rid of golf courses too.

As for food production; that might be important? IDK, I am not a silicon "intelligence" so what do I know? Also, I have to "eat". Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if we can just replace ourselves, so that agriculture is unnecessary, and we can devote all that water to AGI.

TIL that the true arc of humanity is to replace itself!

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#83

Post by random3 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #21

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

so planes that don't flap their wings can't fly

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#85

Post by oompydoompy74 »

fmbb wrote: post #62
Aransentin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

Depends on what the datacenters are used for. AI has no utility. Almonds make marzipan.

AI has way more utility than you are claiming and less utility than Sam Altman and the market would like us to believe. It’s okay to have a nuanced take.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#87

Post by buellerbueller »

simonw wrote: post #36
dlord wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the water usage argument can be pertinent depending on the context. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-cent... https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/feature-in-latin-...

That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about here: > A small data centre using this type of cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...] > For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Querétaro sites used 40 million litres of water, it added. > That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the numbers are huge. That's not cr…

It's a lot of water for AI waifus and videos of Trump shitbombing people who dare oppose him.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#88

Post by roywiggins »

idiotsecant wrote: post #56
simonw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people - than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.

I mean... Food is pretty important ...

The water intensity of American food production would be substantially less if we gave up on frivolous things like beef, which requires water vastly out of proportion to its utility. If the water numbers for datacenters seem scary then the water use numbers for the average American's beef consumption is apocalyptic.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#90

Post by Etherlord87 »

simonw wrote: post #30
paulryanrogers wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean datacenters should get a pass. Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-dat... > I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a differe…

A farmer is a valuable perspective but imagine asking a lumberjack about the ecological effects of deforestation, he might know more about it than an average Joe, but there's probably better people to ask for expertise?

> Honestly, we probably use more water than they do

This kind of proves my point, regardless of the actual truth in this regard, it's a terrible argument to make: availability of water starts to become a huge problem in a growing amount of places, and this statement implies the water usage of something, that in basic principle doesn't need water at all, uses comparable amount of water as farming, which strictly relies on water.

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