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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

#111

Post by Etherlord87 »

simonw wrote: post #91
buellerbueller wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268 Given the difference in water usage, more data centers does not mean less water for agriculture in any meaningful way. If you genuinely want to save water you should celebrate any time an acre of farm land is converted into an acre of data center - all the more water for the other farms!

According to this logic the ideal situation is when there are no farms anymore because then each (out of zero) farm gets maximum water.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#112

Post by jstummbillig »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #18
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…

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.

In what way are they not paying for it?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#113

Post by simonw »

buellerbueller wrote: post #100
simonw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268 Given the difference in water usage, more data centers does not mean less water for agriculture in any meaningful way. If you genuinely want to save water you should celebrate any time an acre of farm land is converted into an acre of data center - all the more water for the other farms!

the value of datacenters is dubious. the value of agriculture, less so.

Once again, the key thing here is to ask how MUCH value we get per liter of water used.

If data centers and farms used the same amount of water we should absolutely be talking about their comparative value to society, and farms would win.

Farms use thousands of times more water than data centers.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#114

Post by turtlesdown11 »

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…

Your context is a little lacking. Golf courses almost universally have retention ponds/wells/etc at the facility and recycle their water.

Only 14% use municipal water systems to draw water. https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#115

Post by belter »

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…

> The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it

Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

"...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..."

"I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption" - https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

"...So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption. If you simply take the Berkeley estimates directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated..."

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#116

Post by Etherlord87 »

jstanley wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it's a "gigantic" waste of water depends on what those figures mean. It's very important to understand if 25 million liters of water per year is a gigantic number or not.

For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough utility? And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else, it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.

If only millions of people suffering from lack of water knew this.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#117

Post by IAmGraydon »

>…Musk would regularly characterise Hassabis as a supervillain who needed to be stopped. Musk would make unequivocally clear that OpenAI was the good to DeepMind’s evil. … “He literally made a video game where an evil genius tries to create AI to take over the world,” Musk shouted [at an OpenAI off-site], referring to Hassabis’s 2004 title Evil Genius, “and fucking people don’t see it. Fucking people don’t see it! And Larry [Page]? Larry thinks he controls Demis but he’s too busy fucking windsurfing to realize that Demis is gathering the power.”

There are some deeply mentally ill people out there, and given enough influence, their delusions seem to spread like a virus, infecting others and becoming a true mass delusion. Musk is not well, as he has repeatedly shown us. It amazes me that so many other people seem to be susceptible to the delusion, though.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#118

Post by roywiggins »

bee_rider wrote: post #110
roywiggins wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a world where a water use tax is levied such that 1) it's enough for datacenters to notice and 2) doesn't immediately bankrupt all golf courses and beef production, because the water use of datacenters is just so much smaller .

We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness. Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.

I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason datacenters would keep operating and beef production wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per gallon.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#119

Post by Etherlord87 »

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…

Yes, a 24 acre soybean field uses a lot of water.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#120

Post by pissmeself »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #117

>…Musk would regularly characterise Hassabis as a supervillain who needed to be stopped. Musk would make unequivocally clear that OpenAI was the good to DeepMind’s evil. … “He literally made a video game where an evil genius tries to create AI to take over the world,” Musk shouted [at an OpenAI off-site], referring to Hassabis’s 2004 title Evil Genius, “and fucking people don’t see it. Fucking people don’t see it! An…

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