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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

#121

Post by danaris »

jtr1 wrote: post #33
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.

I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.

But if I say "I object to AI because and its water use", why would you assume that I don't also object to alfalfa farming in Arizona?

Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide?

This is nothing but whataboutism.

People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the other bad things happening in the world at the same time.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#122

Post by HardCodedBias »

the__alchemist wrote: post #97
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…

I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reactio…

It seems like there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and "AI skepticism."

I have no idea why.

I don't think that the correlation is 1, but it seems weirdly high.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#123

Post by randallsquared »

slightwinder wrote: post #96
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…

> but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. People are critical of farmland and golf courses, too. But Farmland at least has more benefit for society, so they are more vocal on how it's used.

The problem is more one of scale: a million liters of water is less than half of a single Olympic-sized swimming pool. A single acre of alfalfa typically requires 4.9 - 7.6 million liters a year for irrigation. Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool and be sent back, but the irrigation water is lost to transpiration and the recycling-by-weather process.

So, even if there's no recycling, a data center that is said to consume "millions" rather than tens or hundreds of millions is probably using less than 5 acres of alfalfa in consumption, and in absolute terms, this requires only a swimming-pool or two of water per years. It's trivial.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#124

Post by Flavius »

the__alchemist wrote: post #97
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…

I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reactio…

Expecting a purely technical discussion is unrealistic because many people have significant vested interests. This includes not only those with financial stakes in AI stocks but also a large number of professionals in roles that could be transformed or replaced by this technology. For these groups, the discussion is inherently political, not just technical.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#125

Post by chriswarbo »

fallingfrog wrote: post #9
Etheryte wrote: post #2

Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the idea that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end. Many have also gone on and started companies to look for a new way forward. However, if you're hip deep in stock options, along with your reputation, you'll hardly want to break the mirage. So here we are.

I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow down the development of these technologies- a political problem- is much more pressing right now.

> I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it.

Ever since "AI" was named at Dartmouth, there have been very smart people thinking that their idea will be the thing which makes it work this time. Usually, those ideas work really well in-the-small (ELIZA, SHRDLU, Automated Mathematician, etc.), but don't scale to useful problem sizes.

So, unless you've built a full-scale implementation of your ideas, I wouldn't put too much faith in them if I were you.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#126

Post by ajjahs »

fallingfrog wrote: post #9
Etheryte wrote: post #2

Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the idea that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end. Many have also gone on and started companies to look for a new way forward. However, if you're hip deep in stock options, along with your reputation, you'll hardly want to break the mirage. So here we are.

I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow down the development of these technologies- a political problem- is much more pressing right now.

[dead]

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#127

Post by efsavage »

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…

The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable to our initial position whatever that is.

Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people than not will assume that using water means it's not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer, untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation. Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it seems then some education is in order.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#128

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

killerstorm wrote: post #32

On the other hand we have DeepMind / Demis Hassabis, delivering: * AlphaFold - SotA protein folding * AlphaEvolve + other stuff accelerating research mathematics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864 * "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software" - demonstrating SotA results for many kinds of scientific software So what's the "fantasy" here, the actual lab delivering results or a sob story abou…

Yeah, in reality it seems that DeepMind are more the good guys, at least in comparison to the others.

You can argue about whether the pursuit of "AGI" (however you care to define it) is a positive for society, or even whether LLMs are, but the AI companies are all pursuing this, so that doesn't set them apart.

What makes DeepMind different is that they are at least also trying to use AI/ML for things like AlphaFold that are a positive, and Hassabis' appears genuinely passionate about the use of AI/ML to accelerate scientific research.

It seems that some of the other AI companies are now belatedly trying to at least appear to be interested in scientific research, but whether this is just PR posturing or something they will dedicate substantial resources to, and be successful at, remains to be seen. It's hard to see OpenAI, planning to release SexChatGPT, as being sincerely committed to anything other than making themselves a huge pile of money.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#129

Post by anal_reactor »

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…

Try explaining to someone who's only ever seen dial-up modems that 4k HDR video streaming is a thing.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#130

Post by dlord »

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…

I agree that those numbers can seem huge without proper context.

For me, that BBC story, and the others, illustrates a trend; tech giants installing themselves in ressource-strained areas, while promoting their development as drivers of economic growth.

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