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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

#151

Post by iamacyborg »

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.

> 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.

Might as well get rid of all the lawns and football fields while we’re at it.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#152

Post by [deleted] »

Aransentin wrote: post #50
lynndotpy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.

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?

[deleted]

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#153

Post by red75prime »

lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

Does language around fusion reactors ("bringing power of the sun to Earth" and the like) cause similar associations? Those situations are close in other aspects too: we have a physical system (the sun, the brain), whose functionality we try to replicate technologically.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#154

Post by kalkin »

alyxya wrote: post #69

> Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value I haven't heard of that being the argument. The main perspective I'm aware of is that more powerful AI models have a compounding multiplier…

Right. Nobody makes a Pascal's wager-style argument in _favor_ of investing in AGI. People have sometimes made one against building AGI, on existential risk grounds. The OP author is about as confused on this as the water usage point... But the appetite for arguments against AI (which has legitimate motivations!) is so high that people are willing to drop any critical thinking.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#155

Post by leoedin »

efsavage wrote: post #127
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 th…

If water is just used for cooling, and the output is hotter water, then it's not really "used" at all. Maybe it needs to be cooled to ambient and filtered before someone can use it, but it's still there.

If it was being used for evaporative cooling then the argument would be stronger. But I don't think it is - not least because most data centres don't have massive evaporative cooling towers.

Even then, whether we consider it a bad thing or not depends on the location. If the data centre was located in an area with lots of water, it's not some great loss that it's being evaporated. If it's located in a desert then it obviously is.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#156

Post by buellerbueller »

simonw wrote: post #113
buellerbueller wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once again, you are ignoring my (implied) argument:

Humans NEED food, the output of agriculture. Humans do not NEED any of LLMs' outputs.

Once everyone is fed, then we can talk about water usage for LLMs.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#157

Post by tracerbulletx »

Flavius wrote: post #124
the__alchemist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really mind if people advocate for their value judgements, but the total disregard for good faith arguments and facts is really out of control. The number of people who care at all about finding the best position through debate and are willing to adjust their position is really shockingly small across almost every issue.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#158

Post by simonw »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #114
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...

"Presented by the USGA" (the United States Golf Association) gave me a wry chuckle there.

That said, here are the relevant numbers from that 2012 article in full:

> Most 18-hole golf facilities utilize surface waters (ponds, lakes) or on-site irrigation wells. Approximately 14 percent of golf facilities use water from a public municipal source and approximately 12 percent use recycled water as a source for irrigation.

> Specific water sources for 18-hole courses as indicated by participants are noted below:

> 52 percent use water from ponds or lakes.

> 46 percent use water from on-site wells.

> 17 percent use water from rivers, streams and creeks.

> 14 percent use water from municipal water systems.

> 12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#159

Post by belter »

simonw wrote: post #134
belter wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Also from that article: > U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture. USGS 2015 report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has irrigation at 118 billion gallons per day - that's 43,070 billion gallons per year. 163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than half a percentage p…

I am surprised by your analytical mistake of comparing irrigation water with data-center water usage...

They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to misleading conclusions on the impact.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#160

Post by naasking »

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…

> 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

This is simply a scaling problem, eg. thousands of single I/O functions can reproduce the behaviour of a function that takes thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs.

Edit: As for the rest of your argument, it's not so clear cut. An LLM can produce a complete essay in a fraction of the time it would take a human. So yes, a human brain only consumes about 20W but it might take a week to produce the same essay that the LLM can produce in a few seconds.

Also, LLMs can process multiple prompts in parallel and share resources across those prompts, so again, the energy use is not directly comparable in the way you've portrayed.

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