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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

#401

Post by pxc »

tomwphillips wrote: post #222
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…

Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from lo…

IIRC Google chose to pull out altogether to punish the locals for standing up to them— even though they happily built air-cooled data centers elsewhere.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#402

Post by ben_w »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #393
ben_w wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beef is not the only meat. Chicken is much less water intensive.

From the animal welfare perspective, there's much more suffering involved in producing a pound of chicken than a pound of beef.

That depends how sentient a chicken is: their brains are of similar complexity to the larger of these models, counting params as synapses.

Also, while I'm vegetarian going on vegan, welfare arguments are obviously not relevant in response to an assertation that Americans aren't going to give up meat, because if animal welfare was relevant then Americans would give up meat.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#403

Post by pixl97 »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #259
lukan wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I share your pain .. but was it ever really better in reality? Unfortunately it is not like human society in history had truth as the highest virtue.

yeah maybe around the time of Archimedes it was closer to the top, but societies in which people are willing to die for abstract ideas tend to be one... where the value of life isn't quite as high as it is nowadays (ie no matter how much my inner nerd has a love and fascination for that time period, no way i'm pressing the button on any one-way time machines...).

>yeah maybe around the time of Archimedes

I mean, Archimedes stands out because he searched for the truth and documented it. I'm sure most people on the planet at that time would have burned you for being a witch, or whatever fabled creature was in vogue at the time.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#404

Post by thatoneengineer »

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 nice thing about the data center water usage panic is that whenever someone appeals to it, I immediately know that either they haven't done their homework or they're arguing in bad faith.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#405

Post by Terr_ »

lkey wrote: post #163
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…

| Drop the politics Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources . Most municipalities literally do not have enough spare power to service this 1.4 trillion dollar capital rollout as planned on paper. Even if they did, the concurrent inflation of energy costs is about as polit…

IMO this is one of those areas where we (English speakers, likely most other languages as well) collectively suffer from ambiguous words.

It might be more accurate to say "drop the partisanship" or "drop the in/out-group generalizations", etc.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#406

Post by kingstnap »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #305
themanmaran wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly it vanishes without a trace and simply leaves the water cycle.

Just because it doesn’t leave the cycle doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, that means it’s less distributed That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water. The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something…

The way they measure water consumption is genuinely unbelievably misleading at best. For example measuring the water evaporated from a dams basin if any hydroelectric power is used.

Counting water is genuinely just asinine double counting ridiculousness that makes down stream things look completely insane. Like making a pound of beef look like it consumes 10,000L of water.

In reality of course running your shower for 10 to 15 hours is no where near somehow equivalent to eating beef lasagna for dinner and we would actually have a crisis if people started applying any optimization pressure on these useless metrics.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#408

Post by iamflimflam1 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #349
jimbokun wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried putting the AIs to work cleaning up the technical debt?

Yes, I'm already doing it. But the problem is there's not a lot of incentive from management to do it. Long term investment in something that can't easily be quantified is a non-starter to management. People will say "thank you for doing that" but those who create new features that drive metrics get promoted.

I see this too. The focus on “believable ROI” makes it very hard to do.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#409

Post by pixl97 »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #305
themanmaran wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly it vanishes without a trace and simply leaves the water cycle.

Just because it doesn’t leave the cycle doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, that means it’s less distributed That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water. The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something…

>The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels

This has almost zero to do with the data centers themselves and instead the politicians we vote in.

Simply put we need more 'clean' power generation any way you go about it. Economic growth and production is based on ones ability to produce power. We've been coasting on increasing efficiency for a long time, but we've been in need of larger sources of power and distribution for decades, data centers or not.

With that said DC's shouldn't be built in west texas where it's dry. East of the Mississippi gets enough rain that you build a reservoir and you'll have more than enough water to feed the DC for decades.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#410

Post by [deleted] »

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.

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