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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

#411

Post by pixl97 »

pxc wrote: post #401
tomwphillips wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean yes, almost all corporations that have a choice do this. Walmart is one of the better known ones that will put a store right on the edge of a municipality that doesn't want one and cause all kinds of issues for the city at hand.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#412

Post by tharne »

nasmorn wrote: post #326
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous. It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place. People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the t…

The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?

> The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?

I keep seeing arguments like this. They sound like a bit like a form of nihilsm. Do you really think we shouldn't worry about risks to the environment simply because we're all hypocrites on that front in one way or another? I get the frustration and have been guilty of using this type of argument myself in the past, but refusing to discuss a problem because the people raising the concern are imperfect human beings doesn't seem like a tenable position.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#413

Post by Terr_ »

themanmaran wrote: post #281
mlhpdx wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it that you imagine happens to the water after it goes through the data center?

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

"I took all your money and gambled it away, but don't worry because it wasn't destroyed, it's still circulating in the economy and will come back someday."

A reduction in what can be used from the summer snowmelt is a problem, regardless of whether equivalent atoms are redeposited in the winter snowfall.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#414

Post by simonw »

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…

Thanks for the recommendation, added to my reading list.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#415

Post by jmccaf »

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 think the water use arguments are relevant, particularly in regions of the world and US (CA) where potable water is scarce, but land and electricity are available .

NYT article gift link where people reported wells ran dry after data centers moved in. : 'From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy' https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...

From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... , I understand there are two types of cooling with water in DCs, open-loop that's simple but water-intensive, and closed-loop that's expensive but efficient.

>> This can be achieved through air cooling using water evaporation, which is an open-loop and more water-intensive method, or through server liquid cooling.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#416

Post by tharne »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #236
tomwphillips wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of which have to do with AI or AGI. Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer. It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case. What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.

Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"? God help us.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#417

Post by keeda »

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…

This article goes into an ungodly amount of detail -- with receipts -- making the case that the AI water issue is fake:

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#418

Post by pixl97 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #204
roywiggins wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Taxes can have nuance. You can easily write a law that looks like this: There is now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for data-centers. It does not apply to residential use, agricultural use, or any other industrial use. We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My home's power rate through the state owned utility is very different than if I consumed the exact same amount of power, but was a…

>In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.

And yet, if you believe the environmentalist argument in the first place, the price of beef should go up for the damages it causes. Hence why a lot of people think the people complaining about AI are wearing an environmentalist mask, rather than having an actual care about the environment.

Pigouvian taxes are fine, but should be applied across all sources of damage.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#419

Post by foxglacier »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #233
hamdingers wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole. It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.

Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous. It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place. People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the t…

I wouldn't ignore those arguments but most of the time, they're so poorly formed (eg. using data without logic), they aren't really worth listening to. If you believe AI provides no value, then any environmental cost is too high for you but you can't convey that by trying to dramatize how high it is. That's dishonest and I think people rightly turn off it.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#420

Post by buu700 »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #233
hamdingers wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole. It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.

Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous. It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place. People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the t…

Well they're separate issues. Someone could plausibly take the position that air travel should be banned for environmental reasons, but that has no relevance to the utility of air travel. If a group of people were loudly proclaiming that planes were not only bad but useless, anyone who routinely uses planes would obviously find them non-credible.
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