241–250 of 425 posts
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The economy is not a jobs program. Stop thinking about it that way. Think in terms of taxes generated instead.
But it was not my argument, was ot?
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Bob: "I hate and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that" Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them" Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.
And I'm guessing that I'm supposed to believe here that the reason Bob hates explicitly this one company and is dismissing 99% of the damage done to the cute fluffy animal by corporations that seemingly get paid to exterminate them in brutal ways, the reason many people seem to spouse this extremely bizarre, specific belief is "just because" right? Not an obscene amount of hypocrisy and dishonesty? Because I don't ha…
> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions. Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantag…
Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.
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> have to eat to live Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
If we're shipping the alfalfa to China, I assume that means it's supporting some Chinese person's food source, whether they are directly eating the alfalfa, or some animal is eating it that later becomes food. If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to leg…
People have all kinds of needs in addition to those for food and water.
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Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona . Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.
How is it legal? Shouldn’t water be the most regulated (as in protected) substance of all?
You can go millions of prompts before you use up as much water as it took to make a single beef burger. You can go tens of thousands of prompts to match the C02 emissions. There are many legitimate concerns around AI. Water use/CO2 emissions isn’t currently one of them. Going vegan will make up your AI water consumption/CO2 Emissions many thousands of times over.
Source? Meat can be "produced" in a location where water is not as scarce. Rural areas. Datacenters "like" to grow in urban areas. This source says that a 100 prompt spends half a liter of water https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... I remember this year google reported one google search spend a drop of water (or 5 drops, around that)
Each almond takes about a gallon of water to grow: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
A "drop" is not well defined, but some math says there's about 75,000 drops in a gallon: https://www.quora.com/How-many-drops-of-water-can-fit-into-o...
Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.
That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.
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It's not explicitly a great argument, but it's an excellent premise to set. Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into. It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people t…
Bob: "I hate and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that" Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them" Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.
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To be fair to people's objections - agriculture is significantly more important than AI model training when it comes to improving the average standard of living - and to be fair to model training a lot of the water usage in agriculture is used on extremely water inefficient crops. Water usage is, in my opinion, a fair reason to object to AI datacenter placement and growth - but in the arena of public opinion it's mor…
Marginal agricultural water use is alfalfa / nut farming in the desert and ethanol corn, not products consumers actually care about. Consumers aren't clamoring for E15 fuel over E10.