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AI uses less water than the public thinks

californiawaterblog.com

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Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#411

Post by cybercatgurrl »

lxgr wrote: post #244
parsimo2010 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What makes AI use "illegitimate", and any food use automatically "legitimate"? People have all kinds of needs in addition to those for food and water.

this reminds me of the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#412

Post by cybercatgurrl »

jrflo wrote: post #118
parsimo2010 wrote: post #69

Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. O…

A pretty easy 'optional' comparison would be golf course watering. I saw a much more detailed write up on this that I can't find now, but a quick google shows 500 billion gallons a year for US golf courses and 180 billion gallons a year for all data centers, not just AI data centers.

clearly the reasonable course of action here is ban new golf courses!

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#413

Post by cybercatgurrl »

em500 wrote: post #110
parsimo2010 wrote: post #69

Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. O…

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.

in a desert city this is massively irresponsible but people do it anyways because they’ve forgotten they’re living in a desert

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#414

Post by agentultra »

loeg wrote: post #397
agentultra wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long term, fresh water as a resource is in decline [0]. [0] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/global-fres...

DCs could desal all of their cooling water from saltwater and it would still pencil. (So could residential water, for that matter.)

They could but that’s more expensive and location dependent. Much cheaper to put the externalities on tax payers and use their potable drinking water at a nice discount. Best: you don’t even have to report usage.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#415

Post by Matticus_Rex »

SecretDreams wrote: post #393
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The source in your link for that energy claim links to a blog post that then links back to an earlier blog post from the original author of the link you provided (it's basically a circular reference). Huh? The latter blog post does link to the former's blog, but not as a source for that claim. It cites an Altman blog, an estimate from EpochAI, an article in the MIT Technology Review (albeit one that estimates 3x hig…

Order of operations: 1) I click your link 2) I click the link associated with the 0.3 Wh of energy claim in the section "The full cost of a prompt". 3) The link from 2) takes me to a blog post from Hannah Ritchie. In Hannah's post, I click a link associated with the following excerpt: "Third, as a result, more recent estimates suggested that the assumptions I relied on (h/t to Andy Masley’s work on this) — that one s…

If you were to keep reading in Hannah's post, you'd find the reasoning.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#416

Post by traderj0e »

pesus wrote: post #134
bigmadshoe wrote: post #56

Did anyone find it weird that the author uses AI itself to perform the calculations? Seems like a very poor quality piece

I don't find it weird, it's about what I'd expect from AI sycophants. They don't seem to realize that it comes off as not even being able to defend their own ideas.

It's intellectual inbreeding. Like people who put very little real input into AI doc generation then generate code from that without supervision, and the result doesn't even try to do what it's supposed to, but they don't find out for a few weeks.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#417

Post by traderj0e »

foobiekr wrote: post #274
traderj0e wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't come out a little hotter, it gets evaporated in cooling towers. Same result as any other water usage. Cooling towers can't use seawater either. Most datacenters are in places where fresh water is abundant anyway, but some are not. Anyway agricultural water usage is way worse in California.

Agriculture is used to grow _food_.

Don't care. When I want food, the store makes me pay full price.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#418

Post by Straw »

eesmith wrote: post #405
Straw wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These all seem fine in a normal market? If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them. They can choose to use it inefficiently on subsistence farming, or they could sell at the going rate. A normal market itself doesn't imply any particular allocation of water rights, just that they should be as fungible and transferable as possible. Why are the laws that govern the infrastructure particularly im…

> If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them. You've just described the standard practice for taking over Native American lands by economic coercion instead of direct force. Take away land and water using market forces, and a culture based on land and water shatters. That's precisely why the Native Americans protected their rights by treaty, not market forces. Econ 101 was created to justify B…

The land and any associated rights was taken from the Native Americans by coercive force. Not a market. Not that they have any particular claim to it; states own land, not ethnicities. The particular state that controls land sometimes changes. This has little to do with any discussion of water rights.

I am suggesting expanding their water right- instead of only the right to do X, Y, Z with the water, take whatever right to the water they do have, in terms of amount of water, and say "you can do whatever you want with this much water". How to allocate resource rents doesn't have much effect on the market structure itself.

A lot of vitriol against supply and demand without any evidence.

Food is life. Food is culture. Just as much as water. Which countries have had famine, those that allocate via some system of food rights, or those that had a free market in food? The largest examples of famine I am aware of, in the USSR and Maoist China, were driven by some central allocation of food rather than a market. Not a good record.

One of the great features of markets is that things don't need to be decided collectively. Perhaps 90% of people want to wear blue T shirts, but I want a red one. If we collectively decide, I get a blue T shirt. In the market, I buy a red T shirt- perhaps at a very slightly higher price due to less economy of scale.

We certainly know of areas where vanilla markets can fail- externalities etc, but these do not apply to the situation here. The existing system of water rights doesn't feel like a collective decision, but rather entrenched special interests and lobbyists.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#419

Post by eesmith »

Straw wrote: post #418
eesmith wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them. You've just described the standard practice for taking over Native American lands by economic coercion instead of direct force. Take away land and water using market forces, and a culture based on land and water shatters. That's precisely why the Native Americans protected their rights by treaty, not market forces. Econ 101 was created to justify B…

The land and any associated rights was taken from the Native Americans by coercive force. Not a market. Not that they have any particular claim to it; states own land, not ethnicities. The particular state that controls land sometimes changes. This has little to do with any discussion of water rights. I am suggesting expanding their water right- instead of only the right to do X, Y, Z with the water, take whatever ri…

I can see you don't recognize native sovereignty. Tribal nations are domestic dependent nations, and count as a "state". The water rights were not taken by coercive force but remain with the nation, and at least nominally protected by treaty rights.

It's very odd that you talk about a decentralized market when water allocation in the US Southwest was decided by the Colorado River Compact in 1922. This is central allocation and, famously, based on over-estimated flow numbers.

Most large famines were caused by flooding or drought. More people died in the Chinese famine of 1906–1907 than the Russian famine of 1921–1922 and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 combined.

> The existing system of water rights doesn't feel like a collective decision, but rather entrenched special interests and lobbyists.

That is absolutely correct, and would covered in the first week of any water rights class. In the West, "water flows uphill toward money", as I learned from reading "Cadillac Desert".

Or if you want a novel, read "The Milagro Beanfield War." The small farmers (mostly Hispanic) were drafted for WWII and couldn't farm, so lost their water rights, while the large farmers (mostly Anglo) could hire help.

And who got to set up the water law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Ring

"The Santa Fe Ring was an informal group of powerful politicians, attorneys, and land speculators in territorial New Mexico from 1865 until 1912. The Ring was composed of newly-arrived Anglo Americans and opportunistic Hispanics from long-resident and prominent families in New Mexico. Acquiring wealth, both groups realized, lay in owning or controlling the millions of acres of land which the Spanish and Mexican governments of New Mexico had granted to individuals and communities. The acquisition of grant lands by members of the Santa Fe Ring was facilitated by U.S. courts who had no allegiance to Mexican claims and land practices which featured allocating most of the land in grants to the common ownership of the first settlers and their descendants vs. legal private ownership."

What exists is a patchwork of economic systems, there is no cohesive whole, and you clearly prefer the US one which prioritizes the private ownership model of Econ 101.

That's why you can't view it simply through an Econ 101 lens.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#420

Post by kazinator »

thelastgallon wrote: post #287
kazinator wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.

Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.

But burning fossil fuels makes water, and also CO2 for the plants. The white, visible part of what you see coming out of a tail pipe is water vapor.

The main thing is, we are not making any new carbon that was not already here billions of years ago.

:)

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