Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free

I can get behind "AI water use is not a serious concern" if all you are talking about is selling inference, and you're comparing some sort of usage metric (e.g. "water use per request"). Water and power use for inference is on the level of other heavy Internet products like video streaming or cloud compute.

There is a lot I can't ignore, though. Model training is incredibly demanding, so much that OpenAI was trying to get $1 trillion in investment to practically double the number of data centers in the United States by 2030. That is a serious concern when we have to make decisions between, say, consumer water availability and tech investment in water-scarce areas like Arizona and New Mexico.

In Oregon, there are some unique problems with Amazon's water deals in Umatilla, where they are increasing nitrate concentration of the local groundwater through evaporative cooling, and refusing to pay for on-site treatment.

I can go on about other environmental harms, but I think you should take a more nuanced look at the issue. Having ChatGPT summarize a news article is not an unreasonable demand compared to other compute activities, but AI in general is driving compute demand so high that the general public is forced to reckon with a problem that's been there since the beginning: the expansion, operation and use of the Internet has physical environmental consequences.

Public comment is one of the least effective mechanisms for influencing policy, at least at the margin. You can drastically amplify your influence with a simple change: move from public to private commentary, directly and personally addressing your state and local reps. They all have email addresses and I think it's more likely than not you'll be surprised when they (and it'll actually be them, not some factotum) respond to your email.

This would stop working if everybody did it, but I live in an unusually (famously, in fact) engaged municipality and have been unreasonably successful at influencing policy and the evidence I see is that almost nobody does this.

There's probably a civic tech thingy to do here. Though I'd also be mindful of the appearance of canvassing. My experience is that decisionmakers very quickly clock canvassing efforts, and then mentally bucket input into "low-effort" and "high-effort", often in a way that amplifies smaller interests.

I also think you can probably get a long way just by doing a better job than your policy adversaries at presenting information. Another thing I've noticed reps quickly clocking: the commenters who clearly have never read a budget, or who don't know the difference between an Enterprise Fund and the General Fund. These are also problems tech can solve, by digesting and contextualizing data so people can present informed (or informed-sounding) arguments.

https://techforpalestine.org/incubator