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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

#261

Post by pashabitz »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #103
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…

In the article it lists a data point that beer production in Arizona used more water than the data centers in Arizona. People may vehemently disagree, but we absolutely do not need beer. Would I trade beer for AI? That's an easy choice, AI every time. If you just keep track of the water to keep a person alive and the bare minimum water required for agriculture (which isn't particularly efficient in most cases), it wo…

This is a hilariously misleading "study" and I would bet "beer" wasn't chosen arbitrarily for comparison:

The important difference WRT beer is that the water used in the process likely in a larger part goes towards... the beer itself. This in turn is going into the person who drinks it. So, the water here is actually hydrating human beings.

This can be argued as one of the 2-3 absolutely necessary uses of water. Hydrating people.

So, spending less than the beer industry is not that great of an achievement.

However, a casual reader may see comparison to "beer" and think "oh yeah, beer, just a random thing out of a million, so yeah AI is totally ordinary".

Which is a very incorrect conclusion to reach.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#262

Post by tzs »

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.

One difference is that AI data center locations are not constrained by soil quality, length of growing season, climate, availability of cheap seasonal manual laborers, and access to transportation networks able to regularly handle a large physical volume of goods.

Once operational they just need electricity, cooling, internet, and enough local infrastructure to support up to a couple hundred employees. It should be possible to place all of them in locations where electricity and water are so abundant that no one cares about their use.

Heck, people are seriously talking about putting them in space (although I don't see how they will be able to solve the cooling problem).

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#263

Post by km3r »

rsoto2 wrote: post #203
km3r wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We absolutely do not need to waste as much water as we do on agriculture. Their is more efficient watering systems, crops that do not feed humans, and inefficient crops that aren't needed. Any one of those improvements would dwarf the water usage by AI. Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then s…

Yeah people aren't mad about datacenters because they are "anti growth" They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.

Don't expect them to do anything for the greater good. Regulate and require that to happen, don't ban.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#264

Post by rdevilla »

arjie wrote: post #79

> So much of our public discourse on water and other subjects is choked by chatter, untamed by reasoned evidence, data, and quantification. Today, with AI, we have little excuse for not attempting and using honest estimates to inform our discussions and tame our fears and hopes. Are these things usually convincing? The general pattern is that people take a position on something and then find one paper with a DOI iden…

> The reality in the way information is used, I believe, is the opposite from what we think of. We believe that if there is sufficient information, we can use it to form an accurate model of reality.

You should read Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus. He calls this "the naive view of information," which is ignorant of the existence of what he astutely identifies as "intersubjective" realities (see also Angela Cooper-White's entry on "intersubjectivism" in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion):

    [...] its deepest and most complex
    usage is related to the postmodern
    philosophical concept of
    constructivism or, in social
    psychology, social constructionism –
    the notion that reality is co-
    constructed by participants in a
    relationship and in society.
This is the endgame of postmodernist and constructivist thinking that exalts narrative and story as the ground source of truth. In some ways what we are seeing is a return to religious and superstitious thinking where sufficient belief in a dogma or a pantheon is enough to reify those narratives into consensus reality.

Historically Jungian psychology and indeed religion (a form of proto-psychology, from which Jung inherits by way of the alchemical tradition; see Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) was humanity's collective storehouse of wisdom and techniques for managing intersubjective realities and group "information hygiene." Such techniques are now being lost to antiquity with the late 20th and 21st century focus on only objectively verifiable, quantitative measurements (as opposed to the private subjective, qualitative phenomena experienced as the inner ruminations, contemplations, and dream life of the individual).

    White Rose: Do you ever think
    that if you imagined or
    believed in something, it
    could come true... Simply by
    will?

    Angela: Yes. Actually, I did
    believe that. But I'm slowly
    having to admit that's just
    not the real world... Even if
    I want it to be.

    White Rose: Well, I guess it
    all depends on what your
    definition of real is.
https://vimeo.com/387207936

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#265

Post by conductr »

gensym wrote: post #216
dado3212 wrote: post #3

This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s

Honestly, it's weird to me how fixated both sides are on water. People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.

Water is pretty scarce in some of the places they want to build these things. I know people in West Texas that own ranches that have been approached by the datacenter people and it’s basically a desert, oil industry consumes a lot of their water, and the public water they get in the city smells toxic, the well water is flammable. So water use is concerning and I don’t think there’s any reliable or trustworthy source for them to use as a gauge for what to expect so they have to ask.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#267

Post by softfalcon »

badc0ffee wrote: post #120
softfalcon wrote: post #88

The data coming from the University of Calgary about the data centres they're building in Alberta, Canada seems to indicate that they're using evaporative cooling, which is very expensive water wise. The bigger concern though, is the power requirements. Which are set to double or triple the energy use of the entire Province (analogous to a State in the US). https://ucalgary.ca/sustainability/mobilizing-alberta/climat…

There are data centre projects underway that use their own natural gas generators: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/olds-mihta-askiy-data... Air pollution, GHG and water use are concerns, but these projects will not dramatically increase the load on the electric grid. Natural gas is cheap and abundant in Alberta, and the province (actually the whole country, via transfer payments) benefits financially from reso…

I keep hearing about natural gas and on-site power for these data centres. I'll believe it when I see it.

There are already have a couple in Calgary and they're hooked directly to the grid. The cost of electricity for the city shot up at the same time. Also, there have been a few brownouts caused by them not being ready to handle late night draws from those data centres.

That's at least what I'm seeing. Though, admittedly, it's from older project articles. Maybe something has changed in recent months?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ai-data-centre-albert...

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#268

Post by SecretDreams »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #218
SecretDreams wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was moreso asking you about your data on how much AI is tied to CO2...

Andy Masley does some plausible estimates here based on the data we have that puts 50 prompts per day at around 5kg CO2e/year: https://www.andymasley.com/writing/whats-the-full-hidden-cli... The difference between an average diet and a vegan diet via Scarborough et al. 2023/Poore & Nemecek 2018 is in the realm of 1450kg CO2e/year. Assuming those numbers, that difference is around 14,500 prompts per day , or ~5.3M pro…

The premise of your link is founded on the energy associated to with a single prompt. 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).

Basically, there's a lot of words in your initial link, but they all hinge on the readers taken the stated energy assumption for a single (undefined) prompt at face value. If that initial assumption is wrong (at min, it's poorly defined in your link) all further conclusions are invalid.any a scientific publication have done this same trickery =].

They don't define what a query is when they are talking about AI power usage. If we want to get serious, we'd tie usage to tokens since we can actually track token usage.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#269

Post by asadotzler »

ssl-3 wrote: post #221
shimman wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah it's totally normal for neoliberal America to fuck over the public at every opportunity for private corporate gain. Not going to disagree with that at all. But if you think this is honestly a GOOD thing, you have deep anti-human sentiments.

No. That's not what I said, and you're quite clearly being disingenuously hyperbolic. Let's calm down a bit and bring this back down to earth, shall we? Suppose you buy your groceries from a company. Do you have a right to inspect that company's books to evaluate things like their energy use and their water consumption? Yes? No? Should you have that right?

YES. I should be able to evaluate that, and many supply that. When I buy an iPhone I can see exactly what Apple's recycling and use of recycled materials looks like, for example. Environmental impact doesn't only happen within their walls, it hits us all and they have a responsibility to declare that for anyone to see, not just customers. That you think they should be able to do whatever they want behind closed doors and we all just have to suck it up is one of the reasons I'm glad to be old and not far from escaping this world of children who no longer give a shit about anything except self satisfaction.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#270

Post by KingMachiavelli »

rondini wrote: post #160
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #23

I often get side tracked into commenting on regular social media like Instagram and I'm somehow surprised over and over how poor critical thinking skills in the greater population. The zeitgeist of US politics is "this doesn't directly benefit me so this must be bad". According to the Instagram demographic, ALL industrial uses of water and electricity are bad because they "compete" with household use. The massive Agr…

I find it deeply ironic that you accuse the public of lacking critical thinking about the externalities of agriculture but claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever. Demand for compute hardware has skyrocketed, and producing that hardware creates massive pollution from factories and mining. I shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe. To borrow your expression…

> claim data centers produce no long term pollutants whatsoever While running. Incurring a pollution penalty once in fungible location (i.e where mines are approved and "hopefully" managed responsibly) is better than incurring pollution proportional to the output (e.g. plastic and chemical waste).

> shouldn’t have to explain how rare earth mining harms millions around the globe.

Is rare earth mining specifically for semiconductor manufacturing actually a significant driver? My intuition is that rare earth and most raw material mining would be driven much more by EV car motors and batteries.

Certainly you can say all energy use is indirectly responsible for the pollution of the oil, solar, wind, etc. I don't disagree at all! I'm say in-addition to the pollution of raw inputs like energy - contemporary industries have additional and unavoidable side products.

> are earth mining harms millions around the globe.

Those mines are going to operate day after day because it's unfortunately the best economic opportunity in those areas. Those areas deserve our support to improve their socioeconomic realities but opposition to data centers in rich countries does not suddenly provide better opportunities to those regions.

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