This sounds like being concerned about the adverse health effects of a steak due to sugar.
AI uses less water than the public thinks
301–310 of 425 posts
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#302Comparing 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…
> Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading
Kind of reminds me of things like "low fat" labels on foods that have little fat anyway, but tons of sugar.
In this case, electricity is the elephant in the room.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where does your gasoline come from? Most of that usage is for the massive Exxon/etc facilities we have in Houston/Galveston to refine most of the fuel the entire nation uses.
Interesting! What do refineries use so much water for? I had no idea.
By and large cooling, just like a data center.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#304The water use problem is like maybe the 100th biggest risk due to AI, it's weird that in the minds of the most vocal anti-AI activists (with the exception of the Lighthaven/EA crowd) it's like the #1-#4 issue. Is it because water use is one of those morality sinks which is easy to understand compared to some of the other more subtle issues regarding AI proliferation?
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.
Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing
> Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes.
Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#306> 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 e…
> 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.
I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era. But I think we can add this to the list of our poorly-grounded narratives.
There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. The 101-level "solution" is to just raise the price to account for demand. The problem with that is that it treats all usage the same, whether it's a residence's first gallon or an alfalfa field's last gallon. But the former is something we need to protect. It makes sense to price wa…
> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on. Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone…
Gasoline is heavily regulated and subsidized. Leaving the oil market alone resulted in Standard Oil, and we obviously don't want that again.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#308While the argument is probably right, the author may notice he's asking AI websites on AI water usage. Perhaps he should consult more neutral sources, at least to introduce the habit of critical thinking.
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#309Comparing 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.
Possibly one of these, shared to HN in the past year:
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks
#310You 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.
How many gallons of water are you assuming are in that burger patty? Because, while cows do drink water that falls from the sky and lands on fields where it was going to land anyway, they also urinate most of it back out.
Very little water that would have been used for any other purpose, or isn’t naturally returned to the water cycle, ends up being consumed in the production of the burger patty.
To be clear I think your point about AI not consuming all that much water relative to other things is valid, but comparing it to the water consumed by eating meat weakens your point for anyone that hasn’t bought into the bunk “cows are driving climate change” narrative.