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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#451

Post by foxglacier »

bee_rider wrote: post #110
roywiggins wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a world where a water use tax is levied such that 1) it's enough for datacenters to notice and 2) doesn't immediately bankrupt all golf courses and beef production, because the water use of datacenters is just so much smaller .

We definitely shouldn’t worry about bankrupting golf courses, they are not really useful in any way that wouldn’t be better served by just having a park or wilderness. Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I’m under the impression that most of us would be better off eating less meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special occasion meal.

Of course golf courses are useful as shown by the fact that people pay to use them. Perhaps you mean that you personally haven't (yet) found them useful, but you know that different people want different things. I think eating shrimp is disgusting and never eat them but I don't want to ban global shrimp production because the people it would harm are not me!

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#452

Post by jiggawatts »

kingstnap wrote: post #406
lkjdsklf wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it doesn’t leave the cycle doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, that means it’s less distributed That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water. The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something…

The way they measure water consumption is genuinely unbelievably misleading at best. For example measuring the water evaporated from a dams basin if any hydroelectric power is used. Counting water is genuinely just asinine double counting ridiculousness that makes down stream things look completely insane. Like making a pound of beef look like it consumes 10,000L of water. In reality of course running your shower for…

My favourite example is the complaints about “e-waste” because AirPod batteries are not replaceable. Never mind that the batteries make up about half of the weight of the things ro begin with, the entire annual production of AirPods and their cases would barely fill a single shipping container.

No, not a container ship, or anything substantial like that, just one container (1).

Yet, it makes people lose their rational minds and start foaming at the mouth about Apple’s “wasteful practices”.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#453

Post by emp17344 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #387
jtr1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.

> the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology Especially since so many anti-crypto people immediately pivoted to anti-AI. That sudden shift in priorities makes it hard to take them seriously.

The anti-crypto people were correct, though. Why should we not push back when we’re seeing the same type of baseless hype that surrounded crypto being cultivated around the AI space?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#454

Post by ineedasername »

diamond559 wrote: post #444
hamdingers wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole. It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.

No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument assuming "AI skeptics" are illiterate and/or incapable of understanding. You ironically are the one refusing to accept the possibility that you are wrong.

Maybe you've used it-- but a very large number of the AI skeptic comments I see that actually cite particular experiences, even comments in the pages of HN, amount to things like, "ChatGPT hallucinated when I asked about the local price of product X and if it was in stock anywhere around. How can anyone take LLM and AI seriously?"

Or worse, things like "Real science and real engineering doesn't rely on tools that behave randomly.".

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#455

Post by keeda »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #446
keeda wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interpretation was "If an industry that actively works to harm the global health of humanity through their addictive and unhealthy food products is using way more water and we're OK with it, maybe we should give a pass to the industry using a fraction of that water to improve human productivity." Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries, of course, but to a first approximation they are accurate.

> and we're OK with it Are we? Is anybody? Criticism doesn't need to be directed towards one thing at a time.

Well, the food industry continues churning billions in profits at the expense of our health, so statistically speaking, looks like "we" are OK with!

Totally agreed that criticism should be directed where it's due. But what this thread is saying is that criticism of GenAI is misdirected. I haven't seen nearly as much consternation over e.g. the food industry as I'm seeing over AI -- an industry that increasingly looks like its utility exceeds its costs.

(If the last part sounds hypothetical, in past comments I've linked a number of reports, including government-affiliated sources, finding noticeable benefits from GenAI adoption.)

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#456

Post by emp17344 »

stavros wrote: post #167
simonw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"AI has no utility" is a pretty wild claim to make in the tail end of 2025.

Whenever I see someone say AI has no utility, I'm happy that I don't have to waste time in an argument against someone out of touch with reality.

If AI is so useful, we should have a ton of data showing an increase in productivity across many fields. GDP should be skyrocketing. We haven’t seen any of this, and every time a study is conducted, it’s determined that AI is modestly useful at best.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#457

Post by Capricorn2481 »

buu700 wrote: post #420
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous. It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place. People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the t…

Well they're separate issues. Someone could plausibly take the position that air travel should be banned for environmental reasons, but that has no relevance to the utility of air travel. If a group of people were loudly proclaiming that planes were not only bad but useless, anyone who routinely uses planes would obviously find them non-credible.

They're not separate at all, especially if the question is "How hard should we push people to use this."

To be clear, there are a lot of people who routinely used airplanes who don't post-covid, but insisted that they had to. Yeah, I think it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30 minute meeting. Most don't fly at all. I don't know what mass-psychosis white collar industries were under to think that was necessary.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#458

Post by fallingfrog »

chriswarbo wrote: post #125
fallingfrog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow down the development of these technologies- a political problem- is much more pressing right now.

> I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. Ever since "AI" was named at Dartmouth, there have been very smart people thinking that their idea will be the thing which makes it work this time. Usually, those ideas work really well in-the-small (ELIZA, SHRDLU, Automated Mathematician, et…

999999 times out of a million you'd be right.

But, I shouldn't have said anything.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#459

Post by hombre_fatal »

gishh wrote: post #213
roywiggins wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The water intensity of American food production would be substantially less if we gave up on frivolous things like beef, which requires water vastly out of proportion to its utility. If the water numbers for datacenters seem scary then the water use numbers for the average American's beef consumption is apocalyptic.

I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop. For every vegan/vegetarian in the US there are probably 25 people that feed beef products to their pets on a daily basis.

Whether people would switch off meat on their own is a separate issue. If water became scarce enough to start moving the price, then you'd absolutely see people eat less meat.

But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.

Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.

I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#460

Post by throwup238 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #439
throwup238 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. If you look at the data for animals, that’s not really true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is that the vast majority of water used for animals is “green water” used for animal feed - that’s rainwater that isn’t captured but goes into the soil. Most of the plants used for animal feed don’t use irrigation agriculture…

That paper makes the opposite argument than you thought it made. Even from a freshwater perspective it’s more water-efficient to get calories/protein/fat directly from crops than from animal products. Since you like their work, the authors of your paper answered that question more generally here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 where they conclude "The water footprint of any animal product…

You’re confusing my argument. I’m not arguing that meat is more efficient than plants; that by itself is obviously untrue because of the trophic efficiency loss. I’m arguing that meat uses marginal resources that would otherwise be useless for growing food. If we eliminate meat we’d eliminate a lot of marginally productive farmland that is naturally irrigated and have to replace it with industrialized irrigation farming that will be significantly more expensive and use more water and energy. Maybe if we had a global cultural reset with industrialized farming, but no one is going to be happy replacing their beef and chicken with the corn and barley and hay that those lands normally grow, much of it inedible to humans.

That paper isn’t actually debunking anything that I’m saying. If the water foot print per calorie is 20x for beef but the feed is grown with 90% of its water from rainfall, that’s not a 20x bigger footprint in a way that practically matters because most of that water is unrecoverable anyway. The water that is recoverable just makes it through the watershed.

Meat is a way to convert land that cant grow things people can or want to eat into things that people will eat. That pastureland and marginal cropland growing animal feed can’t just be converted to grow more economically productive crops like fruit and vegetables without Herculean engineering effort and tons of water and fertilizer. Instead the farming would have to stress other fertile ecosystems like the Southwest which would make the water problems worse, even if their total “footprint” is smaller. The headline that beef uses 20x more water per calorie completely ignores where that water comes from and how useful it actually is to us.

I don’t doubt that we can switch to an all plant diet as a species but people vastly underestimate the ecological and societal cost to do so.

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