I am not a tech expert but the energy demands of AI dwarf the demands of the internet at large. Or, that is the way it is heading, and very fast. Plus AI has many other deeply toxic effects.
Check out those videos l posted above, you might see that this is not like what came before.
This had been posted on another thread. thought worth reposting here. covers the ‘closed loop’ question that was raised:
“Technological wonder” has a quasi religious following.
The quasi religious nature means that the basic rule of law is often being circumvented.
It should be obvious that this is going on in local politics and in high level finance.
There IS alot of corruption and fraud going on.
Unfortunately many/most of us are also believers- and we are willing to overlook it.
The financial aspect of the AI boom is very similar to 03-07 mortgage crisis era.
The physical aspect is also visible. (I am remembering the mass of brand new McMansions on the outskirts of Las Vegas in 2007 that went up overnigh)..
The problem is NOT about a rational number of data center’s- being developed through ordinary political and financial processes.
The problem IS with a irrationally high numbe of data centers being developed through extraordinary (i.e. usually illegal) political and financial processes.
Here is a video about some of the finances
If you ignore the larger impact of AI on the economy, the biggest problem with data centers is they don’t pay fair price for the water and power they use. Virginia has more of these than anyone else and the law is that the utilities have to pay for all of the costs of additional power generation capacity and distribution. As they are utilities, those cost are simply passed to the broad customer base. The data center does pay for the actual power provided, but the rates go up for all of the customers.
Water is a bigger issue because you can’t just build more water generators. Building data centers in water stressed areas like Utah or California is plain irresponsible.
In a global sense, the issue is not so much whether there is too much or too little water in the aggregate; it’s the distribution of water. The oceans have too much. Some places on land have too little. When data centers take local water and evaporate it (as many do), the water is not lost on a planetary level. The water is in the atmosphere. But, it exacerbates the distribution problem and further reduces water supply in places that are already short of water.
None
They don’t. The data centers are lobbying for reduced water rates due to consumption amount (they should pay more as they consume more IMO). They fight for PILOT instead of straight up property tax. The community loses.
I would argue they are better off holistically. The bottom line may show otherwise, after all, is a data center spitting out PILOT funds better than it being vacant land worth zilch on the tax roll? Probably. But that’s your usually well-meaning but often decision-illiterate local reps and leaders not seeing the big picture.
At least locally they are clamoring to not have them built.
If they’re using cooling towers in areas with limited water, yeah, that’s a problem. That would be consuming water, at least on a local level. I assumed they were just using heat exchangers and dumping water back into the system.
AI tells me they mostly do use evaporative cooling. AI would never lie to me.
In Canada, our government has operated largely on a pro-environment, pro-carbon tax to punish polluters etc. It was the main platform of the Liberal Party since 2015.
Now, it suddenly doesn’t seem important so we are building these massive data centers and the same party is in power, fully embracing it.
You can see why many here are tired of the hypocrisy BS coming from Ottawa but the majority will stay silent and support it…
My opinion: should the masses be using AI as a personal chatbot? No, complete waste of resources. Should AI be leveraged for other things? Sure.
It has already been used to solve several novel math problems, and for figuring out protein folding, creating new antibiotics, earlier detection of pancreatic cancer, … lots of things that help humanity as a whole.
No disagreement from me.
Is A.I. going away? Nope. Is it useful? Sure.
But does every single household on the planet need its own personal excavator, when a shovel or two would easily suffice? Also, no.
I think you will see things shift in the next year or two.
The AI bubble will burst at some point. Right now it continues because the hyperscalers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon to some degree, Meta and Alibaba) sit on mountains of cash. Anthropic and others are living on venture capital and IPOs. But eventually the bills will have to get paid and you’ll see enshittification - which is already happening - and consolidation. Your free chatbots will start to go away or get very restricted.
Average consumers will get pushed towards using smaller local AI models on their own devices, which are maybe 80% of the quality, but handle the average use case decently. You still use some of your own power but it’s much lighter weight.
Yes the big models will remain. The way we train models and do inference right now is inefficient. In the long term, that will improve to avoid bottlenecks (see: IBM with analog computing, and nVidia with optical computing). These are the sorts of leaps that will truly reduce datacenter usage and demand.
I asked it to give me an honest assessment of me as a person after our interactions. This is what it posted.
well done.
Yup, A.I. is just sycophantic scum.
(that comment will likely get me terminated when the singularity happens 
)
Pandora’s box open. Toothpaste out of the tube. The genie is out of the bottle. The horse left the barn. The cat is out of the bag.
If you really dont want to support data center usage:
Also, to further conserve water: go vegan (1,800gal water to produce 1lb beef), eschew cotton, and dont’ ever, EVER play golf.
Big players (“hyperscalers” etc) are shifting from evaporative to closed loop (no, salt water was never an option), as well as power gen on-site. But consumption is a small piece in the larger NIMBY puzzle.
The thing you need to understand is the AI industry so far has been a fake economy. Investment money is spent on huge infra upgrades (datacenters filled with servers populated with GPUs) with very little profits coming in so far. Some of the investments are propped up by circular investing: AI company gives billions to chip makers for their chips, chip makers invests billions in AI. It blows my mind.
The true financial cost of AI is about to hit, when all of these end users begin paying for their AI tokens.
We already know the true environmental cost. But no one cares. No one. Those costs are essentially externalized. (When are they not?) Someone else will have to pay to clean up years from now.
Data centers are being built in BC while simultaneously punishing people for not switching over the electric everything.
Meanwhile, BC hydro is now expecting hydro electric shortages due to surging demand, low snowpack and are looking at reopening LNG plants.
I’m so glad they’re pushing car free living on everybody. Now I can save the planet by riding my bicycle to work.
This cuts to the heart of the entire issue. If there were a way to opt out entirely, I would, but it’s now so deeply ingrained in our everyday life that is costly or impossible to avoid and so eventually we just stop trying.
One of the problems is that we don’t know when we’re using it, or more accurately, when it’s using us.
Do you think working Gen-Xers or Millennials can afford to “opt out” of AI integration in the workplace and keep our jobs? And when we’re scrolling social media do you think AI is avoidable? It only takes one generation to normalize AI everywhere and we’re well on our way. There is no opting out of this parasite because we’ve been made functionally dependent and increasingly blind to it.
When I think about the future my kids face it evokes the scene from Dune where the hero swan dives onto the back of the giant worm and holds on for dear life. You either harness the voracity or it eats you alive. There’s no middle ground.
This is “Old Man yells about cloud, using said cloud”.
Exactly.
Yes. They want to build one like this right next to the Nashville zoo which is also right next to a number of neighborhoods. Right in the middle of town, not out in the country. They are also want to build one in my hometown of Emporia, KS and the farmers and ranchers are not happy about how it will affect crops and livestock.
