Oh, so that's why we're growing alfalfa in the middle of deserts, flooding the fields with excess water so we can keep water rights, and then shipping the alfalfa to China. It's so we can eat!
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 legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.
The southwest is basically exporting its water very cheaply in the form of agriculture. Why when its such a constrained resource here?
People have all kinds of needs in addition to those for food and water.
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).
This comment could have been someone's hamburger!
A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.
Based in Colorado.
I'd be on board if for every data center a farm gave up the amount of water to use in that data center. Instead of carbon offsets, we'll let them purchase water offsets. Of course that's not a serious answer.
Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert and drain the western US's aquifers and rivers because we have insane water rights doctrines that entitle them to trillions and trillions of gallons of free or almost-free water far in excess of what the watershed regions can bear.
If we don't change that system, data center water usage is a rounding error that is barely noticeable at the scale of the problem. If we do change that system, data center water usage isn't a problem at all.
Well, to me, this sounds basically like "Jeff Bezos already exists, this school does not. Increasing the government budget to build a school here is not going to help our finance, so that's where we will push back."
(I don't think Jeff Bezos should lose all his money, but he could definitely pay more tax.)
Scale matters, and you're completely ignoring it. A single hamburger takes about 2,500 liters of water to produce. The US eats a lot of them and produces a lot of them.
Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into.
It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people talking about how terrible this is for the environment deserve to be ignored first, scorned later.
Oh yeah, excellent place to put effort, it's not entrenched, it's just straight up against technological giants in a race that is considered relevant for national security. That should be easy yeah, outstanding target to set.
>and you stop the other negative effects besides just the pollution and water use, and you can build a coalition with the people against the other negative effects of AI.
I'll just repeat myself here:
>Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively.
Regarding pollution??? Completely preposterous.
Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as <other company> to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them"
Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.
Because I don't have anywhere near enough brain damage to do that and I'm not sure I can get there in a medically safe manner.
If Bob made a huge deal about company's abuse of fluffy animal and never otherwise talked about fluffy animal, that would seen as inauthentic
Because we who actually care about this subject go through the effort of educating ourselves and tend to use our energy in ways that actually make a difference, that are effective. Because we care about making an impact, not about brownie points.
People are just embarrassed to admit they're scared they might lose their job. They shouldn't be but they are because they've attached their identity to their career and to the concept of it making them uniquely skilled and creative, in a way that a machine could never replace.
Please don't take this as saying they are replaceable by AI. Maybe it never will. That doesn't matter, what matters is that they're scared that it will, and they're too embarrassed to admit they're scared of it, so they point towards the environmental damage.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
And so in that context all water usage is not equal: watering a golf course where run off goes back to local estuaries is different to evaporative cooling is different to industrial or residential usage.
Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.
Comparing data centers to the bare minimum isn't particularly interesting, the point being made by the article is that we aren't efficient with our water usage in general, AI is a rather small source of waste in the scheme of things.
Careful, your bias is showing.
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.
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 some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being 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.
If you look at water distribution you'll find that its unevenly distributed so farmers should pay a water tax and distribute that water to the less water fortunate. CA has an extremely high water GINI with a few farmers consuming far more than their fair share.
Drinking water is barely a rounding error in cities' water usage.
Agricultural water usage doesn't go to the necessities to feed people. It goes to whatever is most profitable, even if that means growing water intense crops and exporting the produce overseas.
Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.
This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods.
Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.
Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.
Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen
But why stop there, and why exclude all food equally? Does somebody living a vegan lifestyle (which typically needs vastly less resources, including water, per calorie of food produced) get to wash their car in exchange for their trouble? What if I take a cold instead of a hot shower; do I then get to wash my bike every once in a while?
We don't do this, at least not in the western half of the US. Instead, the biggest consumers of water have "water rights" - the right to use a certain amount of water every year, for free, simply for owning a particular piece of land. And these water rights were all staked out based on estimates of the Colorado River that were wildly optimistic, so there's a century-long waiting list of claims that will permanently supercede your own if you fail[0] to actually consume the water you are entitled to.
This is insane, and it leads to some pretty insane incentives. Because agriculture was here first, it has the strongest claims to water, and a pretty heavy incentive to waste as much water as they are legally allowed to. A lot of the discussions surrounding water usage assume that because agriculture is necessary for human survival, that the water it uses is also necessary. It's not - and the only way to get an industrial water user to actually care about their water usage is to actually bill them for it.
Once we have an actual market for water (not just water "rights"), then we can start talking about what usages are actually necessary - i.e. what uses should we explicitly subsidize through taxes rather than implicitly subsidize through a terribly designed system.
[0] In the interest of fairness, I ran this comment through Google's chatbot, which would like you to know that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, it takes ten years of intentional disuse to lose a water claim, and that there is a market for water rights. My counterargument is that most farmers do not care about how much water they can not use, and that a market for water rights is not the same as a market for water, because farmers can still decide to just use the water for free. The pricing mechanism cannot work if there are a class of protected users who do not feel backpressure from the pricing mechanism.
You don't have to eat a burger.
Skip one McDonald's trip per year and you're going to offset all your prompting water waste (see other comments in the thread).
If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.
The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.
Just these two facts will tell you that while, yes, we do need food to live, but on another hand we have an abundance of food and if AI data centers use 0.05% of the water used for humans.
It's a strawman.
Residential water usage is way too different in way too many ways to be meaningfully compared to industrial usage. The scale is different, the waste water treatment is different, the infrastructure cost is different. The water quality standards are different...
(Not I. I disagree with both)
A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.
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.
There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded.
Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)
Nothing but costs! All of those people have been replaced by AI. What's the point of keeping all those economically useless people alive?
This is our future if we don't achieve the fabled post-scarcity society soon.
Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?). While AI water usage might still not look that bad, it would be a more honest comparison.