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 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.

Pointing to agriculture as a necessity while also wanting water usage to be "productive" is a little contradictory here. We grow things because there is a demand for those products in similar way that there is a demand for datacenters, the nutrition aspect is secondary and has been for a long time now. Would you say that almond growing is a productive use of our water? How about bananas, or beef, or avocados? All of these products use an abnormally large amount of water compared to other agricultural endeavors and if we compare that to data center water usage data center's are a drop in the bucket. We don't 'need' all of products we produce through agriculture to survive anymore, we grow them because we like them.

Lots of Colorado river water goes to supplying year around lettuce. If we didn't have lettuce they would just eat something else. Given the supply constraints of the region, "but someone is eating it" is a really bizarre argument. It can be grown elsewhere without water problems.

The southwest is basically exporting its water very cheaply in the form of agriculture. Why when its such a constrained resource here?

They are pointing out that some locations are not a good place to grow specific things and that there is a lot of water wastage in doing so. Attempting to grow crops in the desert vs. in a temperate climate probably uses more water for the same amount of crops (unless they are desert plants, I guess). This is what's being pointed out. If I decide to grow tomatoes on the moon and then ship them back to Earth to be consumed, it's fair game for people to point out how much of a waste of resources that is vs. just growing them on Earth.

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).

this reminds me of the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”

Yes, and now please cut the non-essential philosophical discussion, the server hosting this site doesn't run on thought experiments alone either.

This comment could have been someone's hamburger!

This site, if not overly wasteful, fits onto a single 1U server. A single car is more damaging than such a server.

HN does untold societal damage.

In other words it's not the car and its energy use, but rather its occupants.

A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.

HN could run on a cellphone with a good connection. The YouTube video I am watching in another window probably burns more electrons than this entire forum.

and that hamburger could have fed even more in the form of plant based food! what an inefficient use of resources!

My wife works with farmers professionally as part of a conservation district and just responded "THIS PERSON KNOWS FARMING" when showing her the discussion. I genuinely have no idea what you guys are talking about but she immediately got heated.

Based in Colorado.

There was massive controversy about that so I don't know how good counterexample it's that. Unless the argument is "we already waste a lot why would you care about wasting more??" Which is not a great argument.

The point of the counterexample is a huge component of US agriculture, massively dwarfing data centers in water use, doesn't serve the core needs proposed by the top comment.

The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.

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.

If our water rights system required farmers to actually pay anything approaching market rates for the water they used, it actually would be 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.

> The farming water usage already exists. The data centers do not. Adding more on top of what farming is using is not going to help. We can prevent the data centers, so that's where the push back is.

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.)

How does building a data center, which benefits a single company, compare to building a school, which benefits the general public?

Private jets already exists. Your new EV still doesn't. Adding more emissions on top of what private jets are using is not going to help. We can prevent the new EVs.

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.

It's not explicitly a great argument, but it's an excellent premise to set.

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.

There aren't a million better places to put efforts into. This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched, 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.

>This is a good place to put effort into stopping because it isn't yet entrenched

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.

You are a deeply unserious person :'D

You are insinuating that a fight against tech giants is the preferable option regarding pollution and I'm unserious??

The effects of the tech giants encroachment of society and the stakes and gravity of the situation is so serious that some people think its important not to allow attempts to frame the struggle as Sisyphean to succeed.

>The effects of the tech giants encroachment of society and the stakes and gravity of the situation is so serious

Regarding pollution??? Completely preposterous.

Bob: "I hate <company> and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that"

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.

Why is your hypothetical Tom wrong to claim that Bob primarily cares about hating <company> and is using fluffy creatures as an excuse because it sounds superficially better than the actual reasons Bob has a problem with <company>?

And I'm guessing that I'm supposed to believe here that the reason Bob hates explicitly this one company and is dismissing 99% of the damage done to the cute fluffy animal by corporations that seemingly get paid to exterminate them in brutal ways, the reason many people seem to spouse this extremely bizarre, specific belief is "just because" right? Not an obscene amount of hypocrisy and dishonesty?

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.

Buddy, you don't know a damn thing about agriculture. These things aren't even remotely the same conversation. My point still stands that both can be true. Sure there's inefficiencies in agriculture that can be addressed and there's obviously inefficiencies in all data centers that can be addressed. If people chose to fight one over the other I guess they'll all brain dead according to your world view. I'll make sure to check-in with you next time I don't like something to make sure you approve of it :)

I'm pretty sure most people would see Toms point as valid?

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

This is 100% true. Every person I know - and I know a lot of them because I'm one of them myself - who already seriously cared about the environment pre-AI, including making personal sacrifices for it, doesn't place outsized importance on AI's environmental impact compared to other sources. Every person who frequently brings up AI's environmental damage are those who honestly never really cared about the environment/climate, at most paying lip service to it for brownie points/to feel better but never took any actions that would inconvenience themselves.

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.

The point is that we should start by working on the bigger waste. If agriculture represents 1000x the consumption of AI, even cutting the AI water usage by half would have the less impact than reducing agriculture water usage by 0.02%

Don't be disingenuous. They already were dividing things out by type of usage, like talking about water park usage vs. the usage of an entire city for all purposes. They are already admitting that "water usage of a city" isn't only about quenching thirst and maintaining hygiene, it's not a stretch to assume that they also realize that they can be water wastage in agriculture as well. They can't split out every instance of wastage that could be eliminated, and it's ridiculous to expect them to.

Another example is pistachio farming in California, where it can take ~1+ gallon of water per nut according to some estimates. Much of the industry is enabled by high U.S. trade barriers on a certain country.