[bwanab]

When Alcoa built their aluminum plant in Tennessee in the early part of the 20th century they had to build a series of hydroelectric dams to power the plant. They were using far more power than nearby Knoxville.

The headline is clickbait. Nothing to see here.

[i80and]

I don't think you're making a case for it being clickbait; it sounds more like you're affirming the factuality of the headline?

[loeg]

Clickbait doesn't mean non-factual.

[almost_usual]

> For context, a data center campus with peak demand of one gigawatt is roughly equivalent to the average annual consumption of about 700,000 homes, or a city of around 1.8 million people

[croes]

How many plants did they built?

And aluminum has more benefits than these AIs.

It’s even disputable if the really raise efficiency of people.

[Lerc]

>And aluminum has more benefits than these AIs.

The utility argument holds no water for me. I don't think it should be acceptable to assume the future worth(or lack of) of anything when there are a range of opinions on the issue.

This holds equally for AI and Cryptocurrency which both get criticized for having a lack of utility. Nobody knows the future utility, in both issues there are people who sincerely believe that they will be world changing.

They might be wrong, but it should not be up to individuals, or even the majority, to bluntly declare a different worth and then categorize the process a waste.

By all means make arguments on the long term environmental impact of proposed mechanisms used to achieve those goals, but if your goal is to convince someone else then you have to consider those impacts relative to what they believe are the benefits.

Electricity use, and indeed water use, frequently gets asserted as a big number with the implication of environmental damage. If the electricity is generated cleanly or the water is not rendered otherwise unusable, then the may be negligible environmental impact.

[ben_w]

> This holds equally for AI and Cryptocurrency which both get criticized for having a lack of utility

The argument against cryptocurrency specifically is different: the security measure for anything proof-of-work based is the claim that one cannot reasonably afford to spend 51% of world resources to break it, which means there's no upper bound to consumption — if we Dyson sphere'd the sun and ran 51% of the power through BTC nodes, there would be no difference to how much value that BTC system could provide relative to the one today, and that's also true for any other PoW system.

Many of the the criticisms are also specific to BTC, which is designed to not be able to scale even as far as just serving the transactions of people eating lunch in Berlin. The suggestion at this point is layers on top of BTC, but (1) that makes it look like normal currency handled by a bank, and (2) BTC also can't scale to all the purely inter-bank transactions worldwide.

Proof-of-Stake may be meaningfully different, or not, I don't give it much thought.

[richrichie]

> BTC, which is designed to not be able to scale even as far as just serving the transactions of people eating lunch in Berlin.

BTC’s counterparts are treasury bonds and gold. Not cash. Many non-econ background tech people misunderstand the difference. Try buying lunch with gold or treasury bond.

[ben_w]

I will readily agree with you that:

> Many non-econ background tech people misunderstand the difference.

Unfortunately that includes the creators, early adopters, and many active proponents.

The first thing purchased with BTC was famously two pizzas.

The title of the original paper was "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System": https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

I've seen restaurants offering to accept it.

Musk briefly offered to accept it at Tesla.

[zekrioca]

Would you accept a datacenter to use your potable water and then release it for you to take a shower? Would you drink any kind of water [1]?

Electricity and water are today’s main issues, but there are many indirect others like noisy neighborhoods, pollutants from diesel generators, etc.

These infrastructures will start to use great portions of earth’s resources, saturating it to the point people will need to be making complex choices coming forward.

[1] https://youtu.be/9H8mbIp01sg

[ben_w]

Given I have no idea what the water is used for, I would defer to an expert.

If it goes through copper pipes, picks up heat, then leaves… my expectation is that this is fine, and I could drink it without further processing. Perhaps even insulate the pipes then it's a free source of pre-heated water and we can save energy.

If the exit pipes cross-connect with the staff sewage lines, then it needs full processing like any other waste water stream.

Without having someone actually look at the setup, I'm not going to know which it is, and there's likely a lot of other possible configurations besides those two.

[Lerc]

>Would you accept a datacenter to use your potable water and then release it for you to take a shower? Would you drink any kind of water

If it were deemed safe by experts in the field certainly. If if were deemed unsafe, certainly not.

That's all I'm asking for here, is for decisions and arguments based upon the actual impact, not by assumption that water or electricity supply is uniform and by implication, bad.

[croes]

Building any power source has an environmental effect.

So if want to risk global scale damage your cause should have a proven benefit.

Otherwise it’s up to you to explain people who had to left their homes because of consequences of climate change why you needed those data centers to create power point presentation, mail text and funny cat pictures.

[Lerc]

I think you may find that any project has no proven benefit before that benefit is achieved. Your argument is an argument against doing anything at all.

If you wish to argue there is a risk of global scale damage, then you should demonstrate the risk. I'm not arguing against avoiding risk. I'm arguing against assuming risk and conflating high risk and low risk forms.

What energy production would you find satisfactory? What is unsatisfactory.

Attacking power-point presentations, mail text and funny cat pictures as the cause of people having to leave their homes is assuming undue impact of a small subset of behaviour. What is the actual impact of the behaviour you are criticizing? Is it insignificant in comparison to the resources predicting the path of a hurricane? I assume you would consider that a more worthy cause.

[croes]

> Your argument is an argument against doing anything at all. My argument is about the scale.

They didn’t build a giant railwork network after the first train was shown, they didn’t build Highways after the car’s invention.

It’s like the IT industry turned into a one trick pony and bets everything on a certain type of AI.

[ben_w]

We had data centres for a long time before this, and this isn't a bet on "a certain type of AI" as the GPUs can do a lot of other architectures besides Transformers.

Indeed, your own example of "funny cat pictures"… if you meant "from GenAI" that's a diffusion model while text is a transformer model, and if you meant "in general" all those things pre-date current interest in AI.

[adventured]

You're negating the value and requirement of economic laddering. You can't just jump from nascent AI to hyper useful AI / AGI, without going through all the steps from A to Z. Those steps are certain to be filled with failed experiments, 'wastefulness' (which isn't actually all wastefulness; for the process to be all waste, we'd all have to be omnipotent gods that knew better each step of the way).

It'd be like pretending you could jump straight to fusion (or advanced solar et al) and never have bothered with fossil fuels. Truly economically and technologically impossible.

[alchemist1e9]

> And aluminum has more benefits than these AIs.

What’s the reasoning behind that assertion?

[unholythree]

I guess you could argue back in 1776 AI and aluminum had a roughly equal impact, only for aluminum to over take AI and become far more important by the early 20th century…

Pedantic sarcasm of course.

[Ekaros]

Comparing the current use of aluminium in wide range of products. Compared to current and even some future uses of AI. It is in general very useful material. And somewhat even one of the enablers for this level of AI as lot of power transmission cables are made out of it. It is better for purpose as even if the cables are thicker they weigh less for same power capacity.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Occam's razor? Outside of techno optimist communities made up of people whose livelihood depends on believing in it, AI has become synonymous with slop, hallucination, cheating, and offloading of human labor to shitty bots with cool tech demos but they fall apart going from cursory to sophisticated use.

[alchemist1e9]

With any understanding of markets the Occam’s razor should be the other way around. Basically humanity doesn’t need a centralized planning committee to determine what is or isn’t useful for them, instead they can just spend their money/assets in a free market economy and express their individual needs and wants.

If global governments/society is concerned with externalities of energy consumption they can make regulations and impose taxes/costs on energy sources with undesirable externalities. However they should NEVER as in NEVER decide what use of energy is “good” what is “bad”, there is no such concept, markets will handle preferences and allocations for the system, no centralized planning needed. If AI is still demanded even with increased overall energy costs then it’s because it provides a value and no ivory tower critic can claim they are enlightened and need to decide for all of us.

[add-sub-mul-div]

In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

With any understanding of the real world, "demand" can be seen to be artificially manufactured. The "demand" for smart TVs reflected in the long term phasing out of non smart TVs is the result of the will of the manufacters and docility of consumers. The same playbook will have nearly all of us eventually using "AI" PCs whether we want to or not.

[croes]

When they built the aluminum plant did they already know if aluminum is useful?

That not the case for AI, especially the current type of AI.

They are convenient but if that leads to more efficiency is in dispute.

[Majromax]

> And aluminum has more benefits than these AIs.

It's not like these data centers or the power to run them are free, or being paid for out of public generosity.

If AI proves to be over-hyped, then the private-sector backers of these ventures will lose their investments, and life will go on. Frankly, I'd expect that fate for half of the projects in this article (if not cancelled before completion) just because of the "gold rush" dynamics at play.

[croes]

What happens to the power plants they built or revived?

[Lerc]

If AI fizzles out and the investors lose everything, then I guess a group of the worlds wealthiest individuals have built a lot of infrastructure projects at no benefit to themselves.

I'm prepared to take that risk.

[croes]

If some of these projects are nuclear power plants that’s a huge risk.

[Lerc]

Then contest the development of nuclear power plants, not the generation of electricity in general.