I appreciate this response. The environmental impact is such a red herring it's not even funny. Somehow these statements never include the impact of watching Netflix shows or doing data processing manually.
It's pretty clear there are impacts, AI needs energy, consumes material, creates trash.
You probably just don't mind it. The fact is still fact, the conclusion is different, you assess it's not a big concern in the grand scheme of it and worth it for the pros. The author doesn't care much for the pros, so then any environmental impact is a net loss for them.
They might be rational, but taking things out of context as much as happens with any AI / environment narrative gives off a strong "arsenic-free cauliflower" smell.
1. Dismiss it by believing the projections are very wrong and much too high
2. Think 20% of all energy consumed isn't that bad.
3. Find it concerning environmentally
All takes have some weight behind them in my opinion. I don't think this is a case of "arsenic-free cauliflower", maybe unless you claim #1, but that claim can't really invalidate the others on their rational, they make an assumption on the available data and reason of it, the data doesn't show ridiculously small numbers like it does in the cauliflower case.
I can't speak for you but I'm certainly not qualified to opine on the predictions so I won't address the 20% figure since I don't find it relevant.
> data centers account for 1% to 2% of overall global energy demand
So does the mining industry. Part of that data center consumption is the discussion we are having right now.
I find that in general energy doesn't tend to get spent unless there's something to be gained from it. Note that providing something that uses energy but doesn't provide value isn't a counterexample for this, since the greater goal of civilization seems to be discovering valuable parts of the state space, which necessitates visiting suboptimal states absent a clairvoyant heuristic.
I reject the statement that energy use is bad in principle and pending a more detailed ROI analysis of this, I think this branch of the topic has ran its course, at least for me :)
Ok, but that's the figure that would be alarming, AI is projected to consume 20% of the global energy production by 2030... That's not like the mining industry...
> I find that in general energy doesn't tend to get spent unless there's something to be gained from it
Yes, you'd fall in the #2 conclusion bucket. This is a value judgement, not a factual or logical contradiction. You accept the trade off and find it worth it. That's totally fair, but in no way does it remove or mitigate the environmental impact argument, it just judges it an acceptable cost.
I starting writing a response to your post, but as I kept writing and investigating, it became clear that the MIT article you linked is just overflowing with false statements, half truths, stretched truths, and unsourced information.
It is legitimately one of the most misleading pieces of press I've read in a while.
The 21% value is unsourced, the single image = full phone charge is wrong in so many ways I had written 3 paragraphs picking apart both the MIT publication and the huggingface paper's methodology, and so on.
I'm happy to be given evidence that AI is ruinous in terms of more than its social effects, but this publication has made me incredibly suspicious of anyone claiming this to be the case.
Huh, my search is also turning up nothing. I could swear I heard a story about cauliflower originally being yellow and getting replaced with the white cultivar due to the guy who grew it marketing it as "arsenic-free" cauliflower despite the fact that the yellow one had no arsenic to begin with. Either I'm getting Mandela effected or I'm hallucinating -- which of course only AI models are capable of ;)
They would be rational if author also produced everything they consume off the earth and hosted this very slop on a tree. Otherwise they needed hardware produced by other humans, and those humans used the things mentioned above, and probably AI too.
But as it stands the author indirectly loves Netflix.
> Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually. One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021)
> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.
Uh, we've been doing data processing for nearly 80 years, and watching netflix for nearly 20 years. Suddenly we need to tile the earth with data centers, build power plants, burn all the fuels we can, and will "need to get to fusion" (per Sam) to run AGI. He also said "if we need to burn a little more gas to get there, that's fine". We'll never get to fusion or AGI, but we will destroy the earth to put a few more dollars in the pockets of the 0.01%.
You don't see the difference, or are you willfully ignorant?
Do you honestly expect anyone to believe you're trying to take part in a discussion with that last statement? I appreciate this topic has your emotions running hot, but this is HN, not Reddit. Please leave that kind of talk at the door.
You do understand what "exponential" in the "exponential growth" means?
Yes, it means that "suddenly" we need to do more of everything than we did for entirety of human history until ~few years ago. Same was true ~few years ago. And ~few years before that. And so on.
That's what exponential growth means. Correct for that, and suddenly we're not really doing things that much faster "because AI" than we'd be doing them otherwise.
It's pretty clear there are impacts, AI needs energy, consumes material, creates trash.
You probably just don't mind it. The fact is still fact, the conclusion is different, you assess it's not a big concern in the grand scheme of it and worth it for the pros. The author doesn't care much for the pros, so then any environmental impact is a net loss for them.
I feel both take are rational.