[dado3212]

This is a bit of a dead horse, but the magnitude of how off the public is on this continues to amaze me. Pete Buttigieg did a Tulsa town hall a week or so ago where someone cited it taking "10,000 gallons of water just to generate one photo".[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCc-ipWVShY&t=1h5m43s

[msla]

The other part of this problem is the idea that if you disagree with someone about the facts you're interpreted as disagreeing with them about the thing they're mad about: You disagree that AI somehow destroys fifty billion-trillion gallons of pure water every time someone asks Claude something, therefore you're fully in favor of Grok making nudes of underage girls.

Some people get an Angry. They love their Angry, and nobody will take it from them.

[gensym]

Honestly, it's weird to me how fixated both sides are on water.

People against data centers overestimate water usage, but people who think we should build as many as we can, as fast as we can seem the think that "actually they don't use that much water" somehow negates the more real issues with them.

[conductr]

Water is pretty scarce in some of the places they want to build these things. I know people in West Texas that own ranches that have been approached by the datacenter people and it’s basically a desert, oil industry consumes a lot of their water, and the public water they get in the city smells toxic, the well water is flammable. So water use is concerning and I don’t think there’s any reliable or trustworthy source for them to use as a gauge for what to expect so they have to ask.

[JuniperMesos]

What are the real issues with them in your estimation? Anti-data-center people bring up water use as a reason why the government should legally prevent data centers from being built, and pro-data-center people bring up water use to argue against the anti-data-center position. I agree that the anti-data-center people are overestimating water usage, as well as the degree to which the amount of water data centers do use is a problem; and that they're doing so because they have some other objection to data centers that doesn't sound as convincing. It would be better to talk about those issues.

[anubistheta]

Because it is an easy concrete way to stir up reactionary sentiment. The real issues are debatable but complex. But the common folk can all visualize a gallon of water.

[casefields]

Not only that they are trying the same playbook as what was done to nuclear. A new technology comes and activists try to instill fear so as to murder the tech in its baby crib.

[gensym]

What a strange sentiment.

The world would be better without nuclear technology! Yes, it can be used to generate electricity in a much cleaner way than other technologies, but its potential to kill so many people has shaped geopolitics for generations. If we could get the energy without the destruction, that would be ideal, of course. But there's an unacceptable chance that nuclear weapons will kill everyone I care about.

I think AI is actually similar. It's really useful for all sorts of stuff - I'm running multiple agents writing code as we speak. But it's also going to make the world much more dangerous by giving people the ability to kill and spy like never before.

There are better arguments than the water thing.

[alephnerd]

That's populism for ya, and it's sadly extremely effective.

Meanwhile, both China and India are giving free electricity, providing dollar-for-dollar capex subsidizes, and 25 year tax exemptions to build data centers [0][1].

Love how HN wants to strangle the infrastructure that underlies our entire industry and why HNers get paid. It really highlights how much of the opposition to AI comes from the "chattering classes" and other white collar types as is constantly seen in polling [2][3].

It's funny seeing people who are also part of my party but told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code", treated blue collar workers derisively, and ignored concerns by employees in manufacturing and skilled trades which led them to shift to the right now act the exact same way.

Edit: can't reply

> AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid

Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.

You saw similar opposition to semiconductors fabs back in the early 2010s in the US, and the entire ecosystem virtually out within a decade until the CHIPS act was signed and executed on.

Same with nuclear power in Germany and GreenTech in much of the America.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-tech...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-gives-20-year-tax-...

[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afr...

[3] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/07/26/which-u...

[testfoobar]

Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats. AI is currently driving yet another extreme wealth inequality inflection point. Founded just five years ago, Anthropic is going to be a trillion dollar private company maybe this year! This is a staggering outcome and will further divide the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.

So whether populist outrage is expressed through fears of job losses, higher energy prices or concerns over water usage, IMHO, wealth inequality is the cause.

[matthest]

This is a bit reductionist.

AI is also:

- Boosting existing small businesses and enabling the creation of new small businesses by making previously expensive resources like market research, accounting/legal advice, etc. available for $20/month.

- Helping the world progress towards cheaper healthcare: https://www.vox.com/health/487425/open-ai-chatgpt-diagnosis-...

- Allowing lower income communities to access legal advice that would previously have been prohibitively expensive: https://www.probonoinst.org/2026/02/06/ai-and-technology-hel...

If Anthropic can allow millions of people from all around the world to access these benefits, why shouldn't it be worth a trillion dollars?

Wealth in the modern world is not a zero sum game. Wealth is created, not allocated. The fact that Anthropic is worth a trillion does not prevent you from making money.

[bluGill]

The economy is down, and the fad is blame AI so that is what everyone is doing. The last downturn there was a different fad that people blamed it on - but the real root cause was always the economy and not the fad.

[teamonkey]

It’s understandable that people blame AI for economic issues when so may CEOs are publicly stating that “increased efficiencies due to AI” is the reason for laying off staff.

[bluGill]

They blamed the latest fad for layoffs in the last one as well.

Every company and project I know of has a long list of things they want to do that they believe would be good for customers - but they cannot afford the people needed, and the risk is too high to borrow. That is if AI was really increasing efficiency in a good economy they would be keeping everyone and getting more work done with them.

Of course in reality we cannot know if AI has really increased efficiency - we only have short term measures at best which we know from experience are often wrong. (most often because there are many ways you can make a shortcut today that will kill your long term)

[darth_aardvark]

> " latest fad for layoffs"

What are you referring to here? The latest fad before AI was crypto, or maybe "the metaverse" and I don't think anyone credited those for layoffs. Before that, the latest large round of layoffs was during what, 2008? And the blame for that was correctly laid on the very real economic collapse occurring.

[simianwords]

> Populism is effective because the proverbial rising tide is not lifting all boats

This is naive and shows lack of understanding of second order effects. Technology has been so far one of the only things to lift all boats. The last 100 years almost eliminated extreme poverty, hunger and improved material life for everyone. How? Technology - agricultural, industrial.

Of course AI is going to be a rising tide but there will be a blip where people can lose jobs.

Wealth inequality is just a proxy issue or jealousy. Industrial revolution also increased inequality (just in narrow terms).

[pesus]

> Of course AI is going to be a rising tide but there will be a blip where people can lose jobs.

Can you provide any evidence for the supposed rising tide? So far I've seen nothing that indicates that anyone besides the people directly invested in AI companies will benefit from it. Even the best case scenario right now - software developers becoming more productive - doesn't actually benefit anyone not invested in AI companies.

People losing their jobs (and in many cases, their livelihoods/lives as a result) are also not the only negative effects.

[tolerance]

The irony I think is that whether the tide rises depends on the technology stabilizing to a point where people can be educated on how to competently use it in the workforce. Anyone expecting general returns on AI now is too caught up in the hype to contribute to this occurring—grifters and detractors alike.

[loeg]

Slopulism is effective because people are idiots and happy to eat up lies that align with their priors. Nothing to do with material conditions.

[ebiester]

Can I rephrase it slightly?

Humans have some repeatable bugs in our wetware, and it can be predictably exploited in a way that is hard to correct. It isn't "some people" - it's all of us, and the moment we think we're immune is the moment that we are most easily affected.

Yes, even the smartest of us are idiots in some very predictable ways.

[cphoover]

AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid...

> Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.

Sure but we are talking about whether the enormous investment into AI infrastructure is prudent or not. Also I reckon most people on here made a living just fine before everything moved to remote data centers, and many if not most HNers workloads could run on individual machines... But that's another conversation.

[tolerance]

I suspect soon young learners of the future may tilt their heads in curiosity when finding that Obama was a "Democrat" in the same way they did in the past when finding that Lincoln was a "Republican".

[andersonpico]

you're arguing against things that have no material effect. "oh won't you think about adversarial discourse about the most well funded industry in recent history"