[danaris]

Presumably you're fine with using electricity to heat/cool your house, yes?

Would you, then, also be fine with running three extra air conditioners/space heaters that do nothing but sit outside on the lawn?

"People are OK with the energy usage already happening, so they should be OK with adding 32,767 AI datacenters too" doesn't make sense. It's essentially a reductio ad absurdum. Of course we're "selectively squeamish with computer resource usage"; some usage is obviously useful to us (with entertainment also in the "useful" category—we're not robots!), while for many, many of us, the extra datacenters are having anywhere from a neutral to a profoundly net-negative impact on our lives even before you consider the resource usage.

[handoflixue]

I mean, if you actually understood the scale of AI power usage, it would make sense. A TV can run 200 watts/hour, so this is equivalent to... watching TV?

Or, perhaps, watching TV in the background while you program.

We are not in a power crisis, and data centers have had basically no impact on our lives compared to previous technologies. There are more data centers used for the internet, but somehow you're still here, using a data center to complain about checks notes data centers? Really? Well that's a bit cheeky.

[tokarf]

Sorry I'm a bit old school I don't watch tv when I program. What's the point of watching tv while programming anyway ? But can you really watch tv while programming ? I can't

But maybe when you watch tv while programming you can watch documentaries about water crisis triggered by I datacenter usage, or maybe you can watch some reports about Elon using very poluting gas turbines to generate energy for their massive grok datacenter ...

[danaris]

I'm sorry, when individual datacenters are drawing more power than entire cities, and needing to build entire new fossil-fuel-burning power plants to service their needs, you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical of your "it's just like watching TV" excuse there.

[handoflixue]

You might find it enlightening to look at the power draw and environmental impact of other technologies, for a sense of scale.

LLMs didn't even exist when we started expressing concern about global warming, the internet still uses the vast majority of data centers and thus power, smartphone manufacturing is a nightmare on multiple levels, the environmental effects of factory farming are staggering even if you apply zero moral weight to the suffering, the existence of automobiles... what automobiles used to be like...

It just seems bizarre to care about these issues solely in the context of one particular technology, while giving a free pass to everything prior.

[danaris]

This is whataboutism.

No one's saying we shouldn't care about the impact of other technologies and industries too.

But when the AI industry is sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into building a huge number of datacenters, many of which have already been proven to have environmental and legal problems, sitting there saying, "You didn't complain when we got TV!" or even "You didn't complain when the datacenters were for AWS!" is just transparently trying to change the subject without addressing the very real concerns.

[handoflixue]

It's hardly "changing the subject" to try and establish whether this is actually a proportional effort. Your concern should, in fact, be relative to the harm something does. A single car killing one person is not a reason to demand the abolishment of the automotive industry.

If you care about saving the environment, you could do vastly more by protesting a dozen different causes. You can't give any reason this cause is special - just vague "environmental and legal problems" that probably add up to a half-dozen anecdotes. Meanwhile, Google is out there spending hundreds of billions of dollars and racking up it's own record of proven environmental and legal problems, and you can't even bring yourself to say "yeah, and I condemn Google and all other data centers" - partly because you're using a data center to send the message in the first place

[danaris]

> It's hardly "changing the subject" to try and establish whether this is actually a proportional effort.

No, that's basically the definition of whataboutism.

We are talking about the problems with datacenters. You are trying to claim that we shouldn't be concerned with the problems of datacenters if we aren't at least equally concerned with the problems of X, Y, and Z other things.

There is no world in which that's a sound argument.