[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.

[jstummbillig]

There is a world. In that world data centers are not a net problem, but net solution.

Looking at car exhaust and concluding that cars must be bad would be a questionable conclusion. We tolerate them despite the pollution they cause, not for it.

The same can go for data centers, again, if you conclude that they are net solution. If you don't, then it won't for you. The market simply disagrees with you in that case.

[danaris]

This has nothing to do with "the market".

This is a handful of incredibly wealthy companies deciding for us all.

[handoflixue]

I guess we better go ban swimming pools: they kill people! people drown in them.

What possible counter-argument can you offer to that?