I think it is true that people who obviously dislike AI for ideological reasons often lead with ecological concerns or doubt about the capabilities, leading to an unproductive discussion.
Have you considered engaging on those ecological concerns? There is quite a lot to dig into and can be pretty interesting. For example, try to project how much electricity will be needed to power all the datacenters in construction, then compare that to the existing grid and infra, then figure out the cooling capacity. If done well you will see that we have a pretty massive resource problem here
I had a look now, and apparently we are projected to increase by 2.3x datacenter power consumption until 2030 from 415 TWh to 945 TWh.
That is going from 1.5% of global electricity use to 3%.
It is less than I expected.
Maybe if AI does work out better than expected for knowledge work or becomes applicable to robotics and fields like construction, we are going to see a larger buildout.
> That is going from 1.5% of global electricity use to 3%.
> It is less than I expected.
I suspect this is because of the word "global". Are not most of these currently planned specifically for the USA? Sure, the USA has a disproportionate use of electricity, but IIRC it's like 16% (1/6th) of global?
3% of global electricity is roughly the same as 18% of US electricity; a bit less because not all the new DCs will be in the US, but that's something that I consider with regards to the economics and why I'm bearish on this topic, as I think it will be a case of Dutch disease in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
Okay nice, after looking at the macroview look at the immediate impact into local communities and how much data these companies refuse to, rightfully I might add, share with the public.
Weird how all these concerns can simply go away if they just simply shared the information the public wants (water usage, sound generation, power usage) rather than refuse to do so.