Nobody ever asks if these data centers are actually providing any value to society. There's just this assumption that ever growing compute capacity is a good thing. Then you get into this sort of induced demand situation where more compute capacity exists so people feel like they can use ever more compute capacity for increasingly pointless things.

But it's time we look at each and every workload and decide if it's really worth increasing our energy and water usage as well as devastating our land for it to be possible. Modeling proteins for healthcare? Sure. Generating useless multimedia content that nobody will ever look at? Probably not. Training yet another glorified autocorrect? Definitely not.

People think when they hoard data in ~the cloud~ or waste enormous amounts of resources on things like LLM training there's no harm but it has real impacts.