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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Once again, the key thing here is to ask how MUCH value we get per liter of water used.

If data centers and farms used the same amount of water we should absolutely be talking about their comparative value to society, and farms would win.

Farms use thousands of times more water than data centers.

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Once again, you are ignoring my (implied) argument:

Humans NEED food, the output of agriculture. Humans do not NEED any of LLMs' outputs.

Once everyone is fed, then we can talk about water usage for LLMs.

Farms already produce more than enough food to feed everyone (and, indeed, the excess is a feature because food security is really important). The reason not everyone is fed is not due to needing to divide water resources between farms and other uses.

Going only by the effective need of humans is a bad argument. A lot of farmers wouldn't survive without subsidies and are not vital to our food supply.

Stop eating beef. With the water saved we can grow enough food for any realistic human population. Ok we solved this one. Or do humans NEED burgers as well? We can already feed all people, any starvation is strictly a political problem not a food existing on the planet problem

We produce enough food for everyone already, and then waste a huge amount of it. Our food problem isn't about producing more, it's about distributing what we have.

fine so do the same performative activism for

1. netflix

2. gmail

3. hackernews

4. discord

5. gaming

Yes, it is worthwhile to ask how much value we get.

And a whole bunch of us are saying we don't see the value in all these datacenters being built and run at full power to do training and inference 24/7, but you just keep ignoring or dismissing that.

It is absolutely possible that generative AI provides some value. That is not the same thing as saying that it provides enough value to justify all of the resources being expended on it.

The fact that the amount of water it uses is a fraction of what is used by agriculture—which is both one of the most important uses humans can put water to, as well as, AIUI, by far the single largest use of water in the world—is not a strong argument that its water usage should be ignored.

That's a fair point. For people already finding great utility in GenAI it seems like a foregone conclusion, but for others it can be understandably frustrating that people take it as an article of faith that "AI is worth it."

Disclosure, I'm very much in the former camp, but I try to ground myself with broader empirical evidence. I've found an increasing amount of empirical evidence that GenAI is providing value more than commensurate with its costs.

Largely the studies I've looked at focus on productivity boosts, I guess because that is very easy to tie to economic impact. This recent thread has some relevant sources and extremely rough numbers, but the outcome seems to be that for a 1% increase in datacenter usage we may have gotten a 1.2% boost in national productivity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794907

Now, this absolutely not a rigorous analysis, but could be a good starting point for how to think about these tradeoffs.

it is also a fraction of golf courses which you again ignore. this is just typical "don't do anything!!" ism. there's no argument here.. even if data centres used .00001 millilitre of water you would say the same thing.

Oh, I think golf courses shouldn't exist. They're awful in a number of ways. You want to play golf? VR or minigolf.

But (as I pointed out elsewhere in this discussion [0]) why should I have to mention everything that uses water in a way I think is detrimental in order to be allowed to talk about why I think this thing uses water in a way that is detrimental?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927558

if you are at the point where you have to suggest golf courses shouldn't exist then sorry we are completely on different page here.

your logic will extend to just doing nothing at all because it will take resources from other things that you value.

Why would the logic extend there? If golf courses really do use a lot of water, energy, etc, and they largely benefit a small subset of people, it doesn’t make a ton of sense for them to exist.

Of course making the world a better place for everyone is very against western and American exceptionalism and freedom.

How much water do you think AI data centers use as a percentage of golf courses in the USA?

Complaining about someone else using an "ism" during a literal "whataboutism" is rich

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