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Comment by rootnod3 | Hacker News Reader

And most of those concerns being wildly dismissed by the AI shills, even here on HN.

Mention anything about the water and electricity wastage and embrace the downvotes.

Because those criticisms misses the forest for the trees. You might as well complain about the pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution. AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production. And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations.

The more interesting questions are about psychology, productivity, intelligence, AGI risk, etc. Resource constraints can be solved, but we’re wrestling with societal constraints. Industrialization created modernism, we could see a similar movement in reaction to AI.

>we could see

Well, that's just it. Those extentitential risks aren't even proven yet.

Meanwhile, threats to resources are already being felt today. "just overhaul our infrastructure" isn't an actionable solution that will magically fix things today or next week. Even if these don't end up being big problems in the grand scheme of things doesn't mean they aren't problems now.

> AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production.

It's almost like humans evolved from prehistoric times eating meat. Wild discovery, right?

> And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations.

Why don't AI bros lobby the changes? Much harder than selling snake oil and getting rid of programmers, I guess.

Well considering people that disagree with you “shills” is maybe a bad start and indicates you kind of just have an axe to grind. You’re right that there can be serious local issues for data centers but there are plenty of instances where it’s a clear net positive. There’s a lot of nuance that you’re just breezing over and then characterizing people that point this out as “shills”. Water and electricity demands do not have to be problematic, they are highly site specific. In some cases there are real concerns (drought-y areas like Arizona, impact on local grids and possibility of rate impacts for ordinary people etc) but in many cases they are not problematic (closed loop or reclaimed water, independent power sources, etc).

It’s already causing massive problems before we even got to models that even do anything actually useful.

Wait until other countries jump in the bandwagon and see energy prices jump.

Currently it is mostly the US and China.

And RAM and GPU prices are already through the roof with SSDs to follow.

That is for now with ONLY the US market mostly.

And those “net benefits” you talk about have very questionable data behind it.

It’s a net loss of you ask me.

Well why would we ask you (no offense)? What is the questionable data you're talking about?

RAM and GPU prices going up, sure ok, but again: if you're claiming there is no net benefit from AI what is your evidence for that? These contracts are going through legally, so what basis do you have to prevent them from happening? Again I say its site specific: plenty of instances where people have successfully prevented data centers in their area, and lots of problems come up (especially because companies are secretive about details so people may not be able to make informed judgements).

What are the massive problems besides RAM + GPU prices, which again, what is the societal impact from this?

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