Yeah let's make llm waste a whole city energy / water playing games just for fun !
All of a sudden we are selectively squeamish with computer resource usage, when we were fine having all that fun with computers and hardware, 3 monitor setups, using graphic cards to play games (dear lord!) and tinkering around with home rigs of every proportion and wattage for no reason at all.
Would you, then, also be fine with running three extra air conditioners/space heaters that do nothing but sit outside on the lawn?
"People are OK with the energy usage already happening, so they should be OK with adding 32,767 AI datacenters too" doesn't make sense. It's essentially a reductio ad absurdum. Of course we're "selectively squeamish with computer resource usage"; some usage is obviously useful to us (with entertainment also in the "useful" category—we're not robots!), while for many, many of us, the extra datacenters are having anywhere from a neutral to a profoundly net-negative impact on our lives even before you consider the resource usage.
Or, perhaps, watching TV in the background while you program.
We are not in a power crisis, and data centers have had basically no impact on our lives compared to previous technologies. There are more data centers used for the internet, but somehow you're still here, using a data center to complain about checks notes data centers? Really? Well that's a bit cheeky.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This is a handful of incredibly wealthy companies deciding for us all.
What possible counter-argument can you offer to that?
But maybe when you watch tv while programming you can watch documentaries about water crisis triggered by I datacenter usage, or maybe you can watch some reports about Elon using very poluting gas turbines to generate energy for their massive grok datacenter ...
If we assume 250W for a continuously running agent, Grok 4 training run estimate would be around 50 million session-days, so a half-million people might consume as much running agents continuously for 100 days.