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Extinction due to building too many data centers? How would that even work?

It's not just the data centers, but it's part of a bigger trend of massive industrial projects depleting natural resources for questionable benefits for humanity. There's basically two approaches to ecological problems: either pretend some wonder technology (AI?) is going to save us all and keep driving straight into the wall, or seriously question any industrial activity in a cost/benefit analysis.

Our society is currently headed in the first scenario, building ever more useless shit and accelerating environmental collapse, pretending CO2 capture, AI, unlimited energy storage, agro-bots, desalination and on-site recycling of complex materials will magically keep life sustainable despite any scientific evidence showing otherwise.

There are some projects I'd consider to be useless, but it doesn't seem very likely that data centers will be useless. Maybe not used for their original purpose, though?

That's a good point, but i doubt we will find useful applications that require resources on that scale. The only usecase i can think of is more mass surveillance, which in my view is a net negative.

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