also (and I feel the need to add this to every AI post) it is incredibly bad for our environment and is actively stealing water away from people’s homes.
you cannot argue away the environmental damage.
no you are right for adding it to every ai post as it doesn't get talked about nearly enough. it is causing the world to blow past its emissions reduction targets. the positive climate and environmental gains of adding renewable energy production to energy grids is, in some places, being lost to these hyperscale data centres sucking up the juice and preventing fossil fuel generators from being decommissioned as planned. of course this is also driving up people's electric bills.
and its water use is a much bigger deal than people realize within the broader context of climate change and how its expected that glaciers (one of the main sources of freshwater on the planet) will be basically gone by 2100 which will cause insane damage to ecosystems, agriculture, economies, and drinking water across entire continents. (and this wasted water use doesn't just apply to data centres necessarily either. the industrial use of freshwater is something that needs to be seriously considered and heavily regulated.)
we're being incredibly stupid. and while it would be bad no matter what, we could at least have an excuse if we were using this energy and water for something actually useful or helpful but this generative ai shit is no different than lighting vital resources on fire just to watch them burn. its short-sighted and suicidal.
this is why we need economic democracy! because otherwise fascist billionaires completely disconnected from reality with fucked up dystopian ideologies and backwards belief systems control the use of the world's resources.
I agree with all of the above and would like to add:
Building new data centres is generally bad for the local environment, regardless of their operation. The construction industry is very carbon-intensive, concrete hardening gives off CO2, all the machines and vehicles used are still diesel powered.
Sealing up arable land that is also part of the local water cycle for a huge factory that produces nothing of value is the dumbest use of that land I can concieve of, short of a parking lot (and data centres need those, too!)
We can't use data centres for anything else after the inevitable AI bubble crash. It's going to be vast, windowless, concrete bunkers that would have to be retrofitted massively to even be used as future data centres. Plus, the minute those spaces aren't air conditioned and climate controlled and particle filtered, mold. Mold everywhere. It's like someone was trying to build Fallout ruins/dungeons 20 years in advance.
The more chips we produce, the more POPs (persistent organic pollutants) we dump into the ecosystems where they are produced. Semiconductor lithography is very intensive on forever chemicals. And the downstream/upstream pollution is also very intensive. SimCity lied to us, high tech industry isn't clean at all (tragic, I know).
The idea of the low frequency (audible AND inaudible) hum of data centres just turning residents' brain to mush is dystopic on so many levels. Fuck the concept of sacrifice zones. Fuck the billionaires who push these projects. Imma start a submarine company that caters to the ultra rich who want to see the titanic. And you know my sub designs gonna be good because I have a B.Eng. in a field completely unrelated to sub design. Just like that other guy, you know the one.
these things need to be stopped everywhere and the people having them built need to be dragged out of their mansions and rendered into fertilizer. there is just no excuse for any of this.
