It’s just greediness unhinged by lack of policies. And the voters have finally had a say.
I think you’ll have better luck by arguing the economics and cost predictability. Not everyplace has a natural gas field next door, and in those places you’ll have a compelling argument.
But I’m not entirely convinced that all of the anti-data center voter backlash was about the physical infrastructure and power usage. I think a large fraction was general anti AI sentiment. And you’ll have a much harder time getting people who hate all AI to think putting a datacenter powered by anything is a good idea.
People don’t want these in their backyard but also care about lot about their energy costs.
Each of these people made a choice about how they were going to affect the environment. The vast majority "voted" to use fossil fuels.
These people will yell and complain about anything and everything destroying the Earth, but then when it's their turn?
"We just couldn't figure out how to make the extra 30 minute charge stop on our annual vacation work..."
As an individual, your impact is minor. The problem is that there are hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road.
This is a pretty typical coordination problem where people are reluctant to make personal sacrifices when they know others will not make similar sacrifices which are necessary to achieve the goal.
Turns out everyone's a selfless hero at the dinner table or in the comment section, but few are on the ground.
It's not unreasonable to be frustrated by people's hypocrisy.
Up until two years ago, we very explicitly subsidized electric cars. And for the past six-plus months we've caused oil/gas prices to double.
In any case: is it worth spending a little more money (maybe?) to save the world from climate change? Or isn't it?
That's the general pattern of technology. It makes us rely less on the biosphere, and in turn makes us more dependent on it. But since it is destructive, it also actively destroys the biopshere, which is the way technology grows 'organically'. It's a disease.
A robot civilization? Because last I checked, humans were passed off said biosphere.
Global shipping uses the equivalent energy of a Hiroshima bomb every two minutes - that's about 4000TWh over the course of a year.
ALL data centre use, worldwide, totals 490TWh - that's inclusive of AI data centres.
AI data centre use - 155 TWh.
All data centre use, worldwide, accounts for less than 0.5% of CO2 emissions.
This is "use paper straws to save the whales" territory.
It keeps surprising me that Trump got elected as politician on the promise of introducing new taxes. Tariffs. Republicans at the midterms seemed very surprised that extra taxes affected their election chances negatively. I mean you wouldn't believe it but it's pretty clear who is the pro-tax party now, isn't it?
I mean you couldn't make this up. You'd almost think Trump is like some sort of llama, or perhaps a Russian camel (do those exist?) spitting in the face of his voters, kicking them in the balls to get elected. And it worked.
Twice.
What is the problem with a few thousand terrawatt-hours if it allows politicians to get paid?
WILL SOMEONE think of the politicians?
These are some of the silliest takes I've ever seen. HN used to be full of intelligent people.
Data centers don't use a particularly large amount of energy compared to literally any other commercial human activity. You likely use more energy driving to the store once than you do firing off AI queries for an entire year.
Here's the hard truth.
Old economy: 20 white collar workers drive their SUVs 30-60 mins in traffic into an office building that needs to be heated and cooled 24/7, then drive home.
New AI economy: 1 guy works from home and agents in a data center do the work, using up 1/1000th the amount of energy.
If you actually cared about carbon emissions you'd be screaming that we should run toward the new AI-based economy.
Anyone saying otherwise is not a serious person. Now, of course you can complain about AI ruining in person socialization around the water cooler. That is real.
But energy (or water) usage as a complaint is not only wrong and counter-productive to the thing you claim to care about, but its also insincere virtue signaling to mask what is fundamentally just fear of a new technology.
I can assure you they won't be going on 1.5 hr long car rides everyday to nowhere.
Again, whether this is good or bad is certainly up for debate. But if the thing you claim to be worried about is "carbon emissions" then this is objectively a good thing for that particular concern.
However Jevons paradox will no doubt kick in, meaning as we get more efficient at consuming resources we will find ways to use more of it. So energy usage on a whole will continue to trend upwards because of technological advancements. So we need more power plants, ideally the clean kind
They're just lost in the sauce of the current DC fear campaign, which the media is happily tugging along for all those juicy ad views.
Not sure if you're aware, Zoom and Google meet are powered by data centers.
Whatever semantic bucket you want to place certain tech products under, it all runs on data centers, hence this doesn't negate the point.
But they do use a lot of energy when you consider all the development and resource extraction that they necessarily imply, a factor that most people don't put into their calculations.
For a datacenter is not just a datacenter; it's an incentive and pressure to get others to develop competing datacenters, new models, new products based on them, etc; and the resulting pollution and energy usage from that is astronomical.
This is bad for human social cohesion imo, but objectively good for C02 levels if you claim to care about that.
Nothing physical we build for use cases in the digital world emits carbon on the scale of anything we build for use cases in the physical world.
And compute gets exponentially more efficient and uses less and less resources per unit of output over time. Combustion engines and humans in general don't get exponentially more efficient over time, for example.
You don't actually care about the thing you're pretending to care about if you're saying that AI is bad for the environment. It's probably bad for traditional social structures and institutions, but actually fantastic for the environment.
It's always "Data centers don't use a lot of energy compared to using a particle accelerator to transmute lead into gold."
Imagine, way back when, when trains were invented, and people kept saying “we should stick with horses and carriages!” or “everyone should walk and carry their load on their bodies!”
You can’t reason about this stuff unless you put it in terms of productivity.
Objections to data centers based on energy and water consumption are red herrings. For the most part, people aren’t saying these things because they actually care about these things. They are objecting because either 1/they don’t want to live right next to a data center, 2/they object to DCs being built without the necessary (and ideally clean) generation capacity being built first, or 3/they fear, dislike, or otherwise object to AI for other reasons and don’t want more AI capacity being built at all.
Imagine, way back when, before automobiles were adopted, if car manufacturers lobbied for subsidies and bought out all supplies of steel for years in advance with a promise to pay with yet-to-be realized profits rather than compete based on merit.
"terms of productivity" indeed. The inefficient mode of transmutation was chosen because I find slop's value proposition dubious. The merest hint of regulation shakes the industry like a rotten tree.
You’re proving my last paragraph. (Also, if you don’t know how to make AI generate good things instead of slop, now is a very crucial time to learn.)
Neither is there any need to sleuth your way to what I "actually" believe. I have already given you the answer.
In the original message I was responding to, you were not alluding to a level playing field. You were alluding to no field at all (“Notice how the comparison is never to the absence of data centers”).
If that is not what you intended, I welcome a clarification.
It would be less effort expended for you to reread what I already wrote until you understand it than for me to repeat it until you understand. Exercise the principle of charity[0] when rereading, taking care to suppose that the author is writing to communicate something non-trivial and is at least as intelligent as the reader.
Doctor, heal thyself.