I kid you not, yesterday while reading about the ai bubble and the datacenters boom i was thinking maybe this is THE filter.
Not a nuclear winter, not the angry alien or the big scary asteroid.
Just a fucking chatbot wasting all the water and power.
We truly live in a boring dystopia.
If anything, it’s climate change and failing systems due to late-stage capitalism, followed by some form of fascism or other authoritarian system, aided by AI to stay in power.
Electricity use from AI data centers on a global scale isn’t impactful enough to make that much of a difference, it’s more of a local issue, at least at the current rate. Water use is entirely negligible outside of the surrounding area, animal agriculture uses more than a thousand times as much as all data centers combined.
I went into hyperbole there, my bad. I agree wholeheartedly with your reply.
Admittedly, I have a bias here, since using water for food production feels more justified. Same with some industries. But I concede and agree that meat is not the most efficient way nor the most ethical source of food.
I think data centers rub me the wrong way because, for me, they are the straw that broke the camel’s back.
We see how lots of countries pull out of the fight against climate change (not that they were really fighting it, but at least they seemed to care a little) and now they waste more resources on things that are, from my point of view, not productive nor useful to most people.
(Ethics aside, my view on Gen AI is that it is a tech that is not mature enough, and that the use of brute force to make it better is a waste of resources)
Oh, no need to apologize, I fully agree with your overall view on AI data centers, and your observations of how politicians don’t even nominally stand against climate change anymore. It’s just become very blatant very rapidly, and it’s easiest to see with data centers.
The way people prioritize different causes for climate change and environmental issues does frustrate me at times, so I appreciate the reply :)
We’ve created the great filter that explains the Fermi paradox.
I kid you not, yesterday while reading about the ai bubble and the datacenters boom i was thinking maybe this is THE filter.
Not a nuclear winter, not the angry alien or the big scary asteroid. Just a fucking chatbot wasting all the water and power. We truly live in a boring dystopia.
If anything, it’s climate change and failing systems due to late-stage capitalism, followed by some form of fascism or other authoritarian system, aided by AI to stay in power.
Electricity use from AI data centers on a global scale isn’t impactful enough to make that much of a difference, it’s more of a local issue, at least at the current rate. Water use is entirely negligible outside of the surrounding area, animal agriculture uses more than a thousand times as much as all data centers combined.
I went into hyperbole there, my bad. I agree wholeheartedly with your reply.
Admittedly, I have a bias here, since using water for food production feels more justified. Same with some industries. But I concede and agree that meat is not the most efficient way nor the most ethical source of food.
I think data centers rub me the wrong way because, for me, they are the straw that broke the camel’s back. We see how lots of countries pull out of the fight against climate change (not that they were really fighting it, but at least they seemed to care a little) and now they waste more resources on things that are, from my point of view, not productive nor useful to most people. (Ethics aside, my view on Gen AI is that it is a tech that is not mature enough, and that the use of brute force to make it better is a waste of resources)
I will try to be more mindful about my comments.
Oh, no need to apologize, I fully agree with your overall view on AI data centers, and your observations of how politicians don’t even nominally stand against climate change anymore. It’s just become very blatant very rapidly, and it’s easiest to see with data centers.
The way people prioritize different causes for climate change and environmental issues does frustrate me at times, so I appreciate the reply :)
*arsehole tech bros have created