As a vegan, yes. But also both need to be stopped. Its like if everyone in history was vegan and meat started to become a fad, you would want to nip it before it becomes entrenched. That’s what we need to do with AI, because if we don’t it will be like the factory farming issue that is so entrenched it may never to away.
Well put
There is nothing inherent to AI that requires water usage or CO2 emissions. These are the wrong angles to be attacking if you are fundamentally against AI for some reason. These sorts of problems resulting from nothing but greed occur every time there is a boom or rush, and their remedies lie in humanist governance, not targeting AI specifically.
Those are easy to fix problems that only exist for reasons that have nothing to do with AI; what would you do then? There are very significant problems with AI that relate specifically to AI and need AI-specific remedies. This water and climate stuff really feels like the public being manipulated by bad arguments that they are predisposed to accept for their own emotional reasons.
Cooling systems (water) and power generation (coal/gas/other) are required in large amounts to perform AI tasks compared to a traditional method of generation. Especially when you have AI thrown into every aspect of Windows OS and browsers generating garbage you never asked for.
Yes but there is no reason that power for example has to be coming from fossil fuels burned on-site, emitting at some of the highest intensities on the planet. AI doesn’t care where the electricity comes from. There is obviously rampant corruption and abdication of government responsibility here, and that’s not going to go away if AI magically disappears.
All industry, indeed all work of any kind necessarily generates waste heat. Every factory, office, and hen house has to export waste heat or it cooks itself. AI is not out of line with what people accept elsewhere when it comes to wasting water for industry, for leisure, for their lawns, and dozens of other frivolous applications. The scale of the water problem is only an issue on an extremely local scope, where a locally finite water supply is being consumed to the detriment of other local water users. I guess those people should have paid the bribes which are now apparently de rigueur.
I really feel like this water angle is being promoted by foreign interests who see AI as an arms race and want to retard American corporations as much as possible. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense when you pick it apart and place it in context.
But USA doesn’t have Hydro power everywhere, and the admin has blocked solar and wind in favour of fossil fuels, so it will be CO2
Both. It’s not a one or the other issue. Don’t let it divide us. The planet is on fire and we need all the help from any angle we can get.
When one is an order of magnitude greater than the other, and ON TOP OF THAT involves atrocity against billions and billions of vulnerable individuals, it’s hard to understand why the lesser thing even gets mentioned.
Seriously though, it’s hard to understand. People clearly don’t give a shit about their water usage. The moment AI leaves their head, they go back to much much worse behaviour. It’s clearly bullshit. That’s the point here. It’s all empty virtue signalling.
Cause if everything is terrible and needs fixing nothing will get fixed. People get overwhelmed. Don’t stunt momentum in one area cause your cause is “even more important.” That isn’t how progress is made, but take the progress where it is happening and maybe later parlay it into the next thing.
Or stand still.
If I came after golf (which consumes more water than data centres) with this kind of ferocity, you would think I had a screw loose. The arguments presented don’t make any goddamn sense. It’s an obvious moral panic.
Which sucks because we are being distracted from the ACTUAL harms that AI presents us. Please pull your head out. This is propaganda.
a person gets overwhelmed. people can specialize and take on multiple things, especially on the scale of civilizations. this is not a good response, i’m afraid.
I disagree and the lack of progress across all of these fronts at least makes me think it is part of the problem.
Very few people specialize in politics, so most of the “people” you are saying are capable really are just “persons” who are trying to people in their area and also make good decisions for the environment they live in but without becoming experts. Welcome to the majority of voters they have real lives.
thats a reasonable take. the ideal i spoke of doesn’t necessarily manifest does it
I think the general idea is that people get a lot of value out of the water spent on animals, and the water for animals doesn’t generally affect the water for individuals.
The average person doesn’t care about this stuff. It’s the very reason things are as bad as they are and why the bread and the circuses exists.
Talking about animal welfare is guaranteed to bring up cognitive dissonance for people as they’re made to consider for just a brief moment that they aren’t as “good” as they believe. Then it devolves into posting meat being cooked gifs and whataboutisms. In the end no one changes their mind or their habits and we continue the decline.
The big difference (for meat eaters) is what you get for the water use. Meat production is still seen as vital to sustain us, AI data centers clearly aren’t.
Saying: “this is useless, annoying, a financial bubble AND uses too much water” is easier than “this is tasty, nutritious AND uses too much water”.
For me environmental arguments hit hard, but for most they don’t.
“Healthy” is not going to be accepted. The more meat a human eats, the younger they die and the more major diseases they experience. Environmental arguments clearly don’t hit you very hard, nor does the cruelty and violence you inflict on vulnerable individuals. This is self-serving rationalization in real time.
Why does it not hit me hard? I don’t eat meat. Is it really that difficult to entertain how others think that aren’t you?
My mistake, but clearly I wasn’t the only one to mistake your post for carnist apologia.
Presenting a water usage argument against AI while refusing to be moved by that same argument in the far more urgent and extreme case of animal ag is blatant sophistry. Look inside yourself and figure out what your true motivations are. Because you’re probably not wrong at the very bottom of it all.
Reducing consumer demand for water-intensive products is generally a good idea, but this article is woefully incomplete. It needs the water usage of other domains to properly put that into perspective. For example chocolate uses 1,700 liters of water to make a 100g bar, far more than pork or beef and a much easier sell to consumers than go vegan or even vegetarian. It also fails to note that AI specifically doesn’t need any water to run at all, the datacenter’s servers need it for cooling and water usage of an AI data center is more or less the same as a non-AI datacenter.
Are you trying to market for, or against veganism?
Thoughtless post.
It’s more thought than many people seem to want to put into the topic. It tends to get real dicey whenever the impact of animal agriculture is mentioned.
It’s less thought
Lots of people do not like ai, your post suggests they should think less about how bad ai is, because animal agriculture is so bad.
Nope, the point is AI water usage is bad, and if you truly care about water usage, you might want to address an even worse wastage you’re likely contributing to 3 times a day
Everyone will choose their values and battles. Sure it can feel provocative with anti AI people eating a burger while bashing people for not minding the environment, but telling people who are doing something, that it’s not enough or even wrong, will not help the vegan cause.
I have been vegan for nearly 20 years.
You are marketing against veganism with this post, but you are probably plant based so it wouldn’t be the first time…
Think and care more.
You’re a vegan who criticizes other vegans for raising issues with animal agriculture. Interesting.
You’re marketing against veganism with your ai damage minimisation post.
If you think this is minimizing AI problems you didn’t get it at all
You’re a ‘vegan’ who posts “eating less meat is a great place to start.” to a vegan forum
Incredible, I had no idea that’s what I posted
oh oh pick me pick me i’m one of the good vegans
I’m vegan, I doubt you are.
“Maybe eat less meat” - omg this is against veganism!
veganism is not about eating fewer dead bodies.
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