Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?<p>Everything has a downside attached. Most things are <i>terrible</i> for the environment if you look at the raw numbers, and if you're not interested in them or they're things you don't use then it's easy to just dismiss them as pointless nonsense that we should stop doing.<p>However, if you're <i>only</i> looking at the downside then you're being dishonest. The point is never "Let's stop this because it's bad for the planet", but "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"<p>That could still be a no for AI, but there are things we ought to stop doing <i>long</i> before we come for AI. Notably golf. It's a terrible waste of land and water, and boring.
Animal farming is a far greater user of resources by far and is a top 3 contributor to breaching every planetary boundary.<p>It also has an easily replaceable alternative that would reduce farmland use by 50% , massively reduce water use, eliminate one of the top contributor to climate change, and at little to no cost.<p>A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage.<p>So you’re right that we have far better options to tackle before we even start worrying about AI.<p>AI does have a particularly high local impact, due to concentrating so much of the world’s AI energy use into the land on which the data center is located, so that is a real issue to be dealt with, but that’s largely a regulatory and management issue.
> Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?<p>these are bad examples, because it would be good if they were all gone, except almond farming in areas naturally hospitable to almonds.
That's what makes them good examples, because I'm not arguing in favor of AI. I'm pointing out that things are never universally good, and if you argue things should be shut down you should expect some of the things you like, or even need, would be on other people's lists.
Golf is largely self-regulating though; there is not a huge quantity of VC money going into golf courses. As more people find golf boring, there are fewer golf courses because the economics of running a failing golf course vs. selling to developers are too obvious.<p>Golf courses are not booking revenue by exchanging shares in themselves to other golf courses in exchange for golf balls that have not been manufactured yet.
Not right now, sure. The investment has been done over the last couple of centuries of golf course building. The environmental impact of keeping a huge amount of land watered so a few thousand people can bat their balls around is ongoing.<p>From an environmental perspective we should ban golf and use the land for literally anything else*.<p>* maybe not data centers.
> The environmental impact of keeping a huge amount of land watered so a few thousand people can bat their balls around is ongoing.<p>True, but do you add chemicals to that water, and does it becomes unusable at the end of the day? At worst, that water gets in soil and goes somewhere else, and some of it evaporates.<p>Open loop datacenter cooling is not like that though (you add tons of chemicals to that water to prevent scaling and to kill algae), and closed loop is not that harmful, but big AI datacenters don't use that because it's wee bit more expensive.<p>The most "water hungry" sectors can reuse that water, or at least redirect it for agriculture. AI Datacenters are different. They are built in the cheapest way, hence they are very dirty both in carbon footprint and water-body fouling.<p>Golf courses at least trap some carbon by growing grass. It's almost bitterly funny in comparison.<p>For clarity, it seems possible to filter out these chemicals (alongside everything else) with reverse osmosis, but companies which don't invest in closed loop systems (which reduces water demand by ~90% BTW), won't invest in reverse osmosis, which is way more expensive w.r.t. closed loop systems, I believe.<p>If someone has more precise resources or information which they can point me to, I'd love to update my knowledge.<p>Also, this doesn't negate CO2 emissions of these plants.
Where I live it can rain hundreds of days a year and the nearest course had browning greens last time I drove by.
There is a point where this kind of a pragmatic/contrarian take doesn't stick anymore. Is the net benefit of AI worth the cost of losing natural resources for billions? That's the question you're supposed to ponder, like, it's actually up in the air and not clear cut?
Okay, but this summary of the UN report is emphatically not "only looking at the downside". From the piece:<p>"“This report is not a case against artificial intelligence, a technological transformation that is improving the lives of billions of people around the world,” said Professor Kaveh Madani, Director of UNU-INWEH who led the investigation team. “It is a call for using it responsibly and addressing its unintended impacts proactively to make it sustainable and equitable.”"<p>It is impossible to judge of the net benefit is worth the cost if you don't know the cost. More specifically, "The report finds that AI’s environmental cost is being systematically mismeasured."<p>Its key policy messages even include: "AI within planetary limits is achievable. The report’s central argument is constructive. Capability and stewardship can grow together, but only with measurement, transparency, and shared responsibility across the ecosystem."<p>You can also see it's not anti-AI by how it argues, for example: "Governments should integrate AI infrastructure into energy planning, water governance, and land-use permitting, and require standardized environmental footprint reporting."
X is terrible, so don’t address Y is an awful way of framing any issue.
It is perfectly valid and the point is that if a person cared about water usage, they'd highlight percentage of usage as a whole and other violators of the same misusage of water.<p>If you're complaining about resource usage, but only when that resource is being used by one thing you don't like, you're just a tool for somebody else's agenda.<p>Specifically, if someone ACTUALLY cared about foolish uses of freshwater, they'd be advocating for reforms in water rights that result in growing extremely water-inefficient crops in semi-arid and desert environments. Mostly almonds and alfalfa, especially when these are for export.<p>One would also make the distinction of where the water came from important. Some places are flush with fresh water and its usage isn't terribly important, other places are deserts.<p>Anyway there should just be a "sin tax" for using freshwater for frivolous things like golf courses in the desert and datacenters who don't want to invest in less wasteful cooling solutions.
Netflix and YouTube probably are orders of magnitude less than the alternative of driving to plays and movie theaters. Most golf courses use recycled water, albeit the opportunity cost is real. Almond farming is fair.
this is a poor argument<p>there have been plenty of articles about golf courses being a threat to water sources; just because golf courses haven't been closed doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the threat posed by AI. You're still free to crusade against golf courses if you like.
> if you're only looking at the downside then you're being dishonest. (...) "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"<p>Is any benefit worth the cost of killing the world? The article proposes a series of recommendations for investors in the "roadmap for sustainability and equity", because the conversation isn't if the benefits of AI are worth the costs, but if we are able to pay these costs at all plan the required infrastructure improvements -- which are always done with taxpayer money regardless of how neoliberal the society claims to be -- in order to accommodate the expansion of AI without massive disruptions.
>Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?<p>Don't threaten my communist soul with a good time.<p>>Everything has a downside attached.<p>Yes. Let's regulate that, please.<p>>The point is never "Let's stop this because it's bad for the planet", but "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"<p>Sure. The answer is 'no, it isn't '. These frontier models purposefully chose the most power guzzling, moat digging approach and it was not necessary whatsoever.<p>> but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI.<p>Sure, let's get to it. As well as with AI at the same time.
My son does this. Points out all the issues in the world that I didn't address when I point something he's done. It's a childlike response insisting that either we talk about everything or nothing.<p>Weird take.<p>> That could still be a no for AI, but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI.<p>Hard to have that discussion if these are the responses.
How about instead of sewing FUD and justifying one evil by pointing at others, we actually gave a damn about the world we’re creating.<p>People act like doing things that are good for the environment is inherently lacking in economic value. My Dad’s environmental consulting business put me through college, while doing good things for the environment and people, and that is really small scale stuff. And his primary customer was a bank wishing to avoid lending on contaminated sites.<p>There could absolutely be massive money to be made in doing good things for the environment, it is the people making money doing bad things for the environment who do their damndest to keep grasp on the wheel and subvert any attempt to make doing good things for the environment economically advantageous.<p>These people are virtually selling their children’s future for a few extra bucks today. The earth is going to be around for a long time yet. We should care about our children, grandchildren and so on.
We've gone so far past the "man plants tree whose shade he will never sit under" _almost_ universally. It's hard to see a way back, I know I'm doing my part, helping my struggling community/state. But it's hard work that's badly renumerated.<p>Maybe if we structured our economics around long term plans we wouldn't have such a mess.
Not sure why these bottom ones were downvoted. Look I like AI a lot. I'm using it to build the companies I dreamed about 5 years ago but didn't have time. Now I have a $20 codex account and have burned through 800 million tokens in a month (thanks Tibo for the resets!).<p>But just because I like AI doesn't mean I need to go with the crowd and downvote anything that threatens my livelihood. We can think of solutions instead of just reacting all the time.