You can care about the environment and also think some arguments in favor of your position are bullshit. I didn’t flag it, but I left a critical comment elsewhere explaining why I think it’s bullshit.
Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?
Everything has a downside attached. Most things are terrible 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.
However, if you're only 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?"
That could still be a no for AI, but there are things we ought to stop doing long 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.
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.
A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage.
So you’re right that we have far better options to tackle before we even start worrying about AI.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Netflix and YouTube probably are orders of magnitude less than the alternative of driving to plays and movie theaters.
This ignores that no one drives to a movie theatre or play every day or even several times a day but this is a common usage pattern for Netflix or that Netflix is not really an alternative to these activities but just another form of entertainment piled on top.
Okay, but this summary of the UN report is emphatically not "only looking at the downside". From the piece:
"“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.”"
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."
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."
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."
The report itself praises AI even more, calling it "a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems", along with an overview of its transformational benefits.
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.
>Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?
Don't threaten my communist soul with a good time.
>Everything has a downside attached.
Yes. Let's regulate that, please.
>The point is never "Let's stop this because it's bad for the planet", but "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"
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.
> but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI.
Sure, let's get to it. As well as with AI at the same time.
> if you're only looking at the downside then you're being dishonest. (...) "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"
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.
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.
Weird take.
> That could still be a no for AI, but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI.
Hard to have that discussion if these are the responses.
It’s not about issues unaddressed, it’s more that if you ignore your son on a device 24/7 but then freak out when he goes to YouTube because screentime is bad, he might reasonably conclude from your actions that you don’t actually care about screentime, you just hate YouTube. And maybe YouTube is worth hating, but at least be honest about your reasoning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
From an environmental perspective we should ban golf and use the land for literally anything else*.
> The environmental impact of keeping a huge amount of land watered so a few thousand people can bat their balls around is ongoing.
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.
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.
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.
Golf courses at least trap some carbon by growing grass. It's almost bitterly funny in comparison.
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.
If someone has more precise resources or information which they can point me to, I'd love to update my knowledge.
Also, this doesn't negate CO2 emissions of these plants.
The title is incredibly misleading. AI is not using anything that would go towards the “billions” presented in the article. So unless they are proposing moving the billions to North America in lieu of building datacenters then I don’t see a valid argument.
Is it possibly excessive? Yes. But this is insane hyperbole.
Of course that's how you get attention, I guess. Rational discourse is ignored. To get people to pay attention you have to make everything extreme and stupid.
It's dumb and feels astroturfed. My pet speculation: existing data center owners want to prevent more data center construction to boost the value of their assets.
I ran some numbers on energy use a while back. In general: if you skip one 20 mile drive, you make up for heavy use of e.g. Claude Code for a week.
So telework one day and you're making up for your AI use.
If AI is using too much water, it means the data centers are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll magically discover ways to reduce water consumption.
The Texas natural gas mega-data-center story: that's a political problem. Tax carbon emissions and they'll suddenly realize they can power it better with solar, wind, or nuclear power. I'd also speculate that Texas made gas power a contingency to build it, since fossil fuels own Texas.
total human resouce extraction and use counting water and air and soil use is over 1 trillion tons per anum, mining and construction make up 100 billion tons of that.
These rates are rising, and are starting have negative climate and ecological effects for every place ,person and creature on earth.
Life span averages for the whole planet may still be edging up,but have plateaud for developed countrys, and financial inequity is rising faster than the worlds gdp.
So either AI changes that trend imediatly, or it is just more shit.
Their estimated water usage by AI data centers for 2030 is about 9.8 trillion liters. The global almond crop is estimated to use ~8 trillion liters. So I vote we just ban almonds. Problem solved!
Also, I find the framing of water usage in terms of “the water needs of Sub-Saharan Africans” to be manipulative and misleading. It appears they just picked a poor part of the world where per capita water usage is very low, so they could make it sound as bad as possible. But virtually none of these data centers will have a deleterious effect on water availability for those people.
Alternative headline: “Despite massive growth globally, AI is projected to only use about a third as much water in 2030 as Turkmenistan”
(~28 trillion liters, mostly to grow cotton in the desert).
Or here’s another fun one: the entire annual global water usage of all of AI in 2030, including the water needed to generate all the power for AI, is about what golf courses use daily.
Or alfalfa, which uses ~6 trillion liters per year in California alone. Essentially none of it is eaten by humans, and a large fraction gets exported to China and Japan to feed livestock there.
I'm pretty sure if we had an actually vote between banning AI data centers and banning almond farming, one would win by a landslide. I'm actually confident that if some hypothetical community had absolutely no water or energy problems they would vote against having the AI data center built.
Humans need to eat. Humans don't need AI. We're consuming too much in general and this speculative bubble is making consumption skyrocket with questionable gains for humanity.
The report seems genuinely dishonest. Every technology has its downside. The report complains about e-waste and mineral mining. Hasn't that been an issue since decades?
If they truly wanted to have an honest discussion, they would have outline both the advantages and disadvantages and start a genuinely balanced public debate. The report is more like a doomsday fear-mongering for a lack of better words propaganda.
The sad part is that reputed organizations like UN does this kind of things, it just reduce the trust of public in these orgs even more.
It has been an issue for decades. So what? It isn't like ignoring the topic will make it go away.
The report I read does outline the advantages, starting off in the executive summary, after the AI-generate image, with:
"Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems. AI systems that learn, perceive, reason, and generate content are now embedded across economies and daily lives, supporting services from translation and recommendations to finance, healthcare, energy management, and transportation."
It later says:
"""... AI enables tasks ranging from data processing and translation to diagnosis, forecasting, and
autonomous decision-making. Today, AI can analyze massive datasets in seconds, translate languages, detect diseases from medical scans, forecast climate trends, and power everything from personalized
recommendations to self-driving cars.
By executing complex operations at speeds and scales far beyond human capacity, AI is more than just a technological tool—it is a transformative force. It is reshaping economies, redefining labor, and influencing how societies interact with technology and with the planet. As AI’s influence accelerates, so too does the urgency to understand its full impact: not only the promise it offers, but also the profound challenges it raises.
AI is a powerful driver of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)1, or Industry 4.0—a global
transformation marked by the convergence of digital, physical, and biological systems. Propelled by rapid advances in everything from AI and robotics to cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), this revolution is reconfiguring how people live, work, and are governed. Yet while much attention has been given to AI’s capabilities and risks, including bias, misinformation, and automation leading to loss of jobs, far less focus has been placed on AI’s environmental impact.
... The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 was nothing short of a technological shockwave. ... Once a niche technology, AI is now woven into daily life, powering much of the digital world, including voice assistants, search engines, recommendation systems, smart energy meters, and smartphones. The influence of AI is transforming how people work, communicate, access information, and consume services. ... AI is employed in diagnostics, medical imaging, and patient risk prediction—improving speed and precision of care, while reducing treatment costs. ... AI helps forecast demand, manage power grids, and integrate renewable sources into power networks. ... AI is also revolutionizing transportation and mobility."""
Could you clarify how that's not a good outline of the advantages, and elaborate what specifically you think is fear-mongering?
What in this report is making your reduce your trust in UN?
Well not for any reason given in that Wikipedia link because it's about something else entirely.
But humans have driven multiple species to extinction and destroyed pretty much all their natural predators. They didn't do that by being stronger or faster or having bigger teeth and claws. They did it by being smarter than the dumb animals.
So it's clearly and obviously a terrible idea to create something smarter than us, in case we get the same treatment.
AI isn't smarter than humans. That's a grossly inaccurate statement. It consumes an obscene amount of resources to replace tedious human tasks in a mediocre way. It's stridently average, but not scalably average.
Really sad and telling to see this flagged. HN doesn't care about the environment.
You can care about the environment and also think some arguments in favor of your position are bullshit. I didn’t flag it, but I left a critical comment elsewhere explaining why I think it’s bullshit.
Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?
Everything has a downside attached. Most things are terrible 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.
However, if you're only 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?"
That could still be a no for AI, but there are things we ought to stop doing long 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.
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.
A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage.
So you’re right that we have far better options to tackle before we even start worrying about AI.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Netflix and YouTube probably are orders of magnitude less than the alternative of driving to plays and movie theaters.
This ignores that no one drives to a movie theatre or play every day or even several times a day but this is a common usage pattern for Netflix or that Netflix is not really an alternative to these activities but just another form of entertainment piled on top.
Netflix is an alternative to movie theaters
Okay, but this summary of the UN report is emphatically not "only looking at the downside". From the piece:
"“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.”"
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."
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."
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."
The report itself praises AI even more, calling it "a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems", along with an overview of its transformational benefits.
this is a poor argument
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.
>Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?
Don't threaten my communist soul with a good time.
>Everything has a downside attached.
Yes. Let's regulate that, please.
>The point is never "Let's stop this because it's bad for the planet", but "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"
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.
> but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI.
Sure, let's get to it. As well as with AI at the same time.
> if you're only looking at the downside then you're being dishonest. (...) "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"
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.
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.
Weird take.
> That could still be a no for AI, but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI.
Hard to have that discussion if these are the responses.
It’s not about issues unaddressed, it’s more that if you ignore your son on a device 24/7 but then freak out when he goes to YouTube because screentime is bad, he might reasonably conclude from your actions that you don’t actually care about screentime, you just hate YouTube. And maybe YouTube is worth hating, but at least be honest about your reasoning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
From an environmental perspective we should ban golf and use the land for literally anything else*.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
Golf courses at least trap some carbon by growing grass. It's almost bitterly funny in comparison.
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.
If someone has more precise resources or information which they can point me to, I'd love to update my knowledge.
Also, this doesn't negate CO2 emissions of these plants.
Fertiliser and pesticide runoff from golf courses into water systems is a well known environmental issue.
Where I live it can rain hundreds of days a year and the nearest course had browning greens last time I drove by.
Well, extremely large US models trained all-year will way too much money, yes. Not models like Mistral, they consume way less resources.
That explains why miserable mistral is a pile of garbage
The title is incredibly misleading. AI is not using anything that would go towards the “billions” presented in the article. So unless they are proposing moving the billions to North America in lieu of building datacenters then I don’t see a valid argument.
I challenge people to look at some numbers here.
Is it possibly excessive? Yes. But this is insane hyperbole.
Of course that's how you get attention, I guess. Rational discourse is ignored. To get people to pay attention you have to make everything extreme and stupid.
Thinking AI is particularly bad (or even that large) compared to other uses of water, electricity, and land is the real AI psychosis.
It's dumb and feels astroturfed. My pet speculation: existing data center owners want to prevent more data center construction to boost the value of their assets.
I ran some numbers on energy use a while back. In general: if you skip one 20 mile drive, you make up for heavy use of e.g. Claude Code for a week.
So telework one day and you're making up for your AI use.
If AI is using too much water, it means the data centers are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll magically discover ways to reduce water consumption.
The Texas natural gas mega-data-center story: that's a political problem. Tax carbon emissions and they'll suddenly realize they can power it better with solar, wind, or nuclear power. I'd also speculate that Texas made gas power a contingency to build it, since fossil fuels own Texas.
total human resouce extraction and use counting water and air and soil use is over 1 trillion tons per anum, mining and construction make up 100 billion tons of that. These rates are rising, and are starting have negative climate and ecological effects for every place ,person and creature on earth. Life span averages for the whole planet may still be edging up,but have plateaud for developed countrys, and financial inequity is rising faster than the worlds gdp. So either AI changes that trend imediatly, or it is just more shit.
Their estimated water usage by AI data centers for 2030 is about 9.8 trillion liters. The global almond crop is estimated to use ~8 trillion liters. So I vote we just ban almonds. Problem solved!
Also, I find the framing of water usage in terms of “the water needs of Sub-Saharan Africans” to be manipulative and misleading. It appears they just picked a poor part of the world where per capita water usage is very low, so they could make it sound as bad as possible. But virtually none of these data centers will have a deleterious effect on water availability for those people.
Alternative headline: “Despite massive growth globally, AI is projected to only use about a third as much water in 2030 as Turkmenistan”
(~28 trillion liters, mostly to grow cotton in the desert).
Or here’s another fun one: the entire annual global water usage of all of AI in 2030, including the water needed to generate all the power for AI, is about what golf courses use daily.
So dumb.
Or alfalfa, which uses ~6 trillion liters per year in California alone. Essentially none of it is eaten by humans, and a large fraction gets exported to China and Japan to feed livestock there.
We can do two things: limit almond farming and limit AI water usage.
> So I vote we just ban almonds. Problem solved!
I'm pretty sure if we had an actually vote between banning AI data centers and banning almond farming, one would win by a landslide. I'm actually confident that if some hypothetical community had absolutely no water or energy problems they would vote against having the AI data center built.
Humans need to eat. Humans don't need AI. We're consuming too much in general and this speculative bubble is making consumption skyrocket with questionable gains for humanity.
> questionable gains for humanity.
how do you know that?
Humans don’t need to eat almonds.
I would trade every single token predictor in the world for a single almond.
Almonds are tasty. AI on the other hand….
Then feel free to lobby for a data center in your community; and then let me know how your tap water is.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but does the waste water from almond farms come out as toxic and hazardous for where they eventually end up in?
[flagged]
The report seems genuinely dishonest. Every technology has its downside. The report complains about e-waste and mineral mining. Hasn't that been an issue since decades?
If they truly wanted to have an honest discussion, they would have outline both the advantages and disadvantages and start a genuinely balanced public debate. The report is more like a doomsday fear-mongering for a lack of better words propaganda.
The sad part is that reputed organizations like UN does this kind of things, it just reduce the trust of public in these orgs even more.
It has been an issue for decades. So what? It isn't like ignoring the topic will make it go away.
The report I read does outline the advantages, starting off in the executive summary, after the AI-generate image, with:
"Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems. AI systems that learn, perceive, reason, and generate content are now embedded across economies and daily lives, supporting services from translation and recommendations to finance, healthcare, energy management, and transportation."
It later says:
"""... AI enables tasks ranging from data processing and translation to diagnosis, forecasting, and autonomous decision-making. Today, AI can analyze massive datasets in seconds, translate languages, detect diseases from medical scans, forecast climate trends, and power everything from personalized recommendations to self-driving cars.
By executing complex operations at speeds and scales far beyond human capacity, AI is more than just a technological tool—it is a transformative force. It is reshaping economies, redefining labor, and influencing how societies interact with technology and with the planet. As AI’s influence accelerates, so too does the urgency to understand its full impact: not only the promise it offers, but also the profound challenges it raises.
AI is a powerful driver of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)1, or Industry 4.0—a global transformation marked by the convergence of digital, physical, and biological systems. Propelled by rapid advances in everything from AI and robotics to cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), this revolution is reconfiguring how people live, work, and are governed. Yet while much attention has been given to AI’s capabilities and risks, including bias, misinformation, and automation leading to loss of jobs, far less focus has been placed on AI’s environmental impact.
... The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 was nothing short of a technological shockwave. ... Once a niche technology, AI is now woven into daily life, powering much of the digital world, including voice assistants, search engines, recommendation systems, smart energy meters, and smartphones. The influence of AI is transforming how people work, communicate, access information, and consume services. ... AI is employed in diagnostics, medical imaging, and patient risk prediction—improving speed and precision of care, while reducing treatment costs. ... AI helps forecast demand, manage power grids, and integrate renewable sources into power networks. ... AI is also revolutionizing transportation and mobility."""
Could you clarify how that's not a good outline of the advantages, and elaborate what specifically you think is fear-mongering?
What in this report is making your reduce your trust in UN?
AI presents an existential threat to the continued existence of Homo sapiens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_crisis
How so?
Well not for any reason given in that Wikipedia link because it's about something else entirely.
But humans have driven multiple species to extinction and destroyed pretty much all their natural predators. They didn't do that by being stronger or faster or having bigger teeth and claws. They did it by being smarter than the dumb animals.
So it's clearly and obviously a terrible idea to create something smarter than us, in case we get the same treatment.
AI isn't smarter than humans. That's a grossly inaccurate statement. It consumes an obscene amount of resources to replace tedious human tasks in a mediocre way. It's stridently average, but not scalably average.
It rather obviously is. It can converse on a thousand topics, in 20 different languages, and produce poetry and song off the cuff.
You just think that because it doesn't know about your tiny little niche in as much detail as you, that makes you smarter.
If I gave a general knowledge test to an AI vs you, who would win?