Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production, either. Your example would be even more extreme if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle. Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year in the US.
The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years.
Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.
>Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use.
If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)
Yes, that's roughly what I said in my post. If we're doing a controlled economy and triaging for the health of the ecosystem, we'd start with feed for cattle, and almonds wouldn't be much further down on the list.
The contention with AI water use is that something like this is currently happening as local water supplies are being diverted for data-centers.
People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that doesn't really help the counter-argument.
Aren't Californian almonds like 80% of the world's production?
Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ?
I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples.
Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have cloud AI compute. It's personal, but I'd be more sad that I'd never get to experience the taste of an almond and all the cuisine that comes with it.
> Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT
You've misread it. It's not compared to AI datacenters, it's every type of datacenter, for all types of computing.
In the future scenario you've laid out it wouldn't be cloud AI compute. You wouldn't be able to use HN or send email or pay with a credit card or play video games or stream video.
AI has way more utility than you are claiming and less utility than Sam Altman and the market would like us to believe. It’s okay to have a nuanced take.
I'm more unhappy than happy, as there are plenty of points about the very real bad side of AI that are hurt by such delusional and/or disingenuous arguments.
That is, the topic is not one where I have already picked a side that I'd like to win by any means necessary. It's one where I think there are legitimate tradeoffs, and I want the strongest arguments on both sides to be heard so we get the best possible policies in the end.
If AI is so useful, we should have a ton of data showing an increase in productivity across many fields. GDP should be skyrocketing. We haven’t seen any of this, and every time a study is conducted, it’s determined that AI is modestly useful at best.
Well, I don't like marzipan, so both are useless? Or maybe different people find uses/utility from different things, what is trash for one person can be life saving for another, or just "better than not having it" (like you and Marzipan it seems).
ok in that case you don't need to pick on water in particular, if it has no utility at all then literally any resource use is too much, so why bother insisting that water in particular is a problem? It's pretty energy intensive, eg.
AI has no utility _for you_ because you live in this bubble where you are so rabidly against it you will never allow yourself to acknowledge it has non-zero utility.
What does it mean to “use” water? In agriculture and in data centers my understanding is that water will go back to the sky and then rain down again. It’s not gone, so at most we’re losing the energy cost to process that water.
The problem is that you take the water from the ground, and you let it evaporate, and then it returns to... Well to various places, including the ground, but the deeper you take the water from (drinking water can't be taken from the surface, and for technological reasons drinking water is used too) the more time it takes to replenish the aquifer - up to thousands of years!
Of course surface water availability can also be a serious problem.
No it’s largely the same situation I think. I was drawing a distinction between agricultural use and maybe some more heavy industrial uses while the water is polluted or otherwise rendered permanently unfit for other uses.
Other people might have other preferences. Maybe we could have a price system where people can express their preferences by paying for things with money, providing more money to the product which is in greater demand?
Sure.. Except some people / companies have so much more money, they can demand impractical things and pay above-market rates for them, causing all others to scramble to live day-to-day with the distorted market.
Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people - than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.
The water intensity of American food production would be substantially less if we gave up on frivolous things like beef, which requires water vastly out of proportion to its utility. If the water numbers for datacenters seem scary then the water use numbers for the average American's beef consumption is apocalyptic.
Whether people would switch off meat on their own is a separate issue. If water became scarce enough to start moving the price, then you'd absolutely see people eat less meat.
But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.
Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.
I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.
While I agree, the "meat is not sustainable" argument is literal, and evidenced in beef prices rising as beef consumption lowers over the past years. Beef is moving along the spectrum from having had been a "staple" to increasingly being a luxury.
The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.
That depends how sentient a chicken is: their brains are of similar complexity to the larger of these models, counting params as synapses.
Also, while I'm vegetarian going on vegan, welfare arguments are obviously not relevant in response to an assertation that Americans aren't going to give up meat, because if animal welfare was relevant then Americans would give up meat.
> I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.
I don't see any signs that the US is going to give up on AI and data centers, either. (The coming AI winter notwithstanding)
For what it's worth, I've cut back quite a bit on my beef and pork consumption, and now mostly eat chicken. The environmental and ethical arguments finally got to me.
> Corn, potatoes and wheat are important maybe even oranges, but we could live with a lot less alfalfa and almonds.
Both alfalfa and almonds contain a lot of nutrients you dont find in large enough amounts (or at all) in corn and potatoes though. And alfalfa improves the soil but fixating nitrogen. Sure almonds require large amounts of water. Maybe alfalfa does as well? And of course it depends on if they are grown for human consumption or animal.
Water usage largely depends on the context, if the water source is sustainable, and if it is freshwater.
Of course water used up will eventually evaporate, and produce rainfall in the water cycle, but unfortunately at many places "fossil" water is used up, or more water used in an area then the watershed can sustainably support.
This is a constant source of miscommunication about water usage, and that of agriculture also. It is very different to talk about the water needs to raise a cow in eg. Colorado and in Scotish highlands, but this is usually removed from the picture.
The same context should be considered for datacenters.
