Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It’s not like you can train someone who’s a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over…
But it should be pretty obvious that you can’t run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can’t buy groceries, groceries don’t sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can’t afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…
Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?
You’re missing or ignoring my point. If the energy is provided by carbon neutral sources, then the amount used is irrelevant. That should be our goal. And I don’t know where you’re getting the notion that water resources are " boiled dry" or that gpu heat has any meaningful impact on the climate, but those aren’t actual issues.
And for the record, I’m not defending LLMs or generative images here. That bubble would be better off bursting, but the energy use isn’t why. Hell, it may be the only good aspect of the whole thing. With MS booting up old nuclear reactors, maybe it will revitalize interest so can make some use of that technology.
Energy is zero sum. If you’re throwing away carbon neutral energy you could instead use that energy to displace consumption of energy that would otherwise be produced by coal or whatnot.
Furthermore, many of these data centers use evaporative cooling as opposed to a sealed system and water indeed goes right out and into the atmosphere. There are limitless articles discussing this and the footprint
Edit: I should add that the whole zero sum aspect of energy is why things that ‘scrub carbon’ are a pipe dream. That stuff often requires so much energy to produce that, even if it were made from solar or whatever, there’s always a more positive impact simply by taking that energy and using it to reduce energy production that emits all the carbon in the first place. Consumption is still the crux of the problem at this point and to look at anything that requires gobs of energy and uses clean energy as some insular thing that is separate from things that use dirty energy is not a good way to look at things