If you are following the growing artificial intelligence industry at all, you’ve probably come across some facts and figures about how AI is going to use up all of the country’s water, while also using up all the power and causing prices to spike for regular non-AI using humans, and also that the giant data centers required for this industry are taking over all the usable land, and will cause pollution to soar, and/or lead to a wide range of other negative societal effects.
Handwaving the resource use of AI because it's less than the resources used in agriculture and cities doesn't seem like much of an argument. Civilisation's base function is feeding and housing humans, so you could justify just about anything with that logic.
I'm just saying that we as a society decide that certain things are worth expanding resources on, and we have done so with golf and almonds, both of which have arguably much less social utility than AI
True, though I think the general public's experience of AI so far - i.e. the proportion that appears socially useful vs. the proportion that appears socially harmful - makes the worth of that resource expenditure look much lower.
I mean, you could say the same thing about golf, or almonds. And yet we spend billions more in energy on those (not to mention methanol production) and no one seems troubled by it. Also, AI is already being used to save people's lives by detecting cancer earlier, etc. so definitely better than golf.
Are you familiar with the Ultrasound coming from these places making people sick? I t doesn’t sound good. Seems to be a recently discovered issue since people can’t actually hear the sound frequencies, perhaps an overlooked problem. I have not seen much on it other than this:https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?si=SuezYwEg6_chaykH
I have read about some of these complaints, which appear to be about what's often called "infrasound," or low-level vibrations, but engineers who specialize in things like wind farms say the levels that the HVAC etc in data centers produce would not cause detectable health issues.
Handwaving the resource use of AI because it's less than the resources used in agriculture and cities doesn't seem like much of an argument. Civilisation's base function is feeding and housing humans, so you could justify just about anything with that logic.
I'm just saying that we as a society decide that certain things are worth expanding resources on, and we have done so with golf and almonds, both of which have arguably much less social utility than AI
True, though I think the general public's experience of AI so far - i.e. the proportion that appears socially useful vs. the proportion that appears socially harmful - makes the worth of that resource expenditure look much lower.
They are wildly energy consumptive while providing almost nothing of social value. No bad science in that.
I mean, you could say the same thing about golf, or almonds. And yet we spend billions more in energy on those (not to mention methanol production) and no one seems troubled by it. Also, AI is already being used to save people's lives by detecting cancer earlier, etc. so definitely better than golf.
Are you familiar with the Ultrasound coming from these places making people sick? I t doesn’t sound good. Seems to be a recently discovered issue since people can’t actually hear the sound frequencies, perhaps an overlooked problem. I have not seen much on it other than this:https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?si=SuezYwEg6_chaykH
I have read about some of these complaints, which appear to be about what's often called "infrasound," or low-level vibrations, but engineers who specialize in things like wind farms say the levels that the HVAC etc in data centers produce would not cause detectable health issues.