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AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions
- josefritzishere 2mo agoAI presents an existential threat to the continued existence of Homo sapiens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_crisis
- senordevnyc 2mo agoHow so?
- onraglanroad 2mo agoWell 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.
- josefritzishere 2mo agoAI 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.
- onraglanroad 2mo agoIt 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?
- Geezus_42 2mo agoIt can string together enough words to male mid poetry and sounds to make mid music. It has no creative ability, it is literally a mathematical system that guesses what is most likely to be the correct next token based on averages from its training data. It it physically incapable of creating anything that is not already in the training data.
- onion2k 2mo agoNow 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.
- rogerrogerr 2mo agoGolf 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.
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- onion2k 2mo agoNot 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.
- galleywest200 2mo agoWhere I live it can rain hundreds of days a year and the nearest course had browning greens last time I drove by.
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- ancorevard 2mo ago[flagged]
- senordevnyc 2mo ago[flagged]
- galleywest200 2mo agoWe can do two things: limit almond farming and limit AI water usage.
- goda90 2mo agoHumans 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.
- senordevnyc 2mo agoHumans don’t need to eat almonds.
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- solid_fuel 2mo agoI would trade every single token predictor in the world for a single almond.
- sajithdilshan 2mo ago> questionable gains for humanity. how do you know that?
- sanp 2mo agoAlmonds are tasty. AI on the other hand….
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- sajithdilshan 2mo agoThe 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.
- eesmith 2mo agoIt 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?
- maelito 2mo agoWell, extremely large US models trained all-year will way too much money, yes. Not models like Mistral, they consume way less resources.
- sajithdilshan 2mo agoThat explains why miserable mistral is a pile of garbage
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- throwthrowuknow 2mo agoThe 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.
- api 2mo agoI 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.
- xnx 2mo agoThinking AI is particularly bad (or even that large) compared to other uses of water, electricity, and land is the real AI psychosis.
- api 2mo agoIt'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.
- Geezus_42 2mo agoThere's also tons of natural gas in Texas that either gets vented directly to atmosphere during oil drilling because its not economical to ship to where it can be sold, so provides no benefit to shareholder value.
- NietzscheanNull 2mo agoThis is either completely misinformed or disingenuous. Texas just had to freeze all data center development pending audits because their energy supplier (ERCOT) reported that it had received data center load requests totaling 474 gigawatts. That figure represents ~40% of extant grid capacity for the entire country in just a single state. edit: I'd also add that historically, power generation has accounted for 4% of all water consumption in Texas. The highest recorded load demand on the ERCOT grid, to date, is ~87.5 GW. Scaling generation capacity by 500% is not possible to achieve within a short-term time frame, but even if it were, the water demand of the additional generation sites would completely drain many critical aquifers and result in skyrocketing water rates for citizens of a state already suffering terrible droughts regularly.
- metalman 2mo agototal 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.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoReally sad and telling to see this flagged. HN doesn't care about the environment.
- senordevnyc 2mo agoYou 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.
- gorpy7 2mo agoi’ve noticed in the last month that HN discourse has improved- which i’m super glad for. this thread is a good example of lots of you seeing thru the hyperbole/rhetoric! one of the remaining errors that people make is sort of assuming ai as it is today or even last year is what ai will be 5 years from now. well, it’s going to get a whole lot better and i’m curious to see what that will enable. and although there is lots of fear about how the owners of the models will steer peoples’ world view, i see more of the basal views improving dramatically. what i mean is, people are educating themselves on fundamentals more efficiently and cutting through a lot of the bull that would otherwise lead them to scam or hype or… driven decisions. every once in a while i watch daytime tv and get blown away by the drivel and think, who would watch/be moved by this! that part of our society needs to die fast but it’s still here- it’s sort of forgotten, at least to me, but it probably is more impactful than we’d like to believe. so i’m encouraged by sort of what i would call death to bull and a cleaner path to decently synthesized knowledge. on the top end, it’s the enablement of dreams where previously a business is paperwork not the actual business of making and improving the sold product or experience. i look forward to seeing what people who are newly enabled will bring to the world.