31 ms·
> just about everything in modern life, from streaming Netflix to running a dishwasher, consumes water at levels that can be portrayed as wasteful by hair-shirt
by agentultra 27d ago
> just about everything in modern life, from streaming Netflix to running a dishwasher, consumes water at levels that can be portrayed as wasteful by hair-shirt environmentalists.
Ad-hominems in an Economist article. This reads more like an opinion piece than reporting. There are plenty of documented problems with water usage of data centres. Some can use it efficiently but it costs more to do so and many (most?) do not.
We are also in a time when most people would prefer to use that water for drinking, washing, cleaning… basically anything except data centres.
Don’t think many people are going to read this and think, “Gosh, I was a fool!”
- hypfer 27d agoEither I'm blind or it also doesn't say who wrote it. But it does offer AI narration.
- tolerance 27d agoIs this your first time reading The Economist?
- hbn 27d agoI see that they themselves call it "AI narration" Are we calling TTS "AI" now?
- goodmythical 27d agoHave you not noticed the proliferation of renaming every single machine learning algorithm as artifical intelligence? People have artificially intelligent vaccuums these days.
- dbdoug 27d agoFrom the Economist website: "ALL writers at The Economist are anonymous."
- hypfer 27d agoTIL
- colordrops 27d ago[dead]
- bloaf 27d agoIf people really cared about water usage, they'd be trying to shut down golf courses instead of data centers.
- agentultra 27d agoWhy not both?
- Onavo 27d agoTrue but not campaigning against golf courses make anti data center campaigns look hypocritical. My personal criticism of data centers is mostly regulatory failure. The tech companies are choosing random ass states and stealing land from poor farmers instead of the traditional data center states like Virginia mostly because of tax breaks. The local government is just as if not more responsible for the issues with data centers. It's easy however to just point fingers at big tech instead of he underlying market failures in a lot of the states. The traditional data center states almost always have a supply of clean energy and water with a proper regulatory framework.
- customguy 27d agoMight as well say you're a hypocrite for calling these people hypocrites but not others, and unless you criticize all things at the same time, which is impossible, it's all magically invalid.
- xboxnolifes 27d agoThere has been tons of reported frustration with golf courses in the past. So, yes, people have, and it's pretty consistent here as well.
- bloaf 27d agoI've not seen a single politician calling for statewide bans on golf courses. Its pretty obvious here that people decided datacenters were bad first, then went looking for justifications second.
- Gander5739 27d ago> This reads more like an opinion piece than reporting. That is the style of articles (interpretive analysis) that The Economist does.
- sanbor 27d agoUsing a dishwasher can be up to 5x more water-efficient than hand washing. Hand washing one load of dishes can use 20 gallons of water, whereas water- and energy-efficient dishwashers may use as little as four gallons.[1] [1]: https://www.kitchenaid.com/pinch-of-help/major-appliances/dishwasher-vs-hand-washing.html#:~:text=Using%20a%20dishwasher,as%20four%20gallons. https://www.kitchenaid.com/pinch-of-help/major-appliances/di...
- goodmythical 27d agoCan is doing an awful lot of heaving lifting there. Given that my sink cannot contain 20 gallons of water and that I do not even fill my sink full to do my dishes by hand, I cannot possibly be using 20 gallons of water to do my dishes when I do my dishes by hand.
- lostmsu 27d agoYou don't rinse them after washing?
- ndsipa_pomu 26d agoI don't apart from when I'm initially filling the washing up bowl and doing some cups and glasses. My theory is that the washing up water has less surface tension and thus runs off the crockery better when they're draining/drying.
- gruez 26d agoWhere does this leave us then? All the dishwashers include a rinse in their standard cycle, so should it be surprising that you can save water by cutting corners like not rinsing?
- ndsipa_pomu 26d agoDishwashing machines probably have more need to rinse the dishes as they are using more concentrated formulations. I don't know if it's safe to lick dishwasher tablets, but I hope it's safe to lick dishwashing liquid, though probably not very nice.
- bigbadfeline 27d ago> Ad-hominems in an Economist article. As expected - that source rarely publishes anything else. Here's another pearl [1], where they're rejoicing over the kettle's burned color. In both cases The Economist is totally blind about the economic foundations of the problems and there's no hint of a solution. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580174 America has a whopping debt. But Europe has the whopping debt problem
- westurner 27d ago> We are also in a time when most people would prefer to use that water for drinking, washing, cleaning… basically anything except data centres. That is not what is indicated by consumer behavior. Though it isn't healthiest, people prefer sugar water and so the sugar water companies have been able to afford to acquire water rights and they have driven up the cost of water. Drilling holes through aquifers and not capping them, over-grazing and over-tilling, and wasteful industry production processes have driven up the cost of water. Given a low-enough energy cost and basically unlimited salt water from the oceans, we shouldn't be out of water. There should not be coastal water scarcity. Golf course, chip factory, almonds, fracking, lawns, swimming pools, or purple pipe golf course water?
- westurner 27d ago> We need to use AI to redevelop AI datacenters in order to cancel the harms. This is worth money. It is worth a lot of money to solve the AI data center sustainability problem. And, solving the AI datacenter sustainability would preserve the AI value multiplier in other sustainable process redesign efforts. > We need to use AI to solve for global warming. It's actually imperative; "Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576124#49578556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576124#49578556
- agentultra 27d agoWe already know how to solve for climate change. All that is lacking is political will. Not AI.
- westurner 25d agoWell, perhaps a thought experiment about this then: - One person lives in a world where people have applied AI (the smartest tech we have) to solving for datacenter impact and broader climate change objectives. - The other lives in a world where they use AI to expensively generate infotainment videos (and for example statements about lack of political will) but not solutions that solve for cost and sustainability.
- piloto_ciego 27d ago> We are also in a time when most people would prefer to use that water for drinking, washing, cleaning… basically anything except data centres. And those people are stupid or to be charitable "ignorant." Full stop. I'm not trying to be an ass here, I mean it genuinely. Those people are ignorant at best. Email runs on datacenters, Google runs on datacenters, netflix needs them. Delta airlines uses data centers to route flights and host their massive amounts of data (and so do all the other operations out there). The NWS is using super computers (and big data) to predict the weather. The good, the bad, everything runs on giant clusters of data centers, compute, and power. How many datacenters host the most popular steam games and movies? Indeed, the very message of "Data Center BAD!" is hosted on data centers. You think this wild anti-progress ideology could exist in a world without them? Of course not. Our modern life is enabled by these damn near miraculous technical tools and the people screaming about water or anything else are seldom against the things that they like. Plenty of people shit-talk data centers then go fly to Paris on vacation. Plenty of the same people water their lawns and drive to work when they could walk. In my experience, "DATA BAD" is just code for "AI BAD" - they're really against AI. You talk to these people, and the same thing always comes up, "well, AI is bad for artists" or "AI is going to take over all the jobs" or something along those lines. It's always some scifi fueled Yudkowskian fever dream or fear of losing their jobs or "Elon/Bezos/Gates/Whoever = BAD!" Very little of it is based in any sort of actual evaluation of the world. And I'm not necessarily arguing with them on these guys being jackasses. But the world is not just a black and white thing typically, and the complaints about all of these changes (and that's what all this is, a fear of the new and complaints about change) are reactionary grasps yearning for a prior era. It's terminally (and ironically) online people complaining that they can no longer find meaning in an increasingly competitive work place. It's fear! I've now seen this with many people I know. I've seen this in a huge amount of online spaces. I've seen it in the real world. This is "millenials getting conservative but not realizing it." It's people being afraid of change. Watching the biggest pirates I've known suddenly talk about "defending artists" and strengthening copyright is amusing, but it points to a bigger problem. People being unwilling or unable to adjust to change and it is at it's core a conservative mindset despite the liberal (not leftist mind you) costume it wears. Logic and reason aren't going to convince these folks of anything, they didn't get to their views with logic, they're not going to logic their way out of them. It's modern liberalism's version of climate denial, and it's literally a reactionary way of viewing the world. To your point, very few of these people are likely to read the economist and think "whoa, I was wrong." You're spot on there - but I also don't think that people know where their water comes from, their food comes from, their power comes from, their Net Flix comes from, their medication comes from, or really anything else. They're thinking "I DON'T LIKE X, X NEEDS Y, THEREFORE Y BAD!" That's it typically. The radical leftist position should be "seizing the means of computation" and "man the barricades, this is OUR data center now!" Not, "WE NEED BETTER LAWS TO PROTECT PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE SPACE OF IDEAS TO PROTECT JOBS MAKING LOGOS AND WRITING AD COPY!" This is millenials getting older and confusing reactionary nostalgia for "a better world."
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 27d agoCompare data centers to golf courses. But many people like golf courses Compare data centers to refrigerators. But almost everyone likes refrigerators Compare data centers to dishwashers. But many people like dishwashers Compare data centers to almond trees. But many people like almonds It goes on and on If people really liked "AI" the way they like golf, refrigerators, dishwashers, almonds, etc., then data centers might be an easier sell I don't think this opposition to data centers is "environmentalism", it has too much broad support. I think this is simply lack of enthusiasm for "AI". Silicon Valley and Redmond can effectively force people to use certain software but cannot make people like it This third era of "AI" is probably going to end like the last two; reality will ensure this Arguments for or against notwithstanding
- zzo38computer 27d agoPeople have managed (and sometimes do manage) to do without golf courses and refrigerators and dishwashers and cars (and roads for cars) etc, and should learn to be able to manage to do without such things, for multiple reasons.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 27d agoPerhaps people can manage to do without "AI" data centres Generations of them already know how
- keeda 27d ago> There are plenty of documented problems with water usage of data centres. I would not be so sure, this article seems pretty comprehensive in questioning these supposed problems: https://andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake/ https://andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake/ I agree that the growth of new data centers could be problematic in some areas especially as the infra build-out ramps up. But as many sibbling comments imply, that water can be put to much more economically valuable tasks in data centers than other, drastically more water-hungry uses like golf courses.
- isolay 27d ago> Ad-hominems The title already gives it away, calling it a “moral panic”. Casting your opponents as some sort of brain-damaged cranks is such a tired trope.