This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
I don't think this criticism is very well thought out. There's ample evidence at this point that we are sliding precipitously toward environmental catastrophe and, no, the massive data center build out to support people generating slop illustrations and build toy theorem provers is not helping.
We're not just sliding towards environmental catastrophe — we're deep into it! Ocean acidification is killing corals, we just had the hottest month in recorded history, mass refugee movements from climate disasters are fueling xenophobia and warfare in many parts of the world, and the rate of species extinction keeps increasing, as it has for decades. Extinct species are irreparable environmental damage; they're gone forever.
However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts. Goldman Sachs's projection in <a href="https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-center-power-demand-projected-to-double-by-2027" rel="nofollow">https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-cente... is that by the end of next year US data center power demand will have increased from 31GW to 66GW, roughly 17GW per year. The EIA says <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 that the US uses about 95 quadrillion Btu per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units). That's 3200 gigawatts. So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%. 99% of the US's energy use is due to non-data-center causes.
And direct energy use is a way in which data centers have an especially large environmental impact. Their other potential impacts, such as cement production, sewage, parking lots, commuters driving to them, and freshwater consumption, are much less than that 1%.
Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does. All of China's net new energy production is coming from renewable energy — they're shutting down coal plants faster than they're building new ones, and they're decommissioning gasoline-powered vehicles faster than they're selling new ones. A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there — a much higher rate than for China overall, but even for the whole country, it's over 50% of new cars.
AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
> A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there
Can that be true?
I've read at some point at which speed on average the sound of tires on tarmac will be louder than the sound of an engine, and it was a surprisingly low speed. I don't recall the exact number, but I remember that it was below the average in-city traffic speed (save stop-and-go averages).
This definitely matches my real-world experience. I can't usually make out engine sounds in passing traffic, because the tire noise is so freaking loud. I certainly couldn't blindly tell electric from ICE by sound of a passing vehicle at, say, 40 or 50 km/h.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
voidhorse · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think this criticism is very well thought out. There's ample evidence at this point that we are sliding precipitously toward environmental catastrophe and, no, the massive data center build out to support people generating slop illustrations and build toy theorem provers is not helping.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
However, this is not because of massive data center buildouts. Goldman Sachs's projection in <a href="https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-center-power-demand-projected-to-double-by-2027" rel="nofollow">https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-cente... is that by the end of next year US data center power demand will have increased from 31GW to 66GW, roughly 17GW per year. The EIA says <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 that the US uses about 95 quadrillion Btu per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units). That's 3200 gigawatts. So the US's data centers are currently using 1% of the US's energy and adding ½% per year, so that in 02027 that number increases to 2%. 99% of the US's energy use is due to non-data-center causes.
And direct energy use is a way in which data centers have an especially large environmental impact. Their other potential impacts, such as cement production, sewage, parking lots, commuters driving to them, and freshwater consumption, are much less than that 1%.
Energy use, by the way, doesn't damage the environment. Burning fossil fuels does. All of China's net new energy production is coming from renewable energy — they're shutting down coal plants faster than they're building new ones, and they're decommissioning gasoline-powered vehicles faster than they're selling new ones. A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there — a much higher rate than for China overall, but even for the whole country, it's over 50% of new cars.
AI might turn out to be a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, but at least for the next decade or two, that won't be because of datacenter buildouts, which are an utterly insignificant fraction of its effect.
Anamon · · focus · HN ↗
Can that be true?
I've read at some point at which speed on average the sound of tires on tarmac will be louder than the sound of an engine, and it was a surprisingly low speed. I don't recall the exact number, but I remember that it was below the average in-city traffic speed (save stop-and-go averages).
This definitely matches my real-world experience. I can't usually make out engine sounds in passing traffic, because the tire noise is so freaking loud. I certainly couldn't blindly tell electric from ICE by sound of a passing vehicle at, say, 40 or 50 km/h.