Seems like over the last week everyone in this community is talking about how the real reason AI is bad is because it is destroying the planet. Does this even matter though? AI is bad for so many other reasons. It’s destroying art. It’s destroying Hollywood. It’s removing jobs from the workforce, and it’s concentrating power and money. And ontop of all that, it produces only soulless slop.
We have a good front line there. We can rally around those points.
When you try to bring questionable objections like power an water usage onto the table, it just makes our front-line look weaker, since opponents can easily pick these arguments apart. “Sure it’s a lot of power, but this will lead to nuclear power, which is a net win environmentally.” Or, “a single AI query consumes 2 litres of water?? You mean milliliters, and it’s just going to rain from the sky, and nobody is putting big datacentres in California anyway, and that’s only 1/6th of the amount of water it takes to grow an almond.” Or “yeah, google alone uses as much power as the entire city of Toronto, but Toronto uses green power; so what?”
And yes, we all have counter-arguments to these – “how to deal with nuclear waste?” and “only a fraction of rain water is collected as potable water” and “almonds may take more water than AI but almonds are still bad” and “there are some datacentres in California” and so on but the deeper these arguments go the harder it is to maintain a stable front.
Can we all just admit that this environmental angle is a red herring? I could almost believe it’s a psy-op intended to discredit the anti-AI crowd. Even if the environmental impact of AI is bad, I still think it’s worse for our cause to focus on the environmental aspect than the other aspects. The world has already decided it doesn’t care about the environment.
Yeah I agree that AI is going to kill us, but I don’t think it’s the environmental impact from AI that is a serious concern. Google’s numbers are that their water usage is equivalent to 55 golf courses (there are nearly 1k golf courses in california) – that’s their whole company, not just AI. And as for power usage, they’re about equal to the city of Toronto – that’s a lot, but they’re already building nuclear power plants, so that seems like a net positive for environmental impact to me. We won’t need to burn coal if they are selling bone-aching ad-driven nuclear power as a side hustle on their AI business. (I’m speculating they would do this, but it seems like something they’d do.) I hate ads but I’ll take ads over fossil fuels.
I most likely hate AI as much as you do, so you know, I am not stubbornly resistant to the idea that they might be bad for the environment. This is just what my research indicates, that they’re not a serious environmental concern. You can change my mind if you have a different perspective – I mean this earnestly. I’m all ears.
My point is, even without AI, if all AI were banned tomorrow, all the data centers shut down, what we’re doing to the environment WITHOUT AI is most likely going to kill us all and render the Earth uninhabitable, possibly within 100-200 years. It is, as far as science’s ability to predict, the end of the human race and almost all life on Earth. People thinking we’ll adapt, or that we can just go live on other planets or space stations after this one is destroyed, or that we’ll magically find out a solution and have the technological means to fix it, are all frankly delusional and their wishful thinking is unsupported by current climate science and space science.
My point is we can’t stop fighting for the environment and throw it under the bus just because AI is the new threat of the day. If you truly believe “the world has already decided it doesn’t care about the environment” then there’s no point fighting AI or fighting for anything anymore, because if that is the case then we’re straight up doomed, humanity is cooked (literally), the game is over, might as well have fun on the way out.
My point is that if you intend on humanity having any future, both these things need to be fought. You can’t claim defeat on one and still fight the other, there’s no point and you’re wasting your time because the other will get you. They’re both utterly existential threats, and either one is as completely fatal as the other.
100% agree. However, I don’t think AI is a serious environmental threat. It’s a threat for other reasons.