Now 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.
Okay, but this summary of the UN report is emphatically not "only looking at the downside". From the piece:
"“This report is not a case against artificial intelligence, a technological transformation that is improving the lives of billions of people around the world,” said Professor Kaveh Madani, Director of UNU-INWEH who led the investigation team. “It is a call for using it responsibly and addressing its unintended impacts proactively to make it sustainable and equitable.”"
It is impossible to judge of the net benefit is worth the cost if you don't know the cost. More specifically, "The report finds that AI’s environmental cost is being systematically mismeasured."
Its key policy messages even include: "AI within planetary limits is achievable. The report’s central argument is constructive. Capability and stewardship can grow together, but only with measurement, transparency, and shared responsibility across the ecosystem."
You can also see it's not anti-AI by how it argues, for example: "Governments should integrate AI infrastructure into energy planning, water governance, and land-use permitting, and require standardized environmental footprint reporting."
The report itself praises AI even more, calling it "a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems", along with an overview of its transformational benefits.
Animal farming is a far greater user of resources by far and is a top 3 contributor to breaching every planetary boundary.
It also has an easily replaceable alternative that would reduce farmland use by 50% , massively reduce water use, eliminate one of the top contributor to climate change, and at little to no cost.
A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage.
So you’re right that we have far better options to tackle before we even start worrying about AI.
AI does have a particularly high local impact, due to concentrating so much of the world’s AI energy use into the land on which the data center is located, so that is a real issue to be dealt with, but that’s largely a regulatory and management issue.
Yes, I've mostly stopped eating meat because of its environmental impact. I've also stopped flying, and buy most of my clothes second-hand. So of course it makes sense to also minimize AI use. We can easily do many things, and unlike animal products, AI tools like image generation are not embedded in millennia of culture.
FWIW, I have a hard time evaluating the validity of "A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage."
My back-of-the-envelope estimation, with total power and water consumed, ended up with a few un-resolvable factors.
First, what is "the average AI user"? Is that just people, or does it include businesses, militaries, the police and other government surveillance organizations, etc?
As specific points, does the data collection and AI analysis by both the NSA and McDonald's count as part of the average AI user’s resource usage?
The report says "A spam filter and an image generator are both forms of AI" so am I an AI user because I have a Bayesian filter built into my email client? Because if so, my minuscule power use is nothing like the what's needed for typical image generation, causing the overall average use to decrease.
Second, the wholesale prices I see for power, water, and milk, are all subsidized values, either from direct government subsidizes (like funding dams in the US southwest, or farm subsidizes) or from incomplete pricing (like the environmental impact of burning natural gas for AI). How do I even convert a hundredweight of milk for the wholesale price into the size of a glass? Or did you use the retail price of milk?
In other words, how did you end up with your conclusion?
Animal farming uses significantly more resources than almond farming across almost every major category, that includes land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and overall energy footprint.
there have been plenty of articles about golf courses being a threat to water sources; just because golf courses haven't been closed doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the threat posed by AI. You're still free to crusade against golf courses if you like.
Netflix and YouTube probably are orders of magnitude less than the alternative of driving to plays and movie theaters. Most golf courses use recycled water, albeit the opportunity cost is real. Almond farming is fair.
Netflix and YouTube probably are orders of magnitude less than the alternative of driving to plays and movie theaters.
This ignores that no one drives to a movie theatre or play every day or even several times a day but this is a common usage pattern for Netflix or that Netflix is not really an alternative to these activities but just another form of entertainment piled on top.
That's what makes them good examples, because I'm not arguing in favor of AI. I'm pointing out that things are never universally good, and if you argue things should be shut down you should expect some of the things you like, or even need, would be on other people's lists.
I don't think anyone is saying it should be shutdown completely. I think there is a conversion to be had about not rushing to build all these DCs when we haven't had enough time or accurate numbers to prove that the tech isn't just hype. We're seeing more and more companies that went all in now pulling back because it turned out that "AI" failed to actually provide any benefit, or so little that it wasn't worth the costs. And it's not getting cheaper.
There is a point where this kind of a pragmatic/contrarian take doesn't stick anymore. Is the net benefit of AI worth the cost of losing natural resources for billions? That's the question you're supposed to ponder, like, it's actually up in the air and not clear cut?
It's worth flipping the question around to explore how you actually think.
So rather than ask "What is the impact of AI?" which narrows your focus to the impact of AI, if you really care about the natural resources you should be asking "What has a big impact on natural resources?"
If that's AI, and you're ignoring all the things that have a far greater impact on what you claim to care about, then you should ask if you're really just looking for things to complain about around AI, and natural resources are a convenient excuse.
If you care about water resources and you're not a vegan campaigning against the beef industry, but you're focusing on AI, then you have a degree of cognitive dissonance.
Except that those are very old, very entrenched industries. We are still in the phase where we have a chance of setting some rules for "AI" before it becomes fully entrenched.
It is perfectly valid and the point is that if a person cared about water usage, they'd highlight percentage of usage as a whole and other violators of the same misusage of water.
If you're complaining about resource usage, but only when that resource is being used by one thing you don't like, you're just a tool for somebody else's agenda.
Specifically, if someone ACTUALLY cared about foolish uses of freshwater, they'd be advocating for reforms in water rights that result in growing extremely water-inefficient crops in semi-arid and desert environments. Mostly almonds and alfalfa, especially when these are for export.
One would also make the distinction of where the water came from important. Some places are flush with fresh water and its usage isn't terribly important, other places are deserts.
Anyway there should just be a "sin tax" for using freshwater for frivolous things like golf courses in the desert and datacenters who don't want to invest in less wasteful cooling solutions.
This UN report isn't about "foolish uses of freshwater."
This report praises AI as a part of the next technological revolution, but points out there are problems that should and can be addressed to make its benefits more equitably distributed, to minimize its negatives, to promote transparency in resource use, and to address sovereignty issues.
Discussion of water rights reform, water use for almonds, alfalfa, and golf courses, etc. are completely irrelevant to the goal of this report.
How about instead of sewing FUD and justifying one evil by pointing at others, we actually gave a damn about the world we’re creating.
People act like doing things that are good for the environment is inherently lacking in economic value. My Dad’s environmental consulting business put me through college, while doing good things for the environment and people, and that is really small scale stuff. And his primary customer was a bank wishing to avoid lending on contaminated sites.
There could absolutely be massive money to be made in doing good things for the environment, it is the people making money doing bad things for the environment who do their damndest to keep grasp on the wheel and subvert any attempt to make doing good things for the environment economically advantageous.
These people are virtually selling their children’s future for a few extra bucks today. The earth is going to be around for a long time yet. We should care about our children, grandchildren and so on.
We've gone so far past the "man plants tree whose shade he will never sit under" _almost_ universally. It's hard to see a way back, I know I'm doing my part, helping my struggling community/state. But it's hard work that's badly renumerated.
Maybe if we structured our economics around long term plans we wouldn't have such a mess.
Not sure why these bottom ones were downvoted. Look I like AI a lot. I'm using it to build the companies I dreamed about 5 years ago but didn't have time. Now I have a $20 codex account and have burned through 800 million tokens in a month (thanks Tibo for the resets!).
But just because I like AI doesn't mean I need to go with the crowd and downvote anything that threatens my livelihood. We can think of solutions instead of just reacting all the time.
My son does this. Points out all the issues in the world that I didn't address when I point something he's done. It's a childlike response insisting that either we talk about everything or nothing.
Weird take.
That could still be a no for AI, but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI.
Hard to have that discussion if these are the responses.
It’s not about issues unaddressed, it’s more that if you ignore your son on a device 24/7 but then freak out when he goes to YouTube because screentime is bad, he might reasonably conclude from your actions that you don’t actually care about screentime, you just hate YouTube. And maybe YouTube is worth hating, but at least be honest about your reasoning.
Now do Netflix and YouTube! How about golf courses, almond farming, and Disneyworld?
Don't threaten my communist soul with a good time.
Everything has a downside attached.
Yes. Let's regulate that, please.
The point is never "Let's stop this because it's bad for the planet", but "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"
Sure. The answer is 'no, it isn't '. These frontier models purposefully chose the most power guzzling, moat digging approach and it was not necessary whatsoever.
but there are things we ought to stop doing long before we come for AI.
Sure, let's get to it. As well as with AI at the same time.
if you're only looking at the downside then you're being dishonest. (...) "Is the net benefit worth the cost?"
Is any benefit worth the cost of killing the world? The article proposes a series of recommendations for investors in the "roadmap for sustainability and equity", because the conversation isn't if the benefits of AI are worth the costs, but if we are able to pay these costs at all plan the required infrastructure improvements -- which are always done with taxpayer money regardless of how neoliberal the society claims to be -- in order to accommodate the expansion of AI without massive disruptions.
Golf 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.
Not 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*.
The environmental impact of keeping a huge amount of land watered so a few thousand people can bat their balls around is ongoing.
True, but do you add chemicals to that water, and does it becomes unusable at the end of the day? At worst, that water gets in soil and goes somewhere else, and some of it evaporates.
Open loop datacenter cooling is not like that though (you add tons of chemicals to that water to prevent scaling and to kill algae), and closed loop is not that harmful, but big AI datacenters don't use that because it's wee bit more expensive.
The most "water hungry" sectors can reuse that water, or at least redirect it for agriculture. AI Datacenters are different. They are built in the cheapest way, hence they are very dirty both in carbon footprint and water-body fouling.
Golf courses at least trap some carbon by growing grass. It's almost bitterly funny in comparison.
For clarity, it seems possible to filter out these chemicals (alongside everything else) with reverse osmosis, but companies which don't invest in closed loop systems (which reduces water demand by ~90% BTW), won't invest in reverse osmosis, which is way more expensive w.r.t. closed loop systems, I believe.
If someone has more precise resources or information which they can point me to, I'd love to update my knowledge.
Also, this doesn't negate CO2 emissions of these plants.
Comments
Now 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.
Okay, but this summary of the UN report is emphatically not "only looking at the downside". From the piece:
"“This report is not a case against artificial intelligence, a technological transformation that is improving the lives of billions of people around the world,” said Professor Kaveh Madani, Director of UNU-INWEH who led the investigation team. “It is a call for using it responsibly and addressing its unintended impacts proactively to make it sustainable and equitable.”"
It is impossible to judge of the net benefit is worth the cost if you don't know the cost. More specifically, "The report finds that AI’s environmental cost is being systematically mismeasured."
Its key policy messages even include: "AI within planetary limits is achievable. The report’s central argument is constructive. Capability and stewardship can grow together, but only with measurement, transparency, and shared responsibility across the ecosystem."
You can also see it's not anti-AI by how it argues, for example: "Governments should integrate AI infrastructure into energy planning, water governance, and land-use permitting, and require standardized environmental footprint reporting."
The report itself praises AI even more, calling it "a defining technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, moving societies beyond digitization toward the optimization and automation of complex systems", along with an overview of its transformational benefits.
Animal farming is a far greater user of resources by far and is a top 3 contributor to breaching every planetary boundary.
It also has an easily replaceable alternative that would reduce farmland use by 50% , massively reduce water use, eliminate one of the top contributor to climate change, and at little to no cost.
A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage.
So you’re right that we have far better options to tackle before we even start worrying about AI.
AI does have a particularly high local impact, due to concentrating so much of the world’s AI energy use into the land on which the data center is located, so that is a real issue to be dealt with, but that’s largely a regulatory and management issue.
Yes, I've mostly stopped eating meat because of its environmental impact. I've also stopped flying, and buy most of my clothes second-hand. So of course it makes sense to also minimize AI use. We can easily do many things, and unlike animal products, AI tools like image generation are not embedded in millennia of culture.
FWIW, I have a hard time evaluating the validity of "A glass of cow’s milk costs weeks worth of the average AI user’s resource usage."
My back-of-the-envelope estimation, with total power and water consumed, ended up with a few un-resolvable factors.
First, what is "the average AI user"? Is that just people, or does it include businesses, militaries, the police and other government surveillance organizations, etc?
As specific points, does the data collection and AI analysis by both the NSA and McDonald's count as part of the average AI user’s resource usage?
The report says "A spam filter and an image generator are both forms of AI" so am I an AI user because I have a Bayesian filter built into my email client? Because if so, my minuscule power use is nothing like the what's needed for typical image generation, causing the overall average use to decrease.
Second, the wholesale prices I see for power, water, and milk, are all subsidized values, either from direct government subsidizes (like funding dams in the US southwest, or farm subsidizes) or from incomplete pricing (like the environmental impact of burning natural gas for AI). How do I even convert a hundredweight of milk for the wholesale price into the size of a glass? Or did you use the retail price of milk?
In other words, how did you end up with your conclusion?
Animal farming uses significantly more resources than almond farming across almost every major category, that includes land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and overall energy footprint.
this is a poor argument
there have been plenty of articles about golf courses being a threat to water sources; just because golf courses haven't been closed doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the threat posed by AI. You're still free to crusade against golf courses if you like.
Netflix and YouTube probably are orders of magnitude less than the alternative of driving to plays and movie theaters. Most golf courses use recycled water, albeit the opportunity cost is real. Almond farming is fair.
This ignores that no one drives to a movie theatre or play every day or even several times a day but this is a common usage pattern for Netflix or that Netflix is not really an alternative to these activities but just another form of entertainment piled on top.
Netflix is an alternative to movie theaters
these are bad examples, because it would be good if they were all gone, except almond farming in areas naturally hospitable to almonds.
That's what makes them good examples, because I'm not arguing in favor of AI. I'm pointing out that things are never universally good, and if you argue things should be shut down you should expect some of the things you like, or even need, would be on other people's lists.
I don't think anyone is saying it should be shutdown completely. I think there is a conversion to be had about not rushing to build all these DCs when we haven't had enough time or accurate numbers to prove that the tech isn't just hype. We're seeing more and more companies that went all in now pulling back because it turned out that "AI" failed to actually provide any benefit, or so little that it wasn't worth the costs. And it's not getting cheaper.
There is a point where this kind of a pragmatic/contrarian take doesn't stick anymore. Is the net benefit of AI worth the cost of losing natural resources for billions? That's the question you're supposed to ponder, like, it's actually up in the air and not clear cut?
It's worth flipping the question around to explore how you actually think.
So rather than ask "What is the impact of AI?" which narrows your focus to the impact of AI, if you really care about the natural resources you should be asking "What has a big impact on natural resources?"
If that's AI, and you're ignoring all the things that have a far greater impact on what you claim to care about, then you should ask if you're really just looking for things to complain about around AI, and natural resources are a convenient excuse.
For example, the largest data centre in the US uses approximately the same amount of water as 2 burger restaurants if you include the water used to raise the beef used in the burgers. (https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers...)
If you care about water resources and you're not a vegan campaigning against the beef industry, but you're focusing on AI, then you have a degree of cognitive dissonance.
Except that those are very old, very entrenched industries. We are still in the phase where we have a chance of setting some rules for "AI" before it becomes fully entrenched.
X is terrible, so don’t address Y is an awful way of framing any issue.
It is perfectly valid and the point is that if a person cared about water usage, they'd highlight percentage of usage as a whole and other violators of the same misusage of water.
If you're complaining about resource usage, but only when that resource is being used by one thing you don't like, you're just a tool for somebody else's agenda.
Specifically, if someone ACTUALLY cared about foolish uses of freshwater, they'd be advocating for reforms in water rights that result in growing extremely water-inefficient crops in semi-arid and desert environments. Mostly almonds and alfalfa, especially when these are for export.
One would also make the distinction of where the water came from important. Some places are flush with fresh water and its usage isn't terribly important, other places are deserts.
Anyway there should just be a "sin tax" for using freshwater for frivolous things like golf courses in the desert and datacenters who don't want to invest in less wasteful cooling solutions.
This UN report isn't about "foolish uses of freshwater."
This report praises AI as a part of the next technological revolution, but points out there are problems that should and can be addressed to make its benefits more equitably distributed, to minimize its negatives, to promote transparency in resource use, and to address sovereignty issues.
Discussion of water rights reform, water use for almonds, alfalfa, and golf courses, etc. are completely irrelevant to the goal of this report.
How about instead of sewing FUD and justifying one evil by pointing at others, we actually gave a damn about the world we’re creating.
People act like doing things that are good for the environment is inherently lacking in economic value. My Dad’s environmental consulting business put me through college, while doing good things for the environment and people, and that is really small scale stuff. And his primary customer was a bank wishing to avoid lending on contaminated sites.
There could absolutely be massive money to be made in doing good things for the environment, it is the people making money doing bad things for the environment who do their damndest to keep grasp on the wheel and subvert any attempt to make doing good things for the environment economically advantageous.
These people are virtually selling their children’s future for a few extra bucks today. The earth is going to be around for a long time yet. We should care about our children, grandchildren and so on.
We've gone so far past the "man plants tree whose shade he will never sit under" _almost_ universally. It's hard to see a way back, I know I'm doing my part, helping my struggling community/state. But it's hard work that's badly renumerated.
Maybe if we structured our economics around long term plans we wouldn't have such a mess.
But what about maximizing shareholder value?!?
/S
Not sure why these bottom ones were downvoted. Look I like AI a lot. I'm using it to build the companies I dreamed about 5 years ago but didn't have time. Now I have a $20 codex account and have burned through 800 million tokens in a month (thanks Tibo for the resets!).
But just because I like AI doesn't mean I need to go with the crowd and downvote anything that threatens my livelihood. We can think of solutions instead of just reacting all the time.
My son does this. Points out all the issues in the world that I didn't address when I point something he's done. It's a childlike response insisting that either we talk about everything or nothing.
Weird take.
Hard to have that discussion if these are the responses.
It’s not about issues unaddressed, it’s more that if you ignore your son on a device 24/7 but then freak out when he goes to YouTube because screentime is bad, he might reasonably conclude from your actions that you don’t actually care about screentime, you just hate YouTube. And maybe YouTube is worth hating, but at least be honest about your reasoning.
All or nothing thinking.
Don't threaten my communist soul with a good time.
Yes. Let's regulate that, please.
Sure. The answer is 'no, it isn't '. These frontier models purposefully chose the most power guzzling, moat digging approach and it was not necessary whatsoever.
Sure, let's get to it. As well as with AI at the same time.
Is any benefit worth the cost of killing the world? The article proposes a series of recommendations for investors in the "roadmap for sustainability and equity", because the conversation isn't if the benefits of AI are worth the costs, but if we are able to pay these costs at all plan the required infrastructure improvements -- which are always done with taxpayer money regardless of how neoliberal the society claims to be -- in order to accommodate the expansion of AI without massive disruptions.
Neo-liberal economics is the reason our taxes are subsidizing all of the corporations.
Golf 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.
Not 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.
True, but do you add chemicals to that water, and does it becomes unusable at the end of the day? At worst, that water gets in soil and goes somewhere else, and some of it evaporates.
Open loop datacenter cooling is not like that though (you add tons of chemicals to that water to prevent scaling and to kill algae), and closed loop is not that harmful, but big AI datacenters don't use that because it's wee bit more expensive.
The most "water hungry" sectors can reuse that water, or at least redirect it for agriculture. AI Datacenters are different. They are built in the cheapest way, hence they are very dirty both in carbon footprint and water-body fouling.
Golf courses at least trap some carbon by growing grass. It's almost bitterly funny in comparison.
For clarity, it seems possible to filter out these chemicals (alongside everything else) with reverse osmosis, but companies which don't invest in closed loop systems (which reduces water demand by ~90% BTW), won't invest in reverse osmosis, which is way more expensive w.r.t. closed loop systems, I believe.
If someone has more precise resources or information which they can point me to, I'd love to update my knowledge.
Also, this doesn't negate CO2 emissions of these plants.
Fertiliser and pesticide runoff from golf courses into water systems is a well known environmental issue.
Where I live it can rain hundreds of days a year and the nearest course had browning greens last time I drove by.