We can shut down 90% of datacenters today, suffer a slight inconvinience to our lives and keep living.
We have a farm failure…
"Farms use more water than Al data centers" OK, I'll go without Al and you can go without food and we'll see who lasts longer
Submitted 2 weeks ago by beep@piefed.world to [deleted]
Comments
nerv@fedinsfw.app 2 weeks ago
blarghly@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I mean, assuming we are discussing the US where almost all datacenters are being built -
the real thing to realize is not that datacenters are bad (I’m kinda ambivalent), nor that meat is bad, but that poorly written water rights laws are bad. Which is why we grow some of our most water-intensive crops in some of our driest areas and some farmers end up just flooding the desert with water for no reason each year. Restructuring water rights would massively reduce water usage while maintaining food production for the simple reason that then we would stop growing alfalfa in Pheonix
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Nuanced discussion? What are you, a European?
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I keep seeing this argument and it stinks of astroturfing. Probably to portray data centers the same as farms: a resource-intensive but necessary infrastructure. If they wanted to make a good faith argument, it would be good courses, not farms. And I could also go without golf.
Focusing solely on water consumption with these arguments is another red flag. Its easy to find false equivalencies with water, but no other project demands double the power output of the entire state it’s in, and not many other projects have as bad a ratio of taxpayer dollars spent to revenue generated.
tempest@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Not all farms are required.
Farmers like to claim they are ‘growing your food’ while exporting grain and selling corn for ethanol or shipping alfalfa to Saudi Arabia for cattle feed.
They are incredibly unsympathetic.
roux2scour@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
Meat is worse than AI for the environnement, and you can go without meat (except some health condition)
I work daily with my company’s hosted LLM, and the last 6 months of use had the same environnemental impact as eating 10g of beef
Also i use an old model, in a country with mostly decarbonate electricity, and not with agentic mode, so it may have worse impact elsewhere
This is not an argument for ai though, pushing for ai use where it shouldn’t be used is dumb, wasteful and armful for society, just saying that if you are a dev using llm for occasional help and prototyping, eating less meat will be far more helpful for the environnement
HikingVet@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Meat is worse than AI for the environnement, and you can go without meat (except some health condition)
We can also go without AI. Meat can give nutritional value.
All I’ve seen AI do is reconcentrate wealth to the top 1% of tech bros. LLMs are chat bots that give out information that have to be independently verified.
roux2scour@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
We can also go without ai Yes Meat can give nutritional value Palm oil gives nutrients, yet its cultivation pollute. Meat production pollute, and it’s consumption can be reduced or replaced.
All I’ve seen AI do is concentrate wealth to the top 1%tech bros. I agree. Also consider that meat industry has it’s own big evil shareholder that exploit farmers to produce shit for consumers
My whole point is not ai good meat bad.
Its : if your argument against ai is water, energy and pollution (which i agree with, all this datacenter, hardware and energy consumption is nonsense compared to the little scope of where ai is useful), don’t oppose it to farming industry, or also fight against intensive meat production, which also involves a john shareholder that destroys the planet
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Counter point, meat is fucking delicious and AI is just a shell game of stock manipulation that’s going to crash and throw the world into another Great Depression
roux2scour@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
As if meat industry where not also driven by stock manipulation, exploitation, destruction of natural habitat, to grow food for developped country consumers, when a lot people still don’t have safe access for food.
Meat delicious is based on personal taste. This argument is as valid as “using ai is so fun”, so argument rejected
lookingforanALFpolycule@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Although your claims might be true (we’ll see) they don’t address the argument you replied to which is that:
If you think that someone using AI is wrong because of the water or ecological impact then you should think much worse about people who chose to eat a meat burger instead of a vegetable one because the extra water usage and ecological impact are many many orders of magnitudes bigger than an AI prompt causes.
dan1101@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We have a county reservoir and our idiot leaders have made a deal with Amazon to give them 40% of the reservoir capacity. That is a big problem, especially now what we are in a drought in the springtime.
ReCursing@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
The point you are DELIBERATELY missing is that farms use so much water than AI data centres that the amount data centres use is irrelevant. The water usage claims are so ridiculously overblown and so obviously stupid that it’s appalling that people believe them! I have seen people genuinely claim that water used in data centres is destroyed and can never be recovered, or that it’s polluted so badly it can never be cleaned. Farms not only use multiple orders of magnitude more water, they also pollute it a hell of a lot more so it’s far more difficult to clean and more damaging to the environment. A lot of the claimed numbers come from one person who got gallons and megalitres confused! Just stop spreading this utter nonsense! <haters will not respond with downvotes for calling them out, and more repeatedly debunked nonsense, because they always do, they’re really dull as well as annoying!>
saigot@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I think there is some nuance here. Data centers are being put in cities that cannot support them at the expense of their citizens, this is a corruption problem in my opinion. Data centers could also be much more water conservant than they are, and significantly less polluting and I appreciate the public pressure they are on to improve here. The warm water being released can damage the local ecosystem as well.
I have definitely seen some absurd claims about water usage, but it also isnt totally unconcerning either.
Imo its a pr strategy, water usage is a much more solvable issue than the immense energy usage, and the ai companies would rather actovists attack them for that than for the significant power consumption.
I think the power usage is also going to go down, either because they make ai more efficient, or because they can’t make it more efficient and it continues to make no economic sense and mostly goes away. Hopefully that latter scenario leads to a lot of eccess green energy to be constructed which would make electrifying the world a little easier. But that is probably wishful thinking.
daannii@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What powers data centers ?
oh that’s right. Power plants.
Power plants that now use 10x the water and produce 10x the pollution than previous levels.
It’s not just direct pollution and water use. They use way more water than they report through their demand on local power plants.
And what they can’t get from power plants they make up for by burning natural gas or diesel in generators.
rain_worl@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
why do people hate al so much
Allero@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Several reasons.
- It’s not even AI. It’s machine-learning based word predictor. Which gets us to:
- It’s an absolute example of corporate bullshit made to:
- Throw money back and forth in an economy, making it look like it’s healthy and booming, while:
- Actually tanking the economy,
- Making governments sacrifice everything for “AI dominance”,
- Making management lay off thousands of people under the premise of “automatization”, while really it just increases the workload on the rest, all while:
- Guzzling tons of water,
- Electricity,
- Raw materials,
- Producing never-before-seen amounts of e-waste,
- And leaving residents endangered
- All to generate unreliable results
- That take tons of human labor to correct
- While making others believe the batshit output
- And destroying critical and independent thinking.
But yes, you can get some text output or a quick image draft.
rain_worl@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
yup, uhuh, correct, i get the problems with ai, but i still don’t get why people hate al
pictured (source):
“weird al” yankovic
kevin2107@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
pick a different reason to hate AI sheeple. water isn’t it
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Pick a better reason to want AI. water is a significant issue, especially when it’s commercialized and not everyone has access to clean water.
You can go fuck yourself for defending AI.
The blasting for building these places is literally shaking people’s homes apart. The noise pollution after construction is vibrating people to death. Go setup camp next to a data center and come see us in 100 days.
kevin2107@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There ya go!!! those are great reasons. I’m not defending it just the water issue doesn’t add up when cattle takes up way more and we have alternstive meat options in 2026.
nroth@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Some datacenters are still built with cooling towers instead of chillers. I know for a fact Amazon does this. They are slightly cheaper, but massively wasteful. I think we need better laws for the irresponsible companies, but this is not most datacenter companies. If I heard a Google datacenter was going up near me, I would not care. If I heard an Amazon one was, I would be organizing against it as hard as possible.
SaraTonin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Do farms collectively use more water than data centres collectively, or does the average farm use more water than the average data centre?
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aeronmelon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“But surviving uses more resources than generating value for the shareholders. Why are you so selfish?”
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Many farms are owned by corporations not families. Shit, which one is more profitable?