I believe that at this point in time, most of the general public is against “massive datacenters”, with the word “AI” provoking a visceral response from a lot of people. But why is this the case ? If we go strictly by the numbers, streaming a movie on Netflix consumes a lot, lot more water than prompts to AI models. If I were to pledge never to use AI again, the amount of water saved would be quite negligible, heck I doubt it would even be comparable to the water used by a single farm. I believe that if the general perception against data centers continues to turn sour, we would end up with what happened to nuclear energy in the 90s, and eventually even leading to another AI winter or a bunch of small data centers, which is really counterproductive as a large datacenter is much more water efficient than 2 half its size. Im quite new to EA, but what does the wider community thing about it ?
[Question] The data center question
I believe that at this point in time, most of the general public is against “massive datacenters”, with the word “AI” provoking a visceral response from a lot of people. But why is this the case ?
If we go strictly by the numbers, streaming a movie on Netflix consumes a lot, lot more water than prompts to AI models. If I were to pledge never to use AI again, the amount of water saved would be quite negligible, heck I doubt it would even be comparable to the water used by a single farm.
I believe that if the general perception against data centers continues to turn sour, we would end up with what happened to nuclear energy in the 90s, and eventually even leading to another AI winter or a bunch of small data centers, which is really counterproductive as a large datacenter is much more water efficient than 2 half its size.
Im quite new to EA, but what does the wider community thing about it ?