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Amazon's New AI Data Center Is So Enormous That It Appears It Will Become the Largest Single Source of Pollution in the United States (futurism.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50691454

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[–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

You sound like you acknowledge it's going to cause huge amounts of environmental damage, but because there's no other way of powering it... I guess that's what we're going to have to do.

Is that a fair take on your position?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Largely a fair take, definitely.

    I find myself hating the anti-datacenter thing just because as a geek and web dude since 1994, datacenters are where the internet is, so if you destroy them all, we lose the internet.

    But I'm not particularly fond of AI. I'm not nearly as anti as many, but there is absolutely a lot of harm going on. Case in point. This facility is NOT great. And I think they could do it rather better. Maybe solar wouldn't be an option, but nuclear could be. But because we're so damn capitalist-centric and environment-be-damned, none of those options would be considered.

    It's a frustrating position to be in because ANYTHING not FIRMLY anti-ai and anti-datacenter is usually heavily downvoted, so I've had to learn how to make my case and emphasize that I am not THAT far away from most of the anti folks. lol. I do use some AI for a few things - mostly asking it unimportant questions about trivia online, or to gain basic understanding of things. It does at least as well as googling, and instead of finding videos, which I hate, it gives me the text I want. So it can be handy. But it is also pervasive and capitalists are trying to use it for profit/evil. Soooooo............ I'd like it we could find ethical ways of using it, get it to hallucinate less, regulate it so they don't abuse us with it, and figure out how to use it for all the good that it can legitimately do. Which I know is all unlikely to happen. So I end up being mostly anti-AI....... heh

    What do you think? I briefly stalked your profile out of curiosity, and scanned some recentish comments. It sounds like we share a lot of beliefs from that brief scan. heh. I support highly regulated capitalism and the DSA, for example.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago*

    I think that these days centres should absolutely not be built. They are on a scale we can't justify economically or ecologically and the technology they support are national security threats.

    These are not the AWS-like data centres that "host the internet". These are compute only. They're for AI and big-data. Centralisation of the world computation into a few locations under the control of a few billionaires.

    So point 1. Destroying these does not harm the internet. It preserves it. The 90s internet was one where anyone could put up a web-server and serve whatever they wanted. Sure, it might get given a hug-of-death when a site became popular, but it was only that one site that was affected. The internet was distributed and not centralised.

    Then came the cloud.

    Point 2. This is centralising information. I suspect we are already past the point where people are asking chatbots "who should I vote for?". That alone places millions of votes under the control of whoever trains the LLM model they ask.

    The owners become the owners of all information. It's so handy. Why read a book? In fact let's destroy books to create the machine. Now you can ask it anything. How do I make a cake? How do I fix my car? Is there a war in Palestien Ba-sing-se?

    Point 3. The cost is too high. The American stock market is teetering on the edge of a huge crash. Bigger than 2008, it threatens to take out several of the world's most valuable companies. If the damage was limited to them, I wouldn't worry. Sadly, the banks and investment funds we all use are invested in them. This is Enron x4 plus the banking failure of 2008 in a dot.com bubble wrapper. All whilst the economy in all other sectors is shrinking.

    Wall street knows it's a bubble, but they all want to ride the upside of the bubble, thinking it won't be them left holding when the crash comes. They could calmly unwind their positions and avoid the crash, but ego and hubris don't allow that.

    All in pursuit of an impossible goal

    Then there's the ecological cost. Lake Mead, on the Colorado river, is at it's lowest level since it was created by the Hoover Dam being constructed. Drought and water use in the south-western states have steadily drained it for years ...and they want to add a water guzzlers on the scale of an additional cities. Now I know this one is in Texas, and not in the Colorado river basin, but this isn't the only one and I'm sure Texas rivers have their own issues.

    Then you have the power supply. Whilst the rest of us are trying to move away from fossil fuels, these guys run towards them. Natural gas turbines (which can't be built to schedule) belching out CO2 whilst heatwaves, drought, and wild fires are happening across the globe. I guess it gives the fossil fuel companies a reason to keep going though.

    So yes, I'm against building these centres. The benefits are low, the societal dangers are huge and...

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