> I am not American but from what I hear from americans, this is such a genuine and proven concern that AI does end up increasing their electricty and water costs.
The media pretty much hates AI because it competes with them (people read the AI summary instead of visiting the publisher's website), so they're churning out one hit piece after another.
If you have a sudden spike in demand for electricity, short-term prices increase. Then the higher prices drive construction of new generation capacity (the cheapest option is currently solar) and long term the prices, if anything, come down, because you get more economies of scale and data centers used for AI training are actually pretty good at curtailing load during the rare extended periods of renewable generation undersupply which is one of the main things you need for the grid to take advantage of that cheap solar.
Meanwhile data centers don't inherently use any water. In some climates it's more efficient to use evaporative cooling -- it lowers energy consumption. That doesn't mean you have to do it that way, or even that it's the best choice for all climates. Moreover, many areas don't have the same water problems as the Southwest. "Millions of gallons of water" sounds like a lot until you realize the Great Lakes contain quadrillions of gallons of water, and it's really just being evaporated rather than actually consumed and then comes back down as rain shortly thereafter.
The media also likes comparing these numbers to household water consumption because households don't actually use that much water. Agriculture in just California consumes around 11 trillion gallons of water a year. Using the standard media units of household water consumption, this is the same amount of water used by 160 million households. There are around 133 million households in the US in total.
The water consumption is an entirely fake problem outside of areas where water is actually scarce, and not even the major offender in the areas where it is scarce. You can also obviously put new data centers outside of those areas, or use non-evaporative cooling systems.
> I recently saw a county in america trying to have a deal and the deal itself is behind NDA and the govt cant tell its own citizens about the deal.
This is likewise related to the media trying to impede them. If the local media is going to launch a vendetta against you as soon as they find out you're trying to build something, you'd want to keep it quiet for as long as possible.
That city with the NDA was in Wisconsin. This is not a place with water scarcity.
We have watched every good tech invention for the last 20 years become enshittified - nobody believes in the magical market theory thay “then prices will come down” - because they haven’t. Every service has gone berserk, and nothing feels like a deal any longer - and that’s before you add into the dystopian hellhole aspects of “tech”.
Water consumption and the infrastructure to leverage it can’t be nullified by pointing to… the Great Lakes. That’s not how that works.
This is before you get into “is this technology good for people”. It’s good for a few doughy tech bros in the Epstein list, but not the rest of us.
We don’t need the country to have an infinite pool of data centers, we need healthcare, clean air and water, etc.
We should stop these dumb ass data centers, and also ban all crypto. Tech people were supposed to help usher in Star Trek, not raise our power bills and destroy the environment by firing up new gas power plants for random number generating pyramid schemes and the suckers who fall for them. It’s all beyond embarrassing.
> We have watched every good tech invention for the last 20 years become enshittified - nobody believes in the magical market theory thay “then prices will come down” - because they haven’t.
Electricity isn't a tech product. Tech products become enshittified as a result of market consolidation.
But also, you're saying the prices of tech products haven't come down? The industry that has actually been doing that for decades?
> Water consumption and the infrastructure to leverage it can’t be nullified by pointing to… the Great Lakes. That’s not how that works.
Water consumption in the midwest is a nonsense issue. There is no lack of water there and it comes from rain rather than aquifers, which is the same place it goes back to when used for evaporative cooling.
> We don’t need the country to have an infinite pool of data centers, we need healthcare, clean air and water, etc.
This is like complaining about landlords or utility companies because they don't provide you with medical services. That's the wrong tree.
> We should stop these dumb ass data centers, and also ban all crypto.
It seems like you're blaming tech companies for enshittifying things when that was really a result of the banks having them buy each other up, and then also blaming them for trying to disrupt the banks.
> Tech people were supposed to help usher in Star Trek
This is what I mean by the media writing a stream of hit pieces.
Think about the actual technology in Star Trek. You can talk to the computer and it understands natural language, that's NLP. There is a Holodeck that you can provide with a narrative and it fills in the rest of the story and generates images for it, that's LLMs and image generation.
They're actually working on the thing you're asking for but you're demanding that they stop because the early implementations are primordial and someone keeps telling you to hate them.