alt Hacker NewsNotice how the comparison is never to the absence of data centers.
It's always "Data centers don't use a lot of energy compared to using a particle accelerator to transmute lead into gold."
Replies
dnautics • today at 3:23 PM
AI just today proved that quantum computers are a bad idea, so maybe we will stop dumping resources into that? Surely there will be other knock on effects like this.
Well of course not. People still need to process information, just like they need to get around.
Imagine, way back when, when trains were invented, and people kept saying “we should stick with horses and carriages!” or “everyone should walk and carry their load on their bodies!”
You can’t reason about this stuff unless you put it in terms of productivity.
Objections to data centers based on energy and water consumption are red herrings. For the most part, people aren’t saying these things because they actually care about these things. They are objecting because either 1/they don’t want to live right next to a data center, 2/they object to DCs being built without the necessary (and ideally clean) generation capacity being built first, or 3/they fear, dislike, or otherwise object to AI for other reasons and don’t want more AI capacity being built at all.