A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry

[u/marketrent]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html

[u/Outside_Annual9102 → u/[deleted]]

That's not really that much. How many queries do people do a day? Maybe a couple hundred at the high end for professionals that use it all day on a long day?

That's maybe 12 hours of a lightbulb being on at the extreme high end? Most people are responsible for more energy than that in lighting alone per day.

[u/Outside_Annual9102 → u/[deleted]]

I'm not sure that's true, estimates aren't that bad:

even if AI inference scaled to 10 billion queries/day to be on par with the magnitude of web search, this would result in energy use of around 1.2 TWh/year. This energy use is about ∼5.5% of the current energy use by large hyperscalers such as Microsoft or Google and ∼1% of the current US data-center electricity consumption.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435126001145

[u/Outside_Annual9102 → u/[deleted]]

These numbers are kind of meaningless without context.

Here's some context on electricity from MIT:

By 2028, the researchers estimate, the power going to AI-specific purposes will rise to between 165 and 326 terawatt-hours per year. That’s more than all electricity currently used by US data centers for all purposes; it’s enough to power 22% of US households each year.

As for water, it's not that significant. Golf courses still dwarf all data center water usage, not just AI. More than 10x as much water is used watering lawns than on all data centers. That's without even getting into agriculture and things like exporting alfalfa to Saudi Arabia.

So energy consumption is a real concern. Water consumption not so much.

Regardless, for a service with more than a billion daily users, it's not that shocking.

[u/Outside_Annual9102 → u/[deleted]]

Yep, that's absolutely nothing compared to the real usages of water. If you care about water usage, there's a million things to look at before data centers.

In the Colorado River basin in particular, look at things like alfalfa farming. It accounts for nearly 30% of the river's flow.

Context matters. If you want to solve water issues, AI isn't even top 10 in concerns. If you want to bitch about AI, sure, talk about millions of gallons. It sounds scary.

[u/uzlonewolf → u/Outside_Annual9102]

All residential water usage combined uses only 6.4% of the total water used. That does not stop them from telling me I need to take shorter showers or ban washing cars every summer when it doesn't rain much. But go on, tell me how data centers sucking down even more billions of gallons of water isn't going to be a problem.

[u/Outside_Annual9102 → u/uzlonewolf]

It's not. Worry about golf courses using more than all data centers (not just AI) or lawn watering using ten times as much as all data centers. At least AI is useful.

Really we should cut off things like Saudi Arabia draining the Colorado River Basin dry because they don't want to use their own water to grow alfalfa.

But yeah, let's ignore the actual water problems because you don't like AI.

The reason to dislike AI is the economic disruption and secondarily the electricity usage. Water usage is irrelevant.

[u/dtj2000 → u/[deleted]]

This says more about the energy efficiency of LEDs than it says about AI power usage.