Is AI getting out of hand?

I wonder if people knew about the environmental cost of AI…..the amount of water used to cool the servers, whether they might think twice about how much they use it. I know I didn’t realise until my son told me.

Maybe having to pay something to use AI would make people more conscious of their usage and help limit unnecessary use.

Lonehare12 said:

I wonder if people knew about the environmental cost

I think that's obvious, but most people don't see what's obvious to me.

it's not just water, its plastics to build hardware and energy use. I think the rising cost of domestic energy might be partly to encourage us to use less, so the massive server farms can have more?

There is a quiet industrialisation of the countryside happening that people might not be aware of. It's a combination of the green energy infrastructure -which is good but you have to make sure you are looking at all the demands on the green spaces for balance, as it's also building power substation, fields of batteries, these new data centres which have to be connected up with power and water (ai craze is really driving demand to build these). Post-apocalyptic pylon towers, marching across the the beauty spots (this is happening here), so people wont notice until they try go on holiday and discover there is no countryside left that is unspoilt. Tree plantations already pushed out a lot of sheep farming here too (I know someone this happened to), and now there are more and more being turned over to wind turbines.  Food production doesn't seem to be a priority at all, when big corps offer more money to the landowner of a field to house their mega tech centers, and it's important to remember all these other pressures, so the farming land isn't just sold off piece by piece with no overall plan for food and other living creatures trying to survive on this scrap of land.

There is very little research being done on the effect of all these things in combination, like a magic trick, people are distracted one way, and not notice what is happening behind them.

There is a quiet industrialisation of the countryside happening that people might not be aware of. It's a combination of the green energy infrastructure -which is good but you have to make sure you are looking at all the demands on the green spaces for balance, as it's also building power substation, fields of batteries, these new data centres which have to be connected up with power and water (ai craze is really driving demand to build these). Post-apocalyptic pylon towers, marching across the the beauty spots (this is happening here), so people wont notice until they try go on holiday and discover there is no countryside left that is unspoilt. Tree plantations already pushed out a lot of sheep farming here too (I know someone this happened to), and now there are more and more being turned over to wind turbines.  Food production doesn't seem to be a priority at all, when big corps offer more money to the landowner of a field to house their mega tech centers, and it's important to remember all these other pressures, so the farming land isn't just sold off piece by piece with no overall plan for food and other living creatures trying to survive on this scrap of land.

There is very little research being done on the effect of all these things in combination, like a magic trick, people are distracted one way, and not notice what is happening behind them.