cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37715538
As you can compute for yourself, AI datacenter water use is not a substantial environmental problem. This long read spells out the argument numerically.
If you’d like a science educator trying to make the headline claim digestible, see here
Expanding on this: Even if we take the absurd values of LLM growth from the industry, current and projected freshwater use of AI datacenters will still be small compared to other obviously wasteful uses. This is especially true if you restrict to inference, rather than training, resource use. Once a company has already trained one of these monster-models, using it to respond to a content-free work email, cheat on homework, lookup a recipe, or help you write a silly html web page is usually freshwater savings, because you shower and use the toilet surprisingly often compared to the cooling needs of a computer.
I will acknowledge the nuance I’m aware of:
- we don’t know the specific tech of the newest models. It is theoretically possible they’ve made inference require burning several forests down. I think this is extremely unlikely, given how similar they behave to relatively benign mixture-of-experts models.
- some of the numbers in the linked long-read are based on old projections. I still think they were chosen generously, and I’m not aware of a serious discrepancy in favor of 'AI water use is a serious problem". Please do correct me if you have data.
- there is a difference between freshwater and potable water. Except that I can’t find anyone who cares about this difference outside of one commenter. As I currently understand it, all freshwater can be made potable with relatively upfront investment.
(Please note this opinion is not about total energy use. Those concerns make much more sense to me.)
This is a false premise. No matter how much work AI ostensibly does / how much time it saves the human, the human still exists during that saved time, is still doing other things and, most notably, is still consuming water during that time.
Excuse me, everyone knows you don’t have to shower when you date an AI. It’s the infinite water saving loophole.
My most charitable read of what you are saying is this:
There is a human, who will exist no matter what. They consume X water.
There is a task, which will take the humans whole X water (which we can convert to water) for the human to do, or Y < X water for an llm to do.
If the human does the task, a total of X water is used. If the AI does the task, X + Y water is used.
Is this correct?
Assuming so: I think we should control for how much gets done. Our goal is not to minimize water use, our goal is to maximize stuff done / water use. I am using “savings” in the sense of saving time. Resources are freed up to do other things. There are, for example, other tasks that the AI is bad at but the human is quite good at. We should spend the X water on having the human make meaningful literature or going on dates or enjoying life, and let the AI write the pointless emails.
If I’ve misunderstood you, could you explain if there is also a false dilemma occurring when someone says “this better route to work saves time”, and why? They seem very analogous to me.
The crux is this:
Humans are not consuming more water than they otherwise would to do their homework or respond to a work email. Humans require X water no matter what they’re doing. Those tasks do not add extra water consumption. Using the AI to do them does add extra water consumption.
Humans can, therefore, do those tasks for 0 net water usage. (Doing those tasks consumes X water; not doing the tasks also consumes X water, therefore the net water ‘cost’ of doing those tasks is 0.) AI can do those tasks for Y net water usage, which is a value > 0. Therefore, yes, ostensibly you’re getting more work done in less time, but the net water usage is higher. Since the water usage for the human to do the tasks is 0, any amount of water usage - no matter how much productivity it adds - is increasing the water per unit of work, because it is a number greater than 0.
Your point wasn’t about AI enabling humans to get more work done in less time, it was about AI using less water than humans (presumably to do the same amount of work), which is simply false.
I see. So what I should have written is “a more efficient use of fresh water” instead of “a freshwater savings”? Would that change address the point you are making?
It’s not even a more efficient use of water. It’s more work in less time (ostensibly) at a higher water per work expenditure.
I don’t see why the above argument implies a higher water per work expendature?
The human is consuming X water whether they’re doing the work or not. That’s a constant. There’s certainly activities that would require consuming more water, but they’re not the things AI is helping with. If the human is doing the work themselves, they are consuming X water. If the human is not doing the work, they are consuming X water. Therefore, the water consumption attributable to the work being done is X - X, or 0. The water per unit of work in this case is 0 / Z (where Z is the amount of work being done), or, 0.
If the AI is doing the work, the human is still consuming X water (no change), but the AI is consuming Y water, which is a value greater than 0. Therefore, the water consumption attributable to the work being done is Y / Z, where Z is the amount of work being done.
Since Y is a value greater than 0, the result of Y / Z is higher than the result of 0 / Z.
Conclusion: Having the AI do the work requires a greater water per work expenditure (Y/Z) than having humans do it (0/Z).
(I think you’ve also done something sneaky mathematically; the units of your numerator are ‘change in freshwater use from leaving the human alive’, but your units on the denominator are ‘change in work from the human not existing at all’. I think the two units should try to align; either both assume the human not existing at all, or both assume the human. I’ve been taking the first set of units, the second set of units would compare 0/0 with Y/(w/e the human does instead of Z), which seems less insightful.)
Thank you, I understand your argument. I think we should complicate the model ever so slightly, because the human will exist regardless and does something with that extra time. Suppose there are two tasks, instead of just one. The first task is as we’ve described, the second task is something the human would prefer to do, but cannot do until the first task is done. Let’s say the tasks are comparable; both contribute Z to work done (in general we would have Z and Z’).
Without AI, the water use / work done is X/Z.
With AI, the water use / work done is (X+Y)/(2Z).
The second ratio is smaller whenever Y < X, thus in this case the AI has made our freshwater use more efficient.
We can certainly discuss which model is more accurate/typical, I would welcome such. Do you feel this model of ‘total water use / total work done’ is fair? Generally, I put a lot of value on work that people want to do, and not all that much value on work that people would rather give to AI, so usually Z << Z’, and I think the efficiency gain is rather large (this includes things we don’t normally call work, like self care).
Let’s look at the examples you gave:
I’m not sure what a “content-free” work email is in this context but any work email that I’d even consider trusting to AI is something that would take me under a minute to write by hand anyway. There’s no way I’d trust anything more complex to AI. Is this not the case for you?
If you’re using AI to cheat on homework so you can use the time you save to study in another manner that’s more conducive to your learning methods, I could maybe see this being a benefit, but if you’re using AI to do your homework so you can e.g. play a videogame, you’re really just doing yourself a disservice. If we’re assuming the homework is something you already know how to do and require no additional practice on, and it’s simple enough that AI can handle it without oversight, I suppose this could be a use case?
It takes no more than a minute to look up a recipe, and chances are good that the recipe you find will be more reliable than what AI tells you to do. It’s notoriously bad at this task, and while it’s obviously not the norm, there’s been a non-zero number of cases where it’s told someone to do something that would be fatal if the recipe was followed.
Of the items on your list, this is the one I think has the highest chance of actually saving you some time, albeit very little. You’ll still need to write or provide the content, but you could probably save 10-30 minutes of writing HTML assuming you’d otherwise be doing it all by hand and what you’re trying to do is appreciably complex enough that it would take you that long while not being complex enough that you’ll waste time trying to explain to the AI what you want it to look like.
Anyway, the point is, it’s not like any of these tasks are something you’re going to entrust to AI and save appreciable time to dedicate to another task. Even if we charitably grant that the human has freed up substantial time that they can dedicate to something else, that’s outside of the scope of the original argument.
The argument I was responding to was that using AI for these tasks represents a water savings, not that it represents a time savings or efficiency gain.
If that’s no longer your argument, maybe it would help if you re-stated your revised position, so we’re both arguing from the same starting point?