Comment by awongh

I feel like this water-AI datacenter idea is the worst kind of whataboutism luddite thinking.

To begin with:

- it's almost certain that there is an over capacity of compute being built, and some kind of bubble.

- money is being wasted being thrown after non-viable ideas

*but*

This is a technology that will fundamentally change the way humans think and do things. There will be plenty of amazing new discoveries that will benefit all of humanity that will come out of all of this. -probably the most purely virtuous will be bio-medical related (alphafold etc.)

Yes, the capitalistic waste of resources is a shame, but any comment saying that the money should/can be used in a more cooperative/communal way are completely disconnected from reality.

The relatively high-waste wheel of capital has been spun up and because moore's law seems to generally apply- if not to model training and inference itself, at least to the underlying hardware, we're going to get efficient systems eventually.

I'm on the left and the environmental AI angle is one of the most regressive and short sighted takes from these people. I put it in the same bucket as anti-immigration left-green policies. Our new political world order is putting greens on the side of conservative, regressive authoritarianism and I don't like it.

From that viewpoint it makes sense why young (optimistic, idealistic) people would want to vote republican.