Take Our Money and Shut Up
Ftfy.
I swear editors aren’t even trying these days.
Isn’t it a reference to that Futurama line? It still works.
It is and it doesn’t. The bit is Fry telling someone to stop selling him on something and giving them money blindly, which isn’t what’s happening in the article at all. Flipped, it’s someone paying another to shut up, which fits perfectly and is something an editor should be able to figure out.
It’s hilarious they are like, “but golf courses are worse!”
Yeah. Get rid of them too.
Where’s the protests over golf courses though? Why are you showing up to an Anti-AI protest, but not organizing one for golf courses?
This is the biggest thing that’s pissing me off about these anti-AI for environmental reasons folks. People are literally getting into giant SUVs to drive to anti-AI datacenter protests, then stopping off to get a steak to cook for dinner on the way home.
The amount of fuel they just burned, and the amount of energy and pollution beef production generates for that steak are quite literally orders of magnitude worse for the environment than AI datacenters.
Yet nobody is protesting combustion vehicles, or even oil and gas companies at this point, and very few people choose to not eat meat (and even a lot of those don’t do it for environmental reasons).
Rational people worried about the environment, pollution, or water usage would target the worst offenders. Yet here they are protesting in massive numbers for something that’s less than well under 1% of global energy use.
You’re looking for the populace as a whole to have some kind of sit-down, coordinated evaluation of what has maximal climate impact, but that’s not how protest movements work.
Small groups can be tactical like that. Large protest movements have to seize on whatever momentum happens, when it happens.
If people were out there protesting golf courses, I’d be there too, and I’d be encouraging it, but I’m not going to waste my breath as someone with zero meaningful platform trying to foment a mass protest movement out of thin air.
And there’s something more important to this movement than just directly addressing the environmental impact of datacenters, which is the anti-large-corporation sentiment it’s feeding (both from, and into). That is very important for climate action. And I’m not sure if you’ve been going to any (climate) protests, but there are definitely signs at all of them protesting oil and gas companies.
Irrational protests are not helpful. Doing something just because it’s popular is called a fad.
Anti-corporate sentiment and protests are hilarious, there’s already an easy mechanism to punish companies. Don’t buy their shit, or support other companies that buy their shit. However, that rarely works because “the public” doesn’t actually care and just wants cheap shit.
We could put oil companies out of business in a couple of years by simply changing our collective individual purchasing habits. That would require a sacrifice in lifestyle quality that most people aren’t willing to provide though.
I wonder how many people go to these ai-datacenter protests, then go home and ask chatgpt to help them write a birthday card joke for their friend/family member. I would bet large amounts of money that it’s a sizeable percentage of vocal critics.
While you are absolutely correct, all those other industries are well established, ai and datacentres are relatively new to the scene. It’s much easier to stop something that just started, then stop something that is already established.
Additionally, protesting one doesn’t make protesting the other impossible. Education is an effective tool to reach people. “Are you upset that datacentres waste x amount of water, well then oil and gas wastes 10x amount. Let’s protest those as well.”
That is the most defeatist argument I think I’ve heard. You’re essentially suggesting that it’s too late to fix the biggest issues, so you’re going to protest things that won’t actually have an impact just because it’s easier.
You’re right that people could be doing multiple, I’m just pointing out they aren’t doing that.
At this point it’s clearly either just performative activism, or people are using the environment as an excuse to hide their worries about the economic impacts that may affect them (completely valid)
The third option is that people are so poorly educated that they actually can’t think rationally about this issue. I’m not ruling that out at this point.
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The clothing industry is also orders of magnitude worse, and insanely wasteful. But no, it’s only now people are suddenly up in arms about water consumption.
I’m not with you on energy use, though. It’s already over 5% in the US, and we don’t even know how bad it is in data-center-dense Texas (which means it’s bad), in a state with an already notoriously unreliable energy grid. Still is the case sometimes that politics is local.
See this is part of the problem, people aren’t paying attention to the words and spin that is being used to deceive you.
It’s not 5% of enegy use, the statistics you see for that number are for “electricity use” which is not the same.
Electricity production/consumption only accounts for around 35% of global energy use (and not all of it comes from fossil fuels). Most global energy use is fossil fuels being burned directly in vehicles (trucks, mining, etc.) or industrial processes (fertilizer production, gas refineries, etc.)
The US also hosts a very large percentage of the world’s datacenters. That 5% number also includes All types of datacenters, not just AI which still make up a large portion of that number.
So when you actually complete the math, the current AI enegy use is around 0.5% of global energy use.
For comparison, meat production takes around 15% of global energy use.
Feel free to double check the facts and math on this, it’s all available publicly.
Jesus christ. Tax wealth! Holy hell our gov’t is shit.
