Seems like over the last week everyone in this community is talking about how the real reason AI is bad is because it is destroying the planet. Does this even matter though? AI is bad for so many other reasons. It's destroying art. It's destroying Hollywood. It's removing jobs from the workforce, and it's concentrating power and money. And ontop of all that, it produces only soulless slop.
We have a good front line there. We can rally around those points.
When you try to bring questionable objections like power an water usage onto the table, it just makes our front-line look weaker, since opponents can easily pick these arguments apart. "Sure it's a lot of power, but this will lead to nuclear power, which is a net win environmentally." Or, "a single AI query consumes 2 litres of water?? You mean milliliters, and it's just going to rain from the sky, and nobody is putting big datacentres in California anyway, and that's only 1/6th of the amount of water it takes to grow an almond." Or "yeah, google alone uses as much power as the entire city of Toronto, but Toronto uses green power; so what?"
And yes, we all have counter-arguments to these -- "how to deal with nuclear waste?" and "only a fraction of rain water is collected as potable water" and "almonds may take more water than AI but almonds are still bad" and "there are some datacentres in California" and so on but the deeper these arguments go the harder it is to maintain a stable front.
Can we all just admit that this environmental angle is a red herring? I could almost believe it's a psy-op intended to discredit the anti-AI crowd. Even if the environmental impact of AI is bad, I still think it's worse for our cause to focus on the environmental aspect than the other aspects. The world has already decided it doesn't care about the environment.
100% agree. However, I don't think AI is a serious environmental threat. It's a threat for other reasons.