The other limiting factor is water for cooling the equipment.
The electricity you can at least envision a solution (green tech, maybe they’ll even cynically finally embrace nuclear).
Figuring out water is even more difficult, but it seems like the various crises in the country might lead to a need for massive water infrastructure and pipelines in the future. Or lots of abandoned towns, cities and of course, data centers.
Yes, water is a huge issue. I posted some links yesterday that I won't re-post here. But most of the data centers use the more wasteful evaporation model of water cooling, rather than the recirculation model. As a result, a data center may use 300,000 gallons of water per day. The biggest ones may use up to 1 million gallons per day. This is potable water we're talking about. And people living around them are finding that their water has been destroyed and they cannot drink it. Not to mention the ground sinking around them.
Yeah, we're definitely running headlong into a water crisis. Global warming alone will do it, but these data centers are exacerbating the problem exponentially. Pretty soon, water will be the most valuable commodity.
Remember the movie, The Big Short, based upon a book about the autistic guy who made a bundle betting against the 2008 sub-prime mortgage market? I remember the credits at the end of the movie and statement following that he had re-invested those proceeds into water investments. A couple of years ago or so, I decided to google-search him and what he was up to. He cashed out of his water investments and re-invested the proceeds 100% into private prison companies. Maybe he's moved on again now that knowledge of that has come to pass as a lucrative investment.
actually, cooling towers don't use any water. The evaporate enters the hydrologic cycle and is returned as rain or snow. The blowdown is discharged to a river typically, and then to the ocean. If push comes to shove, locate the data centers near the oceans and run once-through cooling systems. Lots of nukes do that.
If you spray water on a golf course, that is using water. It doesn't matter if the water soaks into the ground or evaporates, etc. It is already gone from the human captured water accounting. I do not think you get to claim that evaporated water is not using water. It can not be used for other human needs until it happens to fall as rain again into a river system we can use or soaks through the ground into an aquifer over 1000 years. A lot of this rain will just fall on the ocean.
you are confusing USING water with LOSING water. All the water is recycled as evaporate, ground water, or discharge to a receiving stream. Over time the system is in a steady state where water used = water recovered. Over short periods you can have imbalances due to the cycle time. Consider Lake Mead. It is dropping because of excessive water demand down the Colorado but all that water re-enters the system over time. Conservation of mass.
but does it remain in the steady-state system in a form that is useful to some human purposes in the next 20 or 50 years? If not, then it's as good as gone.
Yes. Almost nothing we do with water chemically alters it to be another compound. Probably the biggest example is sugar / starch biosynthesis in agriculture which isn't that enormous and probably dwarfed by nature (I haven't looked.) There is also more water than we know what to do with in the ocean. Running out of water, per se, isn't a worry. At all.
The problem is cheaply accessible clean water that we don't have to distill to use. This is the stuff humans use because the alternative is too expensive and that is what these data centers is throwing away.
Never doubt the ability of technology to solve such problems. If push comes to shove there are always the Great Lakes to get us through the next ten thousand years. And who says you need FRESH water for cooling? Lots of coastal power plants using once-through sea water.
Of course, as a practical matter, we could always prioritize usage: drinking water first to AI data centers, crypto last…whoops, don’t have any crypto electrical usage numbers. Brought to us by the genius who got rid of Covid by not testing. No numbers, no problem.
Here in Tucson, the residents managed to stop “Project Blue”, a deal for an AMZ server farm hidden for years by NDAs signed by local planners.
When it came time for city council to approve annexation of the site to allow access to water (both potable and reclaimed), a local independent news outlet (Arizona Luminaria) filed FOIA requests and uncovered the hidden dealing.
City Council was browbeaten by the voters to reject the plan. However, in many other localities, the same secretive, shady deals are still afoot.
Water is life here, and the only thing keeping us growing here is the water we pipe in from the Colorado River. The storage in lakes Powell and Mead is steadily declining as the region-wide drought intensifies.
No one is yet talking about who gets the water as it becomes less and less available.
I have a basic economics question. What is the natural advantage that places like Phoenix have for this industry, as compared to places where there is a lot of water, like near the Great Lakes? Why build there? Is it lack of regulation?
The Republican-dominated Arizona Corporation Commission, for one; they're out to repeal the rules set in 2006 mandating increasing percentages of renewable energy generation by the electric utilities, and now want to revive old coal plants and more natural gas plants to generate the needed electricity for these frauds. (and the whole AI bubble is a fraud. Ed Zitron has been documenting the bubble...he calls it the "rot economy" for several years now. https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Warning he is...wordy. But he bring the reciepts )
It’s encouraging that investigative journalists and voters in Tucson succeeded avoiding a travesty, but as you pointed out, Gary O’Brien, the perps just moved on to places where corruption of governing officials is easier. According to the Memphis story, it’s cheap enough there for Musk to operate outside the laws and regulations with impunity (or maybe a few lawsuits that he would just consider a cost of doing business) and continue with his plans. Similar story with Fox. Murdock paid out a huge judgment for lying about voting machines, but then just went on with business as usual (that is, a continuous stream if lies, lies, and more lies). And so on. So, even though the public may occasionally succeed in shutting down harmful activity, by the time they shut it down, the damage has been done. That, or the perps just go on perping as before. I don’t see how this persistent behavior of billionaires and businesses can be stopped without violence. Where are a thousand Mangiones when you need them?
The paltry resources used to write a memo or store a cat video are NOT the problem.
Data STORAGE centers are not the problem.
The data centers using huge amounts of electricity and water are computing centers using tens or hundreds of thousands of power hungry GPU processors supporting the AI systems
The entertainment value of legal briefs written by AI (with made-up court cases and citations), followed by the judge taking a chunk out of the lawyer who used it, has to be taken into consideration.
OMG: Unregulated, private nuclear fission power plants! I see the spent waste piling up on the outskirts of Black neighborhoods. They wouldn't even bother to contain or stabilize the waste.
Regulation, if done well, is excellent and necessary. I'm all for good regulation because the profiteers tend to suffer from greed and self-interest. The emissions on these private gas turbines in South Memphis is not being put under control. Should they start building private fission plants on-site for data centers, it would not surprise me if they would just make the waste disappear, meaning where the victims have the least means to defend themselves. Fission can hold promise, but the proponents make wide detours around the waste disposal issue, which must be considered from mining to processing, to usage, to plant retirement, and plant disposal.
The reason that France, the country with the highest % of nuclear generation, has mandated solar parking lot canopies on ALL large hot asphalt parking lots nation-wide within 5 years, is because on hot days they have to curtail their nuclear generation to avoid discharging too much hot water into their rivers. Of course, the other advantages are: No new utility transmission, site acquisition or other site improvement spending required. And no permitting or interconnection delays or armies of litigious NIMBYS.
Canada has lots of water. There would however be substantial long-term issues of permitting, financing, regulating and constructing pipelines large and efficient enough to bring it from sources to markets. And those problems would be there regardless of Canada's political status. Nonetheless, the long-term development of this kind of trade should not be ruled-out a priori. We did it on a North American scale with fossil fuels, why not water.
I'm told that there are excellent reasons why one does not want to change the watershed of a flow. Atlanta has been up against this for several years. They want to tap the Tennessee river for water that would provide for additional industry and then be discharged into the Chattahoochee river, which flows into the Flint and thence to the Gulf. The Tennessee flows into the Ohio, which flows into the Mississippi, which flows into the Gulf. You don't want Tennessee river water in the Flint river.
Chicago is a good illustration of why. They reversed the flow of the Chicago river such that it flows into the Mississippi instead of the Great Lake drainage. They're fighting an expensive battle to keep invasive fish from the Mississippi out of the Great Lakes as a result.
As long as the customer uses the water only for the evaporative type of cooling system, there shouldn't be any problem, but people like Musk don't obey laws or regulations.
HUGE, so huge that there will be climate refugees.
Meanwhile, gmail gives me ai summaries to email that I don't want. yet no option to turn it off. While it has some purpose, the overkill of useless ai ( a summary of a 2 sentence email) multiplied by thousands is ridiculous. ai will tip us over the climate edge because the servers are energy sucking maniacs
There is so much reporting recently on damage to watersheds and towns experiencing droughts as they are rudely awakened to data center use of local water. It’s often about where they are placed and their indiscriminate use of the resource in small towns. Pretending that isn’t true won’t make it so.
Haha. But Peggy is absolutely right and yet Phoenix continues to be the fastest growing city in North America. Without water. Literally without water. It’s madness. They’ve already been turned down on a request to tap into the Mississippi/Missouri watershed and now they’re eyeing the Great Lakes. If that happens we’re all screwed. They should just stop building/growing in a desert that cannot sustain human development. Elbows up, everyone!
I live in Scottsdale and water is a big problem here in AZ. Keep in mind that over 70% of the water used in AZ is for agricultural use and not domestic use. Paradoxically, replacing agricultural land with a residential subdivision substantially reduces water usage. Also, it is oddly true that Phoneix uses substantial less water today than it did in the 1950s with 7 times the population.
At the same time the metro areas in AZ are more dependent on Colorado River water supplied by the Central Arizona Project canal system. That is a problem which is not going away and needs to be addressed.
Another interesting fact is new developments must have a proven 100 year supply of water before being approved. The reduced supply of water from the Colorado RIver will eventually impact the rate of growth here.
There are also changes afoot here. to conserve water. For example Scottsdale will pay homeowners $2 per square foot to replace grass lawns with more water conservation friendly landscaping. Scottsdale also has incentives to fill in swimming pools which use a lot of water due to evaporation. Golf course are also incented to reduce their grass areas. We need to do a lot more, but water conservation awareness is alive and well here in the desert.
There are also efforts to reclaim water and extend its use. Some wastewater treatment facilities use treated water to recharge underground aquifers which still account for a significant percentage of water usage in AZ.
Needed changes in water management are coming out of necessity. The rate of change is much slower than I would like, but progress is being made.
Edit for context: my response was to the initial comment of “and yet, Phoenix”.
I appreciate the larger edit too. I think simply Phoenix embodies the country’s inability to actually build where resources are. It’s actually an issue in the federal/states model, because there is a disincentive for one state to say - let’s send everybody else to another state.
What will happen in AZ is there will be less agriculture as water becomes a more valuable and limited resource. Domestic use also has precedence over agricultural use. It can be argued that the biggest AZ export is water in the agricultural products produced here. The less water available, the less exports.
Yes. Even in Arizona, ag uses four times as much water as domestic users. It is fundamentally misguided to allow the cultivation, in a desert, of crops that require large amounts of water.
Piping water to Phoenix from the great lakes is LITERALLY a pipe dream. There's no way to make the economics work so that the water delivered to Phoenix is at all affordable.
"Do we start imagining national-scale water infrastructure for tech the way we once did for highways and power lines?"
----
Highways and power lines are mostly passive once you install them: vehicles produce their own motion and pushing massless* electrons around takes far less effort than moving fluids thousands of miles.
"Will companies spending huge amounts on AI hit the brakes once they realize that they won’t be able to power their data centers?"
I'm thinking they'll be hitting the brakes as they begin to realize there's not nearly as much money in the end product as they're currently fantasizing. Indeed, replacing humans as the labor force raises the question of how the economy could possibly function if most people do not have jobs or incomes.
Yes...something Wall St. and the dudebros always ignore - if no one has a job, who is gonna be spending all that moola on consumer goods/services etc.? Hmmm? It's us little people who keep the consumer economy alive...
Prof. Brad DeLong today addresses your comment about "profits and the end product" from a strictly economics perspective, and the unprecedented sums being spent on capex, i.e., data centers. There's a huge FOMO, defensive component in this stampeding rush to build AI support and training facilities, without a demand that only barely could recover these sunk costs. A good read here:
Maybe these anti-solar/wind etc. green power men will suddenly notice that there is a great big nuclear reactor right there in the sky! Every day! And wind is everywhere! Just the power of the ocean tides and currents could power all the AI centers, the whole world actually! Maybe one of them will ask their precious AI how to harness the power of nature.
So far, there is little prospect of and profits that can justify the virtually infinite sunk costs. Remember every expensive break through creates the need for more investment the was just made obsolete. Who is left holding the bags of obsolete spending?
We will note that Microsoft is 73% institutionally owned, Alphabet (Google) is 60%, so, largely this madness is being paid for by our 401ks. Vote the madmen out! Well, you see, since it is held through index funds, you can't.
Well, if AI actually took over the economy and generated all the wealth, then we'd all get paid even though we didn't have jobs, i.e., universal income would be established to keep spending and consumption going and prevent the end of civilized life.
I think the owners of AI would keep all the wealth, as has occurred with most (all) efficiencies created in the last few decades. At least, many workers' wages have gone up very slowly, despite many so-called improvements that increased their productivity and/or their concrete, measurable "deliverables." At the same time, the gulf between wages of the producers of wealth and the owners of the wealth generated have grown dramatically. No sharing of the wealth or trickle down economics in my observations.
Exactly. They will grab all the money they can and not give a damn if the rest of us die of starvation. Short-sighted, of course, but when did anyone accuse the super wealthy of long-term thinking?
Do you seriously expect the same people who expect us taxpayers to subsidize their companies but don’t want to pay taxes will agree to sharing what they see as their money with the rest of us? Our only hope will be if Elon convinces a bunch of them to go with him to colonize Mars.
What I want to know is why we are constantly being told that there is a huge crisis coming as AI/robots replace us but there is an equally big crisis coming because of low birth rates lowering the number of workers. And why do we need manned space missions if robots/AI will be able to anything humans do and more for far less money? More importantly why are we not having these discussions? Could it be that, like Musk, most journalists watched too many sci-fi movies as kids and can’t tell reality from fantasy?
It's the same crisis; fewer workers, paying less in taxes, with the BBB adding to it. And we are having these discussions. Right here. As for manned space missions, the old argument used to be that the Earth is too small a basket for us to keep all of our eggs there. I think you didn't read enough Sci-Fi when you were a kid.
I read quite a bit of Sci-Fi (and alwasy understood Fi=fiction). I watched a lot of Star Trek, the Star Wars movies (as an adult) — and the Jetsons. I still want to those flying cars and robots that can clean my house — but don’t run away with their pals.
“ Video of a robot leading a mass escape stokes laughs and fears over AI in China”
However I never once thought “OOOhhh, I would love to live on those lifeless rocky planets or inside a spaceship when I could just walk outside and see the beauty of the Ohio River Valley or the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets.
The argument I have repeatedly seen NASA and others cite over the years to justify manned space missions is that the public will get engaged in them. That sounds like NASA needs better PR, not billions more for what they are implicitly admitting is a PR stunt. It’s not like the public has been paying attention to space shuttle missions.
NASA needs to do a lot more outreach to schools like they did back in the day with the Challenger flight. My kids teachers had all kinds of activities designed by NASA. Unfortunately they and all their fellow students saw the disaster on live TV. There is no reason NASA can’t make the same effort with robotic exploration. Kids would really love learning about robots.
Not necessarily. If the owners of the AI were wise and kind, that might happen, but what if they’re unwise and selfish? And which do you see more of when you ou look around?
In the United States of America? I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not but I can assure you that will NEVER happen in any failing capitalist state — and most certainly not in the US.
Depressingly, we are culturally the least able to create a leisure utopia where we are all served Wall-E style by automatons. Just about every aspect of the country's laws has a gotcha in it to prevent out of work individuals from claiming government benefits. They just added another one to Medicaid recently. Our predispositions turn more towards pushing excess population into the sea.
Independence from the demands of labor is a capitalist wet dream. They will not be denied. It seems likely that the country and its leaders will present an existential choice to its citizenry tear down capitalism or die, because they can't bring themselves to do anything other than create an intolerable situation in the service of the moneyed elite.
If you could do anything you want with a modest but reasonable automatic income, would you choose to have a job? Working all day doing only as you’re told, and being harassed if you make the slightest mistake or do even a little less than demanded?
The purpose of a UBI is to be a floor. If you want more, do something people will pay you for. The present safety net (such as it is) is snatched away as soon as you earn anything far less than you need to survive. It disincentivizes working, unless you can take the big single step from poverty to sufficiency. They pretend the chasm in between doesn’t exist.
20 years ago I lost my job. Unemployment was $125 A MONTH! Woo, was I living high! Then I did a one-off job that netted me $100, and I dutifully reported it as the law required. My unemployment was immediately cancelled, and would not be reinstated until I had reported NO INCOME for a full month. You think the law is working as it should?
(I started my own business and after 6 months of scrimping began to survive. Fortunately I knew how to scrimp, because I’ve never made more than $40k/yr in my life)
UBI and a JG are both needed. UBI is fine for people who can't/won't work. But the country has a ton of work that needs doing that will never be profit-generating. A JG creates jobs in public service projects that tackle social and environmental needs. It generates more local income from workers needing to buy locally than UBI, which will tend to suck dollars away from the local economy.
Every homeless person I see I imagine grew up in a home at one time occupied by at least one adult who worked. I assume JG jobs are now what goes to people in rehabilitation of some type. Jobs such as social work would barely pay above UBI, if that would even come to pass. And who watches the children of the nannies and domestics? Apparently, that's unpaid, too.
To make up an example on the fly, with JG money my city could hire tradespeople (or even better, work with unions to train them) and use them to make small improvements to the homes and property of residents. The cost could be repaid by the homeowner in multiple ways, or the city could wait until the property is sold and capture the appreciation then. We’d get more tradespeople, which we need, and those tradespeople will buy food, tools, work clothes, get married, go out to eat (encouraging budding restaurateurs to hire more, which encourages their waiters, etc. etc.).
Nannies etc. would also be paid as part of the JG. In many cases, both parents have to work to get the money they need to hire someone for childcare, so why not just pay one of them to stay home and care for their own children? The savings would be huge, and by paying the caregiver we stimulate the local economy, making it more independent of the corporate giants who would rather buy a wing for an art museum as a tax dodge with the dollars they suck out of the economy.
The people paying for all of this are expecting to get a return on their investment. They are not going to just turn over their "hard won profits" to a government agency to fund UBI. They expect to profit handsomely from all this. Why else would they be racing as if FOMO was the final stage before the rapture. The only way this money becomes UBI is if the government forcibly takes the money or the technology from them.
I would love to believe this. But so far we have yet to receive any worker benefits related to improved efficiencies. And I have no reason to believe we will in the future either.
You mean, like it has for the increasing numbers of homeless people? I’m sorry but I think the mentality of our current zeitgeist is that people without jobs are useless and need to be discarded. That sounds harsh, I know, but just look around. Greed has no bounds and does not want to share.
AI owners would not be providing universal income. If all work is being done by AI, then wealth will be generated and taxes will be paid to the government, which will in turn distribute some of that money as income to the nonworking masses. It's not a question of whether AI owners (or the government) will be nice, it's a question of preserving society so that we the masses don't hang AI owners from lampposts.
I feel the billionaires know all that, but on the cusp of being finally, finally, FINALLY independent of the demands of whiny, snivelling, won't-stay-in-their-place, where's-my-vacation? labor, and you want to chain them to government?! They will not accept this. They can't. It goes against everything they believe in, everything they have worked for. It's worse.
Where. is. the. profit. in. that?!
NO.
No. No. No.
The only way forward is the proles must die.
Hey, and would you look at that, just add a few guns and we even have the robo-army to do it!
Yes, if only people knew how Curtis Yarvin is talking about useless people becoming bio-fuel. They've already got a head start by sending the fed gestapo to DC to charge undesirables with the highest federal crime for some piss-ant misdemeanor, gratis Jeanine Pirro, and throw them in the prison/concentration camps with the rounded up ICE enslaved. This will probably include homeless vets, too, that I read about in today's NYT.
Thanks for mentioning Curtis Yarvin, and just one of his mountain of psychotic ideas. Unfortunately for most of us, the tech bros have bought into his ‘philosophy’ and they’re in the White House setting policy inline with Yarvin’s rants on destroying democracy. UBI is a fantasy to quench the concerns of the masses that AI-promoters are promising to make jobless. An excellent website exposing the dystopian future the tech bro billionaires have in mind is TheNerdReich.com, written by long-time San Francisco journalist Gil Duran (no paywall).
Professor Krugman: the resulting economic crash from this latest bubble "pop" will be devastating. the environment, which elon musk is happily destroying -- and the impoverished black people of memphis -- will be grateful for the relief from being poisoned by massive air pollution.
(still wondering why oligarchs are allowed to pollute and destroy at will, leaving taxpayers to clean up their messes.)
You are absolutely right. In the spirit of AI I ran your point through ChatGPT. Here is it’s response, demonstrating that some AI sites can be thoughtful:
“You’re pointing at a common problem in environmental policy called the “polluter pays principle” vs. public burden issue.
When pollution cleanup falls on the public (taxpayers, communities, or governments) rather than the polluter (companies, industries, individuals who caused the damage), several things happen:
• Moral hazard: Polluters have little incentive to reduce waste or invest in cleaner technology if they know society will pick up the bill.
• Unfair costs: Ordinary citizens who didn’t cause the pollution bear the financial, health, and environmental burden.
• Regulatory gap: This often occurs when laws are weak, enforcement is lacking, or polluters exploit loopholes (e.g., declaring bankruptcy to avoid cleanup).
• Examples:
• Abandoned mines and oil wells where cleanup costs are shifted to taxpayers.
• Superfund sites in the U.S., where the EPA sometimes pays when responsible parties can’t be found.
• Plastic pollution, where disposal costs are covered by municipalities instead of packaging producers.
Environmental economists argue strongly for the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) — the idea that whoever causes the damage should bear the cost of managing it — to encourage accountability and fairness.”
Great summary of why PPP is necessary but as comments point out it only works if the GOVERNMENT is responsible enough to make them pay and effective enough to enforce the regulations. We have only sporadically had either and rarely both at the same time. Consumer demand forced through the minimum standard of bottle bills (deposits and return sites) but only at the state level and rarely able to force companies to pay for the deposit-driven returns of plastic crap. So it ends up being handed back to them but they deal with it “profitably” or just chuck it back into the waste stream. While consumers feel better about buying plastic “because it will be recycled.”
Earth Day and Superfund .... circa the Nixon to Carter era.... motivated in part by a river catching on fire..... NOW.... you can burn a City to the ground... (bits of LA) and we respond.... Act of god!. Covid.... act of god... do away with the vaccine miracle.
Bless your heart! You have hit on the on going " original sin" of mankind, which is not eating of the apple of knowledge, but Cain's reply to God:" Am I my brother's keeper?" ( My opinion)
I'm having trouble really connecting "crash" with "an end to wasting money on non-essential work". GDP will definitely go down, but only because the P in GDP was mistakenly measuring assets used for waste.
Certainly we can expect a contraction, but some economy unraveling crash? No. That comes later when the AI people actually succeed, and jobs get really hard to find.
Consumer cost for electric power is rated on a sliding scale: the more you use, the cheaper your rate per kWh. So residential customers must subsidize the huge consumers, the bitcoin and AI centers. Will residential consumers, voters, agree to continue this financial support for the „system” at increasing personal cost?
Here in Costa Rica we also have a sliding scale. The more you use the more you pay which is as it should be. Energy hungry companies are forced to work at off peak hours when they get a cost break.
Large industrial electricity users once traded “interruptible” power for lower rates. (My A/C runs through a switch that cuts power to my A/C when the system needs exceed its capacity.) However, I am told that the large computer centers tapped into our local utility have no such constraints and depend on their own NG generating plants when power is in short supply. Under this system, wind and solar generation and battery powered cars will never catch up with the creation of our locally murky air.
This is finally starting to be talked about; it should have been front and center a year or more ago. We are definitely due for another bubble bursting; it's been almost 20 years now. From an environmental perspective that "pop" will be a positive. If it also hurts Trump and the tech bros, so much the better.
If/when the bubble bursts, there will still be some firms that have been successful. If the need for "data crunching" continues to increase, will those successful firms be able to take over the assets of those who failed or are they too many technological (software/hardware) differences such that those assets will remain idle for ever?
The old IBM and Bell Labs campuses might serve as examples. IBM East Fishkill closed down about 1990. It lay derelict for about 30 years. It's being remade as a sort of super-mall. Bell Labs had a facility not far from where I live. One large multi-story building with hanging baskets in the center area containing small trees (I kid you not). It closed in the early '90s and lay empty until about 15 years ago. The buyer built homes on much of the land and turned the building into a combination office and shopping complex.
In both cases the equipment was removed. In the case of the Bell Labs building, office furniture was sold off. That was probably also the case with IBM.
And yet, and yet, the government is choking off development in renewable energy. ????? Also, and this is dark enough to sound almost Q-Anon (apologies in advance), but as a person who spent a major part of her life as a therapist, I have a great interest in character, and what it can lead to. So I tend to view people like the extraordinary character, Elon Musk (and many of his compadres among the tech broliarchs) with both interest and educated suspicion. He put methane tanks, without pollution filters, in a black city and 'ignored' the alarming disease uptick in people who lived nearby. And consider this: he is an obvious racist, from a country which practiced Apartheid during the time he lived there, he is also, based on a lot of evidence, a pathological narcissist and drug abuser. Put that in a blender, press the button and get someone who might actually think that killing off poor black people is a feature, not a bug in his plans. See also Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, especially. (Thiel is also from S. Africa.) I know, I know. It's hard to imagine, but a failure of imagination allowed Hitler's rise to power. Just saying.
Just read that Google is building a small nuclear reactor in Tennessee in a partnership with the TVA to power one of its AI farms. This is such a terrible idea I don't even know where to start, but I guess the fact that we still haven't figured out how to safely dispose of nuclear waste issue would be my biggest concern. My #2 concern is that if there is any kind of issue, the public will be on the hook for cleanup and mitigation thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, which limits liability of private nuclear reactor operators. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses ...
A key question indeed. Energy is the core restraint on AI growth. Together with lack of validity, reliability, objectivity and sheer truthfulness in a mushrooming bunch of useless (sycophant) B2C & C2C LLM applications created with a single objective in mind: Making a lot of money -preferrably quickly- for their originators. For Humanity’s sake - lets hope for a quick demise of models which cannot differentiate between Truth and Facts from False and Fakes. That might alleviate a growing share of inference energy consumption. Finally- with AGI, how big is the risk that AI models themselves take over the decisionmaking on how to prioritize a General Energy Bottleneck?
Dan Wang suggests in his fantastic forthcoming book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, that China is focusing on building the physical technologies of the future, such as renewable energy, while America obsesses over virtual possibilities and problems. If AGI turns out to be a bust, and the Trump administration does everything it can to squash renewables, America could find itself in real trouble.
If China leaps ahead on energy technology, as seems likely, other countries are going to be pulled into its orbit. Dark warnings from the United States about the risks of dependence on China will ring hollow to countries that are all too aware of how willing the United States is to weaponize interdependence for its own selfish purposes.
In the wake of Trump’s insane dark age style attacks on Science in the US, it is evident for the rest of us World citizens, that The Atlantic Century, dominated by the United States-is irrevocably in its last stage. It is now rapidly being replaced by the first stage of a Pacific Century dominated by China. The difference in ”Statesmanhood Wisdom”- is staggering. Wise steps of combining Basic & Applied Research and Applications Engineering in both Technology and Society in China risks leaving the US far behind-if present trends continue.
Paul thanks for the reality check. A NEW AI Report from MIT should give us some comfort: NOPE
MIT 5/20/25 —“We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.”
“We spoke to two dozen experts measuring AI’s energy demands, evaluated different AI models and prompts, pored over hundreds of pages of projections and reports, and questioned top AI model makers about their plans. Ultimately, we found that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes.” —
I assume a significant proportion of current "free" users of USA based AI systems are from other countries (Europe, South America, India, etc).
Why isn't Drumpf sending all caps messages about the damage hey are causing to residential power consumers in the US, the environment, water resources, and so on?
Turgut Tuten, Oh hahaha, that will be the day indeed, when our president cares for the environment over his pet projects of making as much money as possible before the ending of his term.
As to how AI is going to affect the economy going forward depends a lot on who is in control of DC. A friend, a Republican, asked me a few years ago what I saw as the difference between the Liberials and the Reich and what I told him was that Liberals always look forward and the Reich always looks backwards. that is why most all advancement in the USA comes when Dems are in control and all regression for at least the past 50yrs has always come when we gave Republicans control. I have only recently understood how Republicans win because they never run on anything but Trump has proven to us all that it is nothing more than just shear racism and masogyny. The GOP as a party has absolutly nothing else to offer. No vision of the good future, no plan to help our lives, no plan to educate our children, nothing more than a plan to make us all slaves to what they want and looking back over the past 50yrs they never have. But, they have embrassed the hatred of racism and given people a shoulder to cry when they want someone to blame because in the most opportunistic country in the World they are still a failure. It is always their own fault. Look at a place like W Virginia where unemployment is the highest in the country, if you were raised there and know this wouldn't you look to finding a way to leave? But that is not what happens, you get someone like Turmp that goes to WV, makes big promises, lying out his ass and they stay and then nothing happens and of course as with all Republicans it is the fault of the Latinos, the Blacks, the Asians, the Native Americans, it is the fault of everyone but the person theay didn't save their pennies and leave. We are now stuck with another 3.5yrs of a P0S who's biggest accomplishments in life are 6 bankruptcies. But, under Trump you do get to hate and blame everyone else. Good luck with that.
That is exactly right and they are not smart enough to see that the leadership they wanted is driving us at 100mph to collapse. It was Republican's Greed that killed the USA in the '30s and since they refuse to read History we are about to repeat it.
Northern Virginia has become the world's biggest concentration of data centers. Citizens are belatedly trying to fight back, but Big Data maintains the upper hand. Construction continues all over the region, while at the same time new projects are sprouting all over the country, often again taking local citizens by surprise before they can organize.
Big Data is giving us no say in what they doing to us with AI or data centers. They prefer we remain sheeple, experimental subjects.
Dominion Power is completely non-transparent with the impact of this on long term power cost and availability, or how much Big Data is using what they pay for it. However, they seem to be behind initiatives to encourage citizens to adopt power conservation measures and roof-top solar power, in a sense putting off on us the work they ought to be doing themselves. This would be a worthy effort were it to stop climate change rather than free up more power for Big Data.
Another terrible thing is that companies seem to be falling into the AI canard: at my job, the Directors are hell-bent on everyone installing AI tools, even though they have no idea what we should use them for or what the benefit is.
Ironically, the same managers pushing for "diversity" initiatives without any idea what that was about, just to cover their asses, are now pushing for "AI" just because it's the new trend.
It's infuriating, I don't know if other companies are the same, but in mine, the C-Level managers are just a bunch of yes men (and one woman) who just implement whatever the shareholders say, no matter what. Fire loyal employees to increase EBITDA? You got it! Destroy hard-working teams that actually get shit done? No problem! And they get paid 4 or 5 times more than the coders actually figuring the shit out. This model of late-stage capitalism is completely disfuncional!
I think it is because often have no idea how to solve problems, but believe they can't personally be blamed for doing what everybody else is doing. Whereas they can be blamed for NOT doing what everybody else is doing.
I started my last job about 40 yrs ago, retired now. I worked at a coal fire plant. About half of the capital to build it was for pollution control. The city of Orlando citizens that own us did not want the degradation of their environment. Well the utility is now moving to solar and other green power because it is cheaper. Coal power is dying. The weird thing is the only way to meet AI power requirements is to go almost full green. So we got two industries at odds with each other, one fossil fuel and the other AI. Sadly we live in interesting times.
The other limiting factor is water for cooling the equipment.
The electricity you can at least envision a solution (green tech, maybe they’ll even cynically finally embrace nuclear).
Figuring out water is even more difficult, but it seems like the various crises in the country might lead to a need for massive water infrastructure and pipelines in the future. Or lots of abandoned towns, cities and of course, data centers.
Yes, water is a huge issue. I posted some links yesterday that I won't re-post here. But most of the data centers use the more wasteful evaporation model of water cooling, rather than the recirculation model. As a result, a data center may use 300,000 gallons of water per day. The biggest ones may use up to 1 million gallons per day. This is potable water we're talking about. And people living around them are finding that their water has been destroyed and they cannot drink it. Not to mention the ground sinking around them.
Yeah, we're definitely running headlong into a water crisis. Global warming alone will do it, but these data centers are exacerbating the problem exponentially. Pretty soon, water will be the most valuable commodity.
Remember the movie, The Big Short, based upon a book about the autistic guy who made a bundle betting against the 2008 sub-prime mortgage market? I remember the credits at the end of the movie and statement following that he had re-invested those proceeds into water investments. A couple of years ago or so, I decided to google-search him and what he was up to. He cashed out of his water investments and re-invested the proceeds 100% into private prison companies. Maybe he's moved on again now that knowledge of that has come to pass as a lucrative investment.
Loved that movie! Michael Burry of Scion Asset Mgmt.
You are also a parasite.
Burning methane spews CO2.
You are a parasite.
Here we go again. Spam bot reported.
actually, cooling towers don't use any water. The evaporate enters the hydrologic cycle and is returned as rain or snow. The blowdown is discharged to a river typically, and then to the ocean. If push comes to shove, locate the data centers near the oceans and run once-through cooling systems. Lots of nukes do that.
If you spray water on a golf course, that is using water. It doesn't matter if the water soaks into the ground or evaporates, etc. It is already gone from the human captured water accounting. I do not think you get to claim that evaporated water is not using water. It can not be used for other human needs until it happens to fall as rain again into a river system we can use or soaks through the ground into an aquifer over 1000 years. A lot of this rain will just fall on the ocean.
you are confusing USING water with LOSING water. All the water is recycled as evaporate, ground water, or discharge to a receiving stream. Over time the system is in a steady state where water used = water recovered. Over short periods you can have imbalances due to the cycle time. Consider Lake Mead. It is dropping because of excessive water demand down the Colorado but all that water re-enters the system over time. Conservation of mass.
but does it remain in the steady-state system in a form that is useful to some human purposes in the next 20 or 50 years? If not, then it's as good as gone.
Yes. Almost nothing we do with water chemically alters it to be another compound. Probably the biggest example is sugar / starch biosynthesis in agriculture which isn't that enormous and probably dwarfed by nature (I haven't looked.) There is also more water than we know what to do with in the ocean. Running out of water, per se, isn't a worry. At all.
The problem is cheaply accessible clean water that we don't have to distill to use. This is the stuff humans use because the alternative is too expensive and that is what these data centers is throwing away.
Why is Ogalala Aquifer running out of water? The water is still on planet Earth but might be in ocean.
Never doubt the ability of technology to solve such problems. If push comes to shove there are always the Great Lakes to get us through the next ten thousand years. And who says you need FRESH water for cooling? Lots of coastal power plants using once-through sea water.
The people living around the Great Lakes are very aware of their bounty and very possessive of it.
Eminent Domain! Once enough of the rest of the country demands it there will be a big straw stretching west.
Of course, as a practical matter, we could always prioritize usage: drinking water first to AI data centers, crypto last…whoops, don’t have any crypto electrical usage numbers. Brought to us by the genius who got rid of Covid by not testing. No numbers, no problem.
Bye bye spam bot. Reported.
And it’s gone!
Here in Tucson, the residents managed to stop “Project Blue”, a deal for an AMZ server farm hidden for years by NDAs signed by local planners.
When it came time for city council to approve annexation of the site to allow access to water (both potable and reclaimed), a local independent news outlet (Arizona Luminaria) filed FOIA requests and uncovered the hidden dealing.
City Council was browbeaten by the voters to reject the plan. However, in many other localities, the same secretive, shady deals are still afoot.
Water is life here, and the only thing keeping us growing here is the water we pipe in from the Colorado River. The storage in lakes Powell and Mead is steadily declining as the region-wide drought intensifies.
No one is yet talking about who gets the water as it becomes less and less available.
I have a basic economics question. What is the natural advantage that places like Phoenix have for this industry, as compared to places where there is a lot of water, like near the Great Lakes? Why build there? Is it lack of regulation?
The Republican-dominated Arizona Corporation Commission, for one; they're out to repeal the rules set in 2006 mandating increasing percentages of renewable energy generation by the electric utilities, and now want to revive old coal plants and more natural gas plants to generate the needed electricity for these frauds. (and the whole AI bubble is a fraud. Ed Zitron has been documenting the bubble...he calls it the "rot economy" for several years now. https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Warning he is...wordy. But he bring the reciepts )
I have nothing to add but my one ASU joke (I am in Tucson, home of the in-state rivals University of Arizona)
Q: How do you get the ASU grad to leave your porch?
A: Pay them for the pizza. [rimshot]
That used to be funny but it turns out UA is so corrupt that it might be better to be an ASU grad.
It’s encouraging that investigative journalists and voters in Tucson succeeded avoiding a travesty, but as you pointed out, Gary O’Brien, the perps just moved on to places where corruption of governing officials is easier. According to the Memphis story, it’s cheap enough there for Musk to operate outside the laws and regulations with impunity (or maybe a few lawsuits that he would just consider a cost of doing business) and continue with his plans. Similar story with Fox. Murdock paid out a huge judgment for lying about voting machines, but then just went on with business as usual (that is, a continuous stream if lies, lies, and more lies). And so on. So, even though the public may occasionally succeed in shutting down harmful activity, by the time they shut it down, the damage has been done. That, or the perps just go on perping as before. I don’t see how this persistent behavior of billionaires and businesses can be stopped without violence. Where are a thousand Mangiones when you need them?
This article in The Conversation was just published today. It lays out the problem of water use by data centers: https://theconversation.com/data-centers-consume-massive-amounts-of-water-companies-rarely-tell-the-public-exactly-how-much-262901
Thanks for the link.
We are literally being sucked dry in the west as it is..now we are wasting resources to write memos, store cat videos, …this is silly!
The paltry resources used to write a memo or store a cat video are NOT the problem.
Data STORAGE centers are not the problem.
The data centers using huge amounts of electricity and water are computing centers using tens or hundreds of thousands of power hungry GPU processors supporting the AI systems
The write memos was the AI reference…of course! Or stupid search engines, or whatever wasteful uses there are…
I was thinking of the recent admonition by the UK government to 'delete old enails and pictures to conserve water' https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/12/uk_government_delete_emails_water/
So what was the point in going paperless to begin with?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sweet baby Jesus' mitochondria, that's stupefying!
Drought in England.
The entertainment value of legal briefs written by AI (with made-up court cases and citations), followed by the judge taking a chunk out of the lawyer who used it, has to be taken into consideration.
OMG: Unregulated, private nuclear fission power plants! I see the spent waste piling up on the outskirts of Black neighborhoods. They wouldn't even bother to contain or stabilize the waste.
Who said anything about unregulated?
Regulation is not a dirty word, you’re highlighting a great use case. Just needs to be thoughtful.
Regulation, if done well, is excellent and necessary. I'm all for good regulation because the profiteers tend to suffer from greed and self-interest. The emissions on these private gas turbines in South Memphis is not being put under control. Should they start building private fission plants on-site for data centers, it would not surprise me if they would just make the waste disappear, meaning where the victims have the least means to defend themselves. Fission can hold promise, but the proponents make wide detours around the waste disposal issue, which must be considered from mining to processing, to usage, to plant retirement, and plant disposal.
The reason that France, the country with the highest % of nuclear generation, has mandated solar parking lot canopies on ALL large hot asphalt parking lots nation-wide within 5 years, is because on hot days they have to curtail their nuclear generation to avoid discharging too much hot water into their rivers. Of course, the other advantages are: No new utility transmission, site acquisition or other site improvement spending required. And no permitting or interconnection delays or armies of litigious NIMBYS.
A city official here in NV told us the new data centers coming to Dayton (Lyon County) are air-cooled. I cannot find confirmation, so prolly a lie.
Came here to say this. This is esp. limiting in arid/semiarid/drought prone regions such as the intermountain west.
Not to mention where they're going to find all the water they need. The Great Lakes, maybe.
Canada has lots of water. There would however be substantial long-term issues of permitting, financing, regulating and constructing pipelines large and efficient enough to bring it from sources to markets. And those problems would be there regardless of Canada's political status. Nonetheless, the long-term development of this kind of trade should not be ruled-out a priori. We did it on a North American scale with fossil fuels, why not water.
I'm told that there are excellent reasons why one does not want to change the watershed of a flow. Atlanta has been up against this for several years. They want to tap the Tennessee river for water that would provide for additional industry and then be discharged into the Chattahoochee river, which flows into the Flint and thence to the Gulf. The Tennessee flows into the Ohio, which flows into the Mississippi, which flows into the Gulf. You don't want Tennessee river water in the Flint river.
Chicago is a good illustration of why. They reversed the flow of the Chicago river such that it flows into the Mississippi instead of the Great Lake drainage. They're fighting an expensive battle to keep invasive fish from the Mississippi out of the Great Lakes as a result.
As long as the customer uses the water only for the evaporative type of cooling system, there shouldn't be any problem, but people like Musk don't obey laws or regulations.
On embracing nuclear: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai
I heard about that! Thx for the link,
Read The Water Knife yet?
HUGE, so huge that there will be climate refugees.
Meanwhile, gmail gives me ai summaries to email that I don't want. yet no option to turn it off. While it has some purpose, the overkill of useless ai ( a summary of a 2 sentence email) multiplied by thousands is ridiculous. ai will tip us over the climate edge because the servers are energy sucking maniacs
This is not true. Water is just not a relevant concern here.
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about?open=false#%C2%A7water
If you want to save water, and you currently eat meat, go veg one day a week, and you'll have saved FAR more water than your internet habits consume.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/theres-plenty-of-water-for-data-centers
There is so much reporting recently on damage to watersheds and towns experiencing droughts as they are rudely awakened to data center use of local water. It’s often about where they are placed and their indiscriminate use of the resource in small towns. Pretending that isn’t true won’t make it so.
I think Peggy Hill’s feelings towards Phoenix sums it up.
https://imgur.com/jTzOgkn
Haha. But Peggy is absolutely right and yet Phoenix continues to be the fastest growing city in North America. Without water. Literally without water. It’s madness. They’ve already been turned down on a request to tap into the Mississippi/Missouri watershed and now they’re eyeing the Great Lakes. If that happens we’re all screwed. They should just stop building/growing in a desert that cannot sustain human development. Elbows up, everyone!
I live in Scottsdale and water is a big problem here in AZ. Keep in mind that over 70% of the water used in AZ is for agricultural use and not domestic use. Paradoxically, replacing agricultural land with a residential subdivision substantially reduces water usage. Also, it is oddly true that Phoneix uses substantial less water today than it did in the 1950s with 7 times the population.
At the same time the metro areas in AZ are more dependent on Colorado River water supplied by the Central Arizona Project canal system. That is a problem which is not going away and needs to be addressed.
Another interesting fact is new developments must have a proven 100 year supply of water before being approved. The reduced supply of water from the Colorado RIver will eventually impact the rate of growth here.
There are also changes afoot here. to conserve water. For example Scottsdale will pay homeowners $2 per square foot to replace grass lawns with more water conservation friendly landscaping. Scottsdale also has incentives to fill in swimming pools which use a lot of water due to evaporation. Golf course are also incented to reduce their grass areas. We need to do a lot more, but water conservation awareness is alive and well here in the desert.
There are also efforts to reclaim water and extend its use. Some wastewater treatment facilities use treated water to recharge underground aquifers which still account for a significant percentage of water usage in AZ.
Needed changes in water management are coming out of necessity. The rate of change is much slower than I would like, but progress is being made.
All good news. Thank you very much for sharing.
Arizona Limits Construction Around Phoenix as Its Water Supply Dwindles
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/climate/arizona-phoenix-permits-housing-water.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Edit for context: my response was to the initial comment of “and yet, Phoenix”.
I appreciate the larger edit too. I think simply Phoenix embodies the country’s inability to actually build where resources are. It’s actually an issue in the federal/states model, because there is a disincentive for one state to say - let’s send everybody else to another state.
That goes all the way down to small towns. In many cases, they're not going to discourage additional building which adds to their tax base.
What will happen in AZ is there will be less agriculture as water becomes a more valuable and limited resource. Domestic use also has precedence over agricultural use. It can be argued that the biggest AZ export is water in the agricultural products produced here. The less water available, the less exports.
Yes. Even in Arizona, ag uses four times as much water as domestic users. It is fundamentally misguided to allow the cultivation, in a desert, of crops that require large amounts of water.
Piping water to Phoenix from the great lakes is LITERALLY a pipe dream. There's no way to make the economics work so that the water delivered to Phoenix is at all affordable.
"Do we start imagining national-scale water infrastructure for tech the way we once did for highways and power lines?"
----
Highways and power lines are mostly passive once you install them: vehicles produce their own motion and pushing massless* electrons around takes far less effort than moving fluids thousands of miles.
__________________
*Hey, physics pedant: I'm tawkin' heah.
"Will companies spending huge amounts on AI hit the brakes once they realize that they won’t be able to power their data centers?"
I'm thinking they'll be hitting the brakes as they begin to realize there's not nearly as much money in the end product as they're currently fantasizing. Indeed, replacing humans as the labor force raises the question of how the economy could possibly function if most people do not have jobs or incomes.
That’s my skepticism as well. Good luck selling $1,000 iPhones to unemployed people.
Yes...something Wall St. and the dudebros always ignore - if no one has a job, who is gonna be spending all that moola on consumer goods/services etc.? Hmmm? It's us little people who keep the consumer economy alive...
Prof. Brad DeLong today addresses your comment about "profits and the end product" from a strictly economics perspective, and the unprecedented sums being spent on capex, i.e., data centers. There's a huge FOMO, defensive component in this stampeding rush to build AI support and training facilities, without a demand that only barely could recover these sunk costs. A good read here:
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/i-badly-want-a-map-to-the-likely?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
If you can't spot the bubble, it is because you have your hands over your eyes.
Maybe these anti-solar/wind etc. green power men will suddenly notice that there is a great big nuclear reactor right there in the sky! Every day! And wind is everywhere! Just the power of the ocean tides and currents could power all the AI centers, the whole world actually! Maybe one of them will ask their precious AI how to harness the power of nature.
So far, there is little prospect of and profits that can justify the virtually infinite sunk costs. Remember every expensive break through creates the need for more investment the was just made obsolete. Who is left holding the bags of obsolete spending?
Investors in microsoft, google, OpenAI, etc.
We will note that Microsoft is 73% institutionally owned, Alphabet (Google) is 60%, so, largely this madness is being paid for by our 401ks. Vote the madmen out! Well, you see, since it is held through index funds, you can't.
Well, if AI actually took over the economy and generated all the wealth, then we'd all get paid even though we didn't have jobs, i.e., universal income would be established to keep spending and consumption going and prevent the end of civilized life.
I think the owners of AI would keep all the wealth, as has occurred with most (all) efficiencies created in the last few decades. At least, many workers' wages have gone up very slowly, despite many so-called improvements that increased their productivity and/or their concrete, measurable "deliverables." At the same time, the gulf between wages of the producers of wealth and the owners of the wealth generated have grown dramatically. No sharing of the wealth or trickle down economics in my observations.
Exactly. They will grab all the money they can and not give a damn if the rest of us die of starvation. Short-sighted, of course, but when did anyone accuse the super wealthy of long-term thinking?
Do you seriously expect the same people who expect us taxpayers to subsidize their companies but don’t want to pay taxes will agree to sharing what they see as their money with the rest of us? Our only hope will be if Elon convinces a bunch of them to go with him to colonize Mars.
What I want to know is why we are constantly being told that there is a huge crisis coming as AI/robots replace us but there is an equally big crisis coming because of low birth rates lowering the number of workers. And why do we need manned space missions if robots/AI will be able to anything humans do and more for far less money? More importantly why are we not having these discussions? Could it be that, like Musk, most journalists watched too many sci-fi movies as kids and can’t tell reality from fantasy?
The power of gibberish propaganda.
It's the same crisis; fewer workers, paying less in taxes, with the BBB adding to it. And we are having these discussions. Right here. As for manned space missions, the old argument used to be that the Earth is too small a basket for us to keep all of our eggs there. I think you didn't read enough Sci-Fi when you were a kid.
I read quite a bit of Sci-Fi (and alwasy understood Fi=fiction). I watched a lot of Star Trek, the Star Wars movies (as an adult) — and the Jetsons. I still want to those flying cars and robots that can clean my house — but don’t run away with their pals.
“ Video of a robot leading a mass escape stokes laughs and fears over AI in China”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/video-robot-leading-mass-escape-093000836.html
However I never once thought “OOOhhh, I would love to live on those lifeless rocky planets or inside a spaceship when I could just walk outside and see the beauty of the Ohio River Valley or the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets.
The argument I have repeatedly seen NASA and others cite over the years to justify manned space missions is that the public will get engaged in them. That sounds like NASA needs better PR, not billions more for what they are implicitly admitting is a PR stunt. It’s not like the public has been paying attention to space shuttle missions.
NASA needs to do a lot more outreach to schools like they did back in the day with the Challenger flight. My kids teachers had all kinds of activities designed by NASA. Unfortunately they and all their fellow students saw the disaster on live TV. There is no reason NASA can’t make the same effort with robotic exploration. Kids would really love learning about robots.
We will never get off this planet with robotic exploration. NASA (or someone) needs to colonize other planets (even orbiting other stars) with people.
Not necessarily. If the owners of the AI were wise and kind, that might happen, but what if they’re unwise and selfish? And which do you see more of when you ou look around?
If they were wise and kind, we would see it in their choice of methods to power the data centers.
You'd just hear the giant sucking sound of all that generated wealth going upwards.
In the United States of America? I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not but I can assure you that will NEVER happen in any failing capitalist state — and most certainly not in the US.
Depressingly, we are culturally the least able to create a leisure utopia where we are all served Wall-E style by automatons. Just about every aspect of the country's laws has a gotcha in it to prevent out of work individuals from claiming government benefits. They just added another one to Medicaid recently. Our predispositions turn more towards pushing excess population into the sea.
Independence from the demands of labor is a capitalist wet dream. They will not be denied. It seems likely that the country and its leaders will present an existential choice to its citizenry tear down capitalism or die, because they can't bring themselves to do anything other than create an intolerable situation in the service of the moneyed elite.
You're kidding, right? The musks of the world will keep every extra nickel for themselves.
Let them eat crypto.
We want a job guarantee, not just UBI
I am retired. Social Security is my UBI.
Only for a little while.
19 years this year.
Do you not think people can work out useful things to fo with their time, if they are not worried about having no money?
Really? You have nothing better to do than work at meaningless tasks, solving other peoples problems that might only be make work?
If you could do anything you want with a modest but reasonable automatic income, would you choose to have a job? Working all day doing only as you’re told, and being harassed if you make the slightest mistake or do even a little less than demanded?
The purpose of a UBI is to be a floor. If you want more, do something people will pay you for. The present safety net (such as it is) is snatched away as soon as you earn anything far less than you need to survive. It disincentivizes working, unless you can take the big single step from poverty to sufficiency. They pretend the chasm in between doesn’t exist.
20 years ago I lost my job. Unemployment was $125 A MONTH! Woo, was I living high! Then I did a one-off job that netted me $100, and I dutifully reported it as the law required. My unemployment was immediately cancelled, and would not be reinstated until I had reported NO INCOME for a full month. You think the law is working as it should?
(I started my own business and after 6 months of scrimping began to survive. Fortunately I knew how to scrimp, because I’ve never made more than $40k/yr in my life)
Why?
UBI and a JG are both needed. UBI is fine for people who can't/won't work. But the country has a ton of work that needs doing that will never be profit-generating. A JG creates jobs in public service projects that tackle social and environmental needs. It generates more local income from workers needing to buy locally than UBI, which will tend to suck dollars away from the local economy.
Every homeless person I see I imagine grew up in a home at one time occupied by at least one adult who worked. I assume JG jobs are now what goes to people in rehabilitation of some type. Jobs such as social work would barely pay above UBI, if that would even come to pass. And who watches the children of the nannies and domestics? Apparently, that's unpaid, too.
JG jobs aren't make-work.
To make up an example on the fly, with JG money my city could hire tradespeople (or even better, work with unions to train them) and use them to make small improvements to the homes and property of residents. The cost could be repaid by the homeowner in multiple ways, or the city could wait until the property is sold and capture the appreciation then. We’d get more tradespeople, which we need, and those tradespeople will buy food, tools, work clothes, get married, go out to eat (encouraging budding restaurateurs to hire more, which encourages their waiters, etc. etc.).
Nannies etc. would also be paid as part of the JG. In many cases, both parents have to work to get the money they need to hire someone for childcare, so why not just pay one of them to stay home and care for their own children? The savings would be huge, and by paying the caregiver we stimulate the local economy, making it more independent of the corporate giants who would rather buy a wing for an art museum as a tax dodge with the dollars they suck out of the economy.
That is a nice fantasy.
The people paying for all of this are expecting to get a return on their investment. They are not going to just turn over their "hard won profits" to a government agency to fund UBI. They expect to profit handsomely from all this. Why else would they be racing as if FOMO was the final stage before the rapture. The only way this money becomes UBI is if the government forcibly takes the money or the technology from them.
I don't see *this* government doing that, do you?
I would love to believe this. But so far we have yet to receive any worker benefits related to improved efficiencies. And I have no reason to believe we will in the future either.
More likely, setting the stage for a real-life Butlerian Jihad.
You mean, like it has for the increasing numbers of homeless people? I’m sorry but I think the mentality of our current zeitgeist is that people without jobs are useless and need to be discarded. That sounds harsh, I know, but just look around. Greed has no bounds and does not want to share.
AI owners would not be providing universal income. If all work is being done by AI, then wealth will be generated and taxes will be paid to the government, which will in turn distribute some of that money as income to the nonworking masses. It's not a question of whether AI owners (or the government) will be nice, it's a question of preserving society so that we the masses don't hang AI owners from lampposts.
I feel the billionaires know all that, but on the cusp of being finally, finally, FINALLY independent of the demands of whiny, snivelling, won't-stay-in-their-place, where's-my-vacation? labor, and you want to chain them to government?! They will not accept this. They can't. It goes against everything they believe in, everything they have worked for. It's worse.
Where. is. the. profit. in. that?!
NO.
No. No. No.
The only way forward is the proles must die.
Hey, and would you look at that, just add a few guns and we even have the robo-army to do it!
Yes, if only people knew how Curtis Yarvin is talking about useless people becoming bio-fuel. They've already got a head start by sending the fed gestapo to DC to charge undesirables with the highest federal crime for some piss-ant misdemeanor, gratis Jeanine Pirro, and throw them in the prison/concentration camps with the rounded up ICE enslaved. This will probably include homeless vets, too, that I read about in today's NYT.
Thanks for mentioning Curtis Yarvin, and just one of his mountain of psychotic ideas. Unfortunately for most of us, the tech bros have bought into his ‘philosophy’ and they’re in the White House setting policy inline with Yarvin’s rants on destroying democracy. UBI is a fantasy to quench the concerns of the masses that AI-promoters are promising to make jobless. An excellent website exposing the dystopian future the tech bro billionaires have in mind is TheNerdReich.com, written by long-time San Francisco journalist Gil Duran (no paywall).
I want some of what you're smoking.
Something tells me those backing the loss in jobs really do not care...
They have investments they live off — at least until the AI bubble bursts.
They'll offload that problem to the government they claim to despise (and are starving of resources)
Professor Krugman: the resulting economic crash from this latest bubble "pop" will be devastating. the environment, which elon musk is happily destroying -- and the impoverished black people of memphis -- will be grateful for the relief from being poisoned by massive air pollution.
(still wondering why oligarchs are allowed to pollute and destroy at will, leaving taxpayers to clean up their messes.)
You are absolutely right. In the spirit of AI I ran your point through ChatGPT. Here is it’s response, demonstrating that some AI sites can be thoughtful:
“You’re pointing at a common problem in environmental policy called the “polluter pays principle” vs. public burden issue.
When pollution cleanup falls on the public (taxpayers, communities, or governments) rather than the polluter (companies, industries, individuals who caused the damage), several things happen:
• Moral hazard: Polluters have little incentive to reduce waste or invest in cleaner technology if they know society will pick up the bill.
• Unfair costs: Ordinary citizens who didn’t cause the pollution bear the financial, health, and environmental burden.
• Regulatory gap: This often occurs when laws are weak, enforcement is lacking, or polluters exploit loopholes (e.g., declaring bankruptcy to avoid cleanup).
• Examples:
• Abandoned mines and oil wells where cleanup costs are shifted to taxpayers.
• Superfund sites in the U.S., where the EPA sometimes pays when responsible parties can’t be found.
• Plastic pollution, where disposal costs are covered by municipalities instead of packaging producers.
Environmental economists argue strongly for the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) — the idea that whoever causes the damage should bear the cost of managing it — to encourage accountability and fairness.”
Great summary of why PPP is necessary but as comments point out it only works if the GOVERNMENT is responsible enough to make them pay and effective enough to enforce the regulations. We have only sporadically had either and rarely both at the same time. Consumer demand forced through the minimum standard of bottle bills (deposits and return sites) but only at the state level and rarely able to force companies to pay for the deposit-driven returns of plastic crap. So it ends up being handed back to them but they deal with it “profitably” or just chuck it back into the waste stream. While consumers feel better about buying plastic “because it will be recycled.”
Earth Day and Superfund .... circa the Nixon to Carter era.... motivated in part by a river catching on fire..... NOW.... you can burn a City to the ground... (bits of LA) and we respond.... Act of god!. Covid.... act of god... do away with the vaccine miracle.
No. They are never thoughtful. Read Gary Marcus.
That is until the tech bros uncheck the box that says 'provide thoughtful answers'.
And they should pay in advance!
Bless your heart! You have hit on the on going " original sin" of mankind, which is not eating of the apple of knowledge, but Cain's reply to God:" Am I my brother's keeper?" ( My opinion)
Eve said that it was after she ate the mushroom that the snake started talking.
Ha,ha,ha! Well, I reckon so!
Lol
I'm having trouble really connecting "crash" with "an end to wasting money on non-essential work". GDP will definitely go down, but only because the P in GDP was mistakenly measuring assets used for waste.
Certainly we can expect a contraction, but some economy unraveling crash? No. That comes later when the AI people actually succeed, and jobs get really hard to find.
Consumer cost for electric power is rated on a sliding scale: the more you use, the cheaper your rate per kWh. So residential customers must subsidize the huge consumers, the bitcoin and AI centers. Will residential consumers, voters, agree to continue this financial support for the „system” at increasing personal cost?
Here in Costa Rica we also have a sliding scale. The more you use the more you pay which is as it should be. Energy hungry companies are forced to work at off peak hours when they get a cost break.
Sounds like a better world would reverse that—the more you use, the more it costs you.
Large industrial electricity users once traded “interruptible” power for lower rates. (My A/C runs through a switch that cuts power to my A/C when the system needs exceed its capacity.) However, I am told that the large computer centers tapped into our local utility have no such constraints and depend on their own NG generating plants when power is in short supply. Under this system, wind and solar generation and battery powered cars will never catch up with the creation of our locally murky air.
This is finally starting to be talked about; it should have been front and center a year or more ago. We are definitely due for another bubble bursting; it's been almost 20 years now. From an environmental perspective that "pop" will be a positive. If it also hurts Trump and the tech bros, so much the better.
If/when the bubble bursts, there will still be some firms that have been successful. If the need for "data crunching" continues to increase, will those successful firms be able to take over the assets of those who failed or are they too many technological (software/hardware) differences such that those assets will remain idle for ever?
The old IBM and Bell Labs campuses might serve as examples. IBM East Fishkill closed down about 1990. It lay derelict for about 30 years. It's being remade as a sort of super-mall. Bell Labs had a facility not far from where I live. One large multi-story building with hanging baskets in the center area containing small trees (I kid you not). It closed in the early '90s and lay empty until about 15 years ago. The buyer built homes on much of the land and turned the building into a combination office and shopping complex.
In both cases the equipment was removed. In the case of the Bell Labs building, office furniture was sold off. That was probably also the case with IBM.
It might take a few more years.
And yet, and yet, the government is choking off development in renewable energy. ????? Also, and this is dark enough to sound almost Q-Anon (apologies in advance), but as a person who spent a major part of her life as a therapist, I have a great interest in character, and what it can lead to. So I tend to view people like the extraordinary character, Elon Musk (and many of his compadres among the tech broliarchs) with both interest and educated suspicion. He put methane tanks, without pollution filters, in a black city and 'ignored' the alarming disease uptick in people who lived nearby. And consider this: he is an obvious racist, from a country which practiced Apartheid during the time he lived there, he is also, based on a lot of evidence, a pathological narcissist and drug abuser. Put that in a blender, press the button and get someone who might actually think that killing off poor black people is a feature, not a bug in his plans. See also Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, especially. (Thiel is also from S. Africa.) I know, I know. It's hard to imagine, but a failure of imagination allowed Hitler's rise to power. Just saying.
Killing off anyone but the rich is pretty much the reasoning of Project 2025.
<shiver>
Trump's hatred of renewable energy contrasts with the Albanese Government in Australia which is aiming for 90% renewable electricity by about 2035.
What's Aussie for "viva Australia"?
'Beauty mate?'
Good-oh?
Trump is really stupid. So are his advisors. To them climate change is just another leftist hoax.
MAGA really are off in fantasyland.
Indeed.
The water for cooling must be recycled so it can be reused over and over and over again. I'm from Australia - we know about recycling.
It should be -- but it's not in the vast number of cases. Most data centers waste the water, via evaporation, that they use every day.
We’re from the United States. We don’t! 😳
Just read that Google is building a small nuclear reactor in Tennessee in a partnership with the TVA to power one of its AI farms. This is such a terrible idea I don't even know where to start, but I guess the fact that we still haven't figured out how to safely dispose of nuclear waste issue would be my biggest concern. My #2 concern is that if there is any kind of issue, the public will be on the hook for cleanup and mitigation thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, which limits liability of private nuclear reactor operators. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses ...
Musk figured out where to put annoying pollution. I imagine the reactor companies will follow along.
A key question indeed. Energy is the core restraint on AI growth. Together with lack of validity, reliability, objectivity and sheer truthfulness in a mushrooming bunch of useless (sycophant) B2C & C2C LLM applications created with a single objective in mind: Making a lot of money -preferrably quickly- for their originators. For Humanity’s sake - lets hope for a quick demise of models which cannot differentiate between Truth and Facts from False and Fakes. That might alleviate a growing share of inference energy consumption. Finally- with AGI, how big is the risk that AI models themselves take over the decisionmaking on how to prioritize a General Energy Bottleneck?
Dan Wang suggests in his fantastic forthcoming book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, that China is focusing on building the physical technologies of the future, such as renewable energy, while America obsesses over virtual possibilities and problems. If AGI turns out to be a bust, and the Trump administration does everything it can to squash renewables, America could find itself in real trouble.
If China leaps ahead on energy technology, as seems likely, other countries are going to be pulled into its orbit. Dark warnings from the United States about the risks of dependence on China will ring hollow to countries that are all too aware of how willing the United States is to weaponize interdependence for its own selfish purposes.
In the wake of Trump’s insane dark age style attacks on Science in the US, it is evident for the rest of us World citizens, that The Atlantic Century, dominated by the United States-is irrevocably in its last stage. It is now rapidly being replaced by the first stage of a Pacific Century dominated by China. The difference in ”Statesmanhood Wisdom”- is staggering. Wise steps of combining Basic & Applied Research and Applications Engineering in both Technology and Society in China risks leaving the US far behind-if present trends continue.
Paul thanks for the reality check. A NEW AI Report from MIT should give us some comfort: NOPE
MIT 5/20/25 —“We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.”
“We spoke to two dozen experts measuring AI’s energy demands, evaluated different AI models and prompts, pored over hundreds of pages of projections and reports, and questioned top AI model makers about their plans. Ultimately, we found that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes.” —
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/
Not surprisingly, a very good article.
I assume a significant proportion of current "free" users of USA based AI systems are from other countries (Europe, South America, India, etc).
Why isn't Drumpf sending all caps messages about the damage hey are causing to residential power consumers in the US, the environment, water resources, and so on?
Turgut Tuten, Oh hahaha, that will be the day indeed, when our president cares for the environment over his pet projects of making as much money as possible before the ending of his term.
AI has enabled new ways to commit fraud. Ask AI about significant swindles using AI and it will tell you.
Ask AI for an estimated cost of AI slop pollution on social media. It's real. It's a problem. AI does not know.
Ask AI for the most significant advancement, achievement, invention or insight that has come from AI. Because almost nobody knows of any except AI.
The famous Tulip Bubble crested over a tulip that was uniquely beautiful. It was actually diseased.
As to how AI is going to affect the economy going forward depends a lot on who is in control of DC. A friend, a Republican, asked me a few years ago what I saw as the difference between the Liberials and the Reich and what I told him was that Liberals always look forward and the Reich always looks backwards. that is why most all advancement in the USA comes when Dems are in control and all regression for at least the past 50yrs has always come when we gave Republicans control. I have only recently understood how Republicans win because they never run on anything but Trump has proven to us all that it is nothing more than just shear racism and masogyny. The GOP as a party has absolutly nothing else to offer. No vision of the good future, no plan to help our lives, no plan to educate our children, nothing more than a plan to make us all slaves to what they want and looking back over the past 50yrs they never have. But, they have embrassed the hatred of racism and given people a shoulder to cry when they want someone to blame because in the most opportunistic country in the World they are still a failure. It is always their own fault. Look at a place like W Virginia where unemployment is the highest in the country, if you were raised there and know this wouldn't you look to finding a way to leave? But that is not what happens, you get someone like Turmp that goes to WV, makes big promises, lying out his ass and they stay and then nothing happens and of course as with all Republicans it is the fault of the Latinos, the Blacks, the Asians, the Native Americans, it is the fault of everyone but the person theay didn't save their pennies and leave. We are now stuck with another 3.5yrs of a P0S who's biggest accomplishments in life are 6 bankruptcies. But, under Trump you do get to hate and blame everyone else. Good luck with that.
That is exactly right and they are not smart enough to see that the leadership they wanted is driving us at 100mph to collapse. It was Republican's Greed that killed the USA in the '30s and since they refuse to read History we are about to repeat it.
Biden is white. That propaganda machine sure has been successful.
Billionaire-funded reich-wing tv, talk radio, and social media.
Northern Virginia has become the world's biggest concentration of data centers. Citizens are belatedly trying to fight back, but Big Data maintains the upper hand. Construction continues all over the region, while at the same time new projects are sprouting all over the country, often again taking local citizens by surprise before they can organize.
Big Data is giving us no say in what they doing to us with AI or data centers. They prefer we remain sheeple, experimental subjects.
Dominion Power is completely non-transparent with the impact of this on long term power cost and availability, or how much Big Data is using what they pay for it. However, they seem to be behind initiatives to encourage citizens to adopt power conservation measures and roof-top solar power, in a sense putting off on us the work they ought to be doing themselves. This would be a worthy effort were it to stop climate change rather than free up more power for Big Data.
After flooding Northern VA with Data Centers, Big Data is moving across the state with the assistance of Governor Youngkin, who has repeatedly vetoed legislation preventing data centers and similar facilities from equal access to electric power as consumers have. CF:https://cardinalnews.org/2025/04/11/energy-demand-will-outstrip-supply-in-virginia-as-data-centers-proliferate/
Seems like a particularly shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot moment to stop subsidizing solar and wind power, no?
Trump is a friggin’ disaster.
Another terrible thing is that companies seem to be falling into the AI canard: at my job, the Directors are hell-bent on everyone installing AI tools, even though they have no idea what we should use them for or what the benefit is.
Ironically, the same managers pushing for "diversity" initiatives without any idea what that was about, just to cover their asses, are now pushing for "AI" just because it's the new trend.
Goodbye, DEI, hello, A.I!
They always push the latest buzzwords because that what they are told to do from on high.
It's infuriating, I don't know if other companies are the same, but in mine, the C-Level managers are just a bunch of yes men (and one woman) who just implement whatever the shareholders say, no matter what. Fire loyal employees to increase EBITDA? You got it! Destroy hard-working teams that actually get shit done? No problem! And they get paid 4 or 5 times more than the coders actually figuring the shit out. This model of late-stage capitalism is completely disfuncional!
I think it is because often have no idea how to solve problems, but believe they can't personally be blamed for doing what everybody else is doing. Whereas they can be blamed for NOT doing what everybody else is doing.
Same with my company. At least I can get AI to draw some funny cartoons.
I started my last job about 40 yrs ago, retired now. I worked at a coal fire plant. About half of the capital to build it was for pollution control. The city of Orlando citizens that own us did not want the degradation of their environment. Well the utility is now moving to solar and other green power because it is cheaper. Coal power is dying. The weird thing is the only way to meet AI power requirements is to go almost full green. So we got two industries at odds with each other, one fossil fuel and the other AI. Sadly we live in interesting times.