this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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70
The Hated One - "Ai Will Wage Wars Over Water" (lemmy.today)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The Hated One has been pretty solid in the past regarding privacy/security, imho. I found this video of his rather enlightening and concerning.

  • LLMs and their training consume a LOT of power, which consumes a lot of water.
  • Power generation and data centers also consume a lot of water.
  • We don't have a lot of fresh water on this planet.
  • Big Tech and other megacorps are already trying to push for privatizing water as it becomes more scarce for humans and agriculture.

---personal opinion---

This is why I personally think federated computing like Lemmy or PeerTube to be the only logical way forward. Spreading out the internet across infrastructure nodes that can be cooled by fans in smaller data centers or even home server labs is much more efficient than monstrous, monolithic datacenters that are stealing all our H2O.

Of course, then the 'Net would be back to serving humanity instead of stock-serving megacultists. . .

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Spreading out the internet across infrastructure nodes that can be cooled by fans in smaller data centers or even home server labs is much more efficient than monstrous, monolithic datacenters that are stealing all our H2O.

That's definitely not true, data centers are way more efficient than home servers. But yes, they use water to be more efficient.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (1 children)

We have an absolute shitton of fresh water on the planet. It’s just being horribly mismanaged most of the time.

Once the AI gets rid of the pesky humans using it frivolously to do stupid things like “drink” or “bathe”, there will be plenty to go around.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

thats if ai ever gets "sentient" in our lifetimes like the suits keep insisting it will

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I don't forsee it becoming "sentient" so much as "Being given a stupid amount of access and resources to figure out a problem by itself, and stupidly pursuing the maximization of that goal with zero context."

There's that darkly humorous hypothetical that an Ai tasked with maximizing making paperclips would continue to do so, using every resource it could get a hold of, and destroying any threat to further paperclip production!

So that, with data center expansion and water. Lol

See "paperclip maximizer" under "hypothetical examples" Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

oh this is happening today. the ultra-addictive social media thing is mostly through machine learning algos being tuned to do this regardless of anything else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

EXACTLY. High-five!

That's what I worry about. Right now we can ignore social media somewhat, but if Ai gets wedged into contracts with government/infrastructure and other unavoidable daily life, I imagine that's where a plausible threat could come from.

I've no doubt such things are already in the works. Ai controlled traffic lights or something, for instance. Obviously the military and law enforcement are already giddy about it, of course.

Giving a stupid machine a seemingly simple goal to pursue and the wrong set of keys could lead to disasterous consequences, I think. We also have the whole "Do Ai cars protect the driver or all human life even if it risks the driver?" Debate.

"But it's trendy, it's the future! And there's so much venture capital involved, how lucrative!" Seems to be how major decisions are made these days.

I don't see it some day "waking up" and thinking "I feel like humans are unnecessary." It's scarier than that...it will see us as just another variable to control and "maximize" us out of the picture.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Also, I can't even imagine how many resources image-generating AIs take up, especially when it's all based around "refining prompts" over and over and over....

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

I've been limiting my AI use ever more because of that, and I found out that AI isn't as necessary as they want us to believe. In fact, the downsides may be more than that small productivity boost we're gaining, in terms of rights to clear and verifiable informations and in terms of manipulative tactics and uses made possible by that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's a lot less than playing a video game. My fans on my GPU spin up harder and for more sustained time whenever I'm playing.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I think the training part is not to be neglected and might be what is at play here. Facebook has a 350k GPU cluster which is being setup to train AI models. Typical state of the art models have required training for months on end. Imagine the power consumption. Its not about on person running a small quantized model at home.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

Such training can be done in places where there's plenty of water to spare. Like so many of these "we're running out of X!" Fears, basic economics will start putting the brakes on long before crashing into a wall.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's not what I replied to though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You said running an imagine generating AI on your GPU is less demanding than a video game. While possibly true, the topic of water scarcity and energy demands are not about what one person runs on one GPU, hence my response.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

The person I replied to was only commenting on people how much it cost for people to "refine prompts" which isn't where the problems lie. People at home on consumer hardware can't be the ones causing issues at scale, which is what I pointed out. We weren't talking about training costs at all.

Besides, the GPU clusters models are trained on are far outnumbered by non-training datacenters, which also use water for cooling. It seems weird to bring that up as an issue while not talking about the whole cloud computing industry. I've never seen any numbers on how much these GPU clusters spend versus conventional use, If you have any I'd like to see them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

They want water? Have them pump it from Neptune

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

With enough technological advances, they might be able to just switch to salt water.

It's silly to imagine all these "way out there" scenarios without also imagining progress in other areas.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Privatised water companies you say? England is way ahead of the shit curve.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Spreading out the internet across infrastructure nodes that can be cooled by fans in smaller data centers or even home server labs is much more efficient than monstrous, monolithic datacenters that are stealing all our H2O

  1. I mean this just isn't true though, the big servers are more efficient. Scale means efficiency.

  2. The fediverse is also just more inefficient than a centralized service. Part of this is due to the design of activitypub, but part of it is the inherent inefficiency of any decentralized service compared to a centralized one

  3. Also this doesn't happen in practice, most fediverse accounts are on servers running on rented cloud services, not people's homelabs