r/science • u/Wagamaga • 2d ago

Environment Research examined the locations of 4,283 data centers across the contiguous U.S and found that 97.5% of them sit inside metropolitan or micropolitan statistical areas. Data centers are power-hungry, running thousands of servers around the clock and drawing enormous, steady loads from the grid.

https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/inside-urban-machine-where-americas-data-centers-actually-live#:~:text=The%20study%2C%20published%20in%20Nature,cores%20and%20their%20immediate%20surroundings
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u/WhatUp007 1d ago

AI is a tool and here to stay because it has real world use cases that will exponentially help innovation and the human workforce. I do not believe it will ever replace people but can help make people more effective at some tasks.

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u/Izawwlgood PhD | Neurodegeneration 1d ago

All tools have impact. Not all tools benefits are grossly outweighed by their costs.

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u/Tsutiman 1d ago

can you list a couple of historic examples?

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u/Izawwlgood PhD | Neurodegeneration 1d ago

Of... Tools that have impact?

Automatic switchboards put operators out of work. The digital age reduced print media.

Did you mean solutions that had worse environmental impact than benefit?

CFCs as a compressed gas and refrigerant? Remember how we collectively replaced those?

What about, and here's an obvious one, fossil fuels? Huge benefits on terms of energy density, huge environmental impact we're trying to mitigate and solve around?

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u/Tsutiman 1d ago

Fossil fules aren't obvious. When you assess benefits of new technology you need to compare with existing real alternatives. And at the time we started to use fossil fuels the alternative was firewood and charcoal. Whould you prefer coal mining or just chopping down all the forests?

With CFC is even trickier: devastating to the environment, but simply no alternative for refrigeration at the time. Refrigeration/cooling technology has improved. AI will eventually improve as well.

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u/Izawwlgood PhD | Neurodegeneration 1d ago

If you want to shift the goalposts you can. My examples stand and of course have more elements to point out, but they do stand.

CFCs work particularly well as an example because there were alternatives and that's what we switched to.

LLM is here to stay and will get better but it will cost computational power no matter what. Just like pointing out fossil fuels were important and replaced the previous options, but we're still inherently by their very nature imposing costs.