Water, Water, Everywhere, And Not a Drop to Think
The problem with Data Centers. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE, SPECIAL to the COLORADO SUN
FIRST, A CONFESSION: I’m a data drunkard, too. Mind you, I never use A.I. to write for me, because robots are unoriginal writers and thinkers by design. But sometimes I really DO want to know what people most like to do when they’re in the Dordogne, in France, or what’s the surest stratagem to kill Japanese beetles. And A.I., being utterly brainless, can regurgitate with the best of them. And I, too, type in A.I. prompts, while knowing full well that Colorado, where I live, is in a dire drought this summer, after the least wintery winter since I’ve been here. H2Oh no! Which is why my editor at the Colorado Sun leapt in with both feet when I proposed a 12-Step program for data drunkards like me, to save dwindling rivers like the Colorado. I can’t say I’m all the way on the wagon, yet, but I can tell that wagon is rolling in the direction I want to go. Care to join me?
(Peter Moore, Special to The Colorado Sun)
THERE ARE AT LEAST FIVE WAYS that data centers suck up the water supplies that we don’t actually have right now.
With water-cooled chillers, these cavernous constructions keep overloaded wires from melting down.
With enormous water-driven swamp coolers, these absurdly huge hothouses keep the air inside those enormous buildings below Hades-level.
With free-cooling systems, these Brobdingnagian bunkers use outside water to cool inside air down from fire-breathing-dragon levels.
With liquid-cooling systems, these gargantuan structures circulate water through computer equipment to keep it from becoming molten silicon.
These egregious edifices tax the air-conditioning systems in neighboring homes, which are heated to between 4 and 18 degrees by the hot breath of our outrageous data addictions.
Which is why a proposed new data center in Denver estimated that it would use about 805,000 gallons of water per day. It would take 4,025 days for your household to gulp that much. If the heat isn’t already making your head swim, those numbers might.
Of course, tech apologists will argue that those numbers are dwarfed by the agricultural uses of water. Fair enough. But tell me, which of these do you need more: An AI-generated article filled with half-truths about the history of Japanese cooking, or actual food on your table?
Din din, for the win.
I don’t like to point fingers about excessive drinking, but data centers have a doozy of an addiction to water. And all the rest of us are data drunkards, chugging artificial intelligence like so much Coors Light.
It’s time we checked into rehab.
To help out, I have adapted Alcoholics Anonymous’s famous “Twelve Steps” to sober up the 57 thirsty data centers in our neighborhoods, and the 6 million Coloradans who can’t seem to slake their appetite for AI.
Repeat after me:
We admit that we are powerless over our data usage, and that our lives are unmanageable because of it.
We believe that a Power greater than ourselves (Elon, really?) can restore us to sanity.
We turn our lives and our servers over to the care of Jeff Bezos, Lord of Amazon Web Services, as we understand Him.
We encourage chatbots to take a searching and fearless moral inventory of our lives.
Admit to AI, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our data usage.
We are entirely ready to have A.I. remove all these defects of character.
We humbly ask AI to bless our web browsers.
We make a list of all water sources we have harmed, and are willing to make amends to all.
We make direct amends to wasted water wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
We take a personal inventory and when we are wrong we promptly admit it, while still leaving room to order stuff we don’t need from Amazon.
Through prayer and meditation, we seek to improve our contact with AI as we understand it, praying only for AI’s will for us and the electric power to carry that out.
Having had an awakening as to the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to others and go cold-turkey on all of our devices.
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.” – Elon Musk
And he would know.
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AI is wonderful and scary - real scary. It can do stuff that's just astounding and much of that is the speed at which it does it. But its use should be highly restricted to only good people who want good for each other and the planet. Otherwise we are screwed out of our humanity. The End.
We’re trying to fight the massive data centre trying to open north of me … Alberta HAS HARDLY ANY RIVERS to begin with, it’s a dry climate like Arizona for heaven’s sake!