[dimitrios1]

> sound scary when presented without context

It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at this point and creating the demand for all these datacenters. If it was just for us devs and researchers, you wouldn't need this many.

[simonw]

Whether it's a "gigantic" waste of water depends on what those figures mean. It's very important to understand if 25 million liters of water per year is a gigantic number or not.

[jstanley]

For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough utility?

And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else, it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.

[HDThoreaun]

Its not gigantic and its not a waste. Brainrot creates massive economic value that can be used to pay people for products you are more happy to consume.

[thewebguyd]

And also, none of those current use cases are a real benefit to society, outside of maybe research cases.

The only benefit is to the already wealthy owner class that is itching to not have to pay for employees anymore because it impacts their bottom line (payroll is typically the largest expense).

It's not like we are making robots to automate agriculture and manufacturing to move toward a post scarcity, moneyless society, which would have real benefits. No, instead we have AI companies hyping up a product whose purpose (according to them) is so that already wealthy people can hoard more wealth and not have to pay for employees. It's promising to take away a large portion of the only high-paying jobs we have left for the average person without an advanced degree.

Me being able to write software a little faster, without hiring a junior, is a net negative to society rather than a benefit.

[simonw]

You appear to be arguing against using technology to boost human efficiency on a forum full of software engineers who've dedicated their careers to building software that makes humans more efficient.

If we aren't doing that then why are we building software?

[BeFlatXIII]

Seems the problem is the revealed preference of the normies, rather than the technology itself.