AIBU to question hosepipe bans while AI water use gets little scrutiny

Bringing in a hosepipe ban after two days is a ridiculous overreaction. We had loads of rain over the past few weeks and on Monday night in fact and there is more forecast for next week.

Rather than just AI we need to be questioning why it is that the water companies are losing billions of gallons due to substandard infrastructure while charging the earth for their supply and their executives receiving fat bonuses.

It’s time people stuck two fingers up at these hosepipe bans which aren’t enforceable anyway. But it’s far easier for individuals to turn on each other rather than to question what’s really going on.

As for AI, I hope in five years time the majority of it has imploded. People seem to have no idea the damage which is being done by AI.

It’s estimated that a 3rd of jobs will be taken by AI. We’re raising a generation who will soon be illiterate non communicators because they just get AI to write their emails, their texts, they won’t need CV’s or cover letters because they won’t have jobs to go to.

The music industry will have died because currently the top artists on Spotify are AI generated from Suno and its ilk.

Great if you want to use it as a search engine, but a therapist? Something to write your emails? An imaginary friend? The sooner it dies the better.

You're probably right, but Kent has had hosepipe bans from before AI even existed.

I mean, technically it is true, me lighting a single match would contribute to climate change a tiny bit. But the global impact of AI and data centers is still miniscule compared to global manufacturing, transport, concrete production, beef farming etc.

Are you vegan? Because if you are not, and you are worried about water usage… well, your worries are very much misplaced. https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/devastating-water-footprint-animal-agriculture/163485/ (and yes, I am vegan for ethical and environmental reasons)

I initially clicked the agree emoji, but retracted it. I don’t think we can say that AI data centres are definitely contributing to climate change, but we need to monitor the situation. These centres are power and resource hungry. Can we sustain them? Probably not.

Use a watering can

Get ChatGPT to summarize it? 😉

AI uses less than a teaspoon of water per search

And I think that golf courses around the world use something like 3 trillion litres of water per year, and leaky pipes in the uk waste over 1 trillion litres per year.

AI will hopefully do a huge amount of good in the medical and scientific fields, can’t say the same about golf or leaky pipes.

They're all over the world including some in the UK.

Apparently streaming now uses up more energy than making tea and coffee.

An interesting report. Good ol’ WRC.
What struck me was this paragraph. Interesting that these large consumption data centres have come online recently. AI?
‘This consumption is highly skewed towards the large water users, with the top six data centres accounting for 65% of the sector’s water consumption. Many of these appear to have come online in the last few years’

What about avocado water? Or is that different?

I asked ChatClawdRok who said ‘why are you asking me? If there’s a hosepipe ban, you don’t use me in solidarity.’

Sorry, the full stop and bracket got added to my original link, this should work:
https://mosl.co.uk/news-and-events/news/data-centre-study-calls-for-new-reporting-framework-to-manage-water-use

Also my maths might have been wrong by a factor of 1000, but the point still stands.

Of which the vast majority are traditional (non-AI) datacentres that use air cooling rather than water cooling. Air cooling is perfectly sufficient for traditional servers without GPUs.

The handful of water-cooled AI datacentres we do have in the UK use closed-loop cooling so very little water is wasted (a little from evaporation). Open loop just doesn’t make sense economically in the UK.

That link doesn’t work, but I would be interested in reading it. The report I linked to was talking about the increase in UK data centres. These centres are classed as critical to our national infrastructure, so they will be increasing.
Our water resources are at breaking point already, so we need to work out how we are going to supply both domestic and retail water.

I would argue we need to look at shit being pumped into our rivers, massive profits being made before we worry about usage

Everyone is linking to stats about global water usage by AI. Most of them are in the USA and China. The current UK water supply is ~14,000 billion litres/day (bottom of page 7 of the paper @MezeAndNibbles linked to). In the UK, data centers use 1.87 million litres per year (https://mosl.co.uk/news-and-events/news/data-centre-study-calls-for-new-reporting-framework-to-manage-water-use).

So in the UK, data centers currently use about 0.0000000000366% of our available water. We really dont have many data centers.

https://www.thebrockovichreport.com/p/the-new-pollution-is-data-and-its

Everyone bangs on about data centre water use literally every time AI is mentioned, as though data centres never existed before AI and half the infrastructure of our lives isn't reliant on computer stuff that needs data storage.

YABU to object to AI water use but also ignore a hosepipe ban to water your own garden, because it's inconsistent. But the water being used to cool AI centres is probably not the same reason your local water company is asking people to be sparing with their water use. These are two separate issues.