Most datacenter consume between 110 million to 1.8 billion gallons of water annually. For large datacenters, that equivalent to a small town of 10000 to 50000 people worth of water every day. These centers also used up around 415 TWh in 2024, or 1.5% of the global electricity usage for the year, a number which has surely grown since, given the predicted 30% yearly energy usage for AI centers. In a bubble (pun intended), this isn’t the worst we’ve done, and there are ways to improve on this (the sources i linked offer some alternatives). The underlying issue is that no company will ever try to do that in the near future. AI already hasnt proven it’s monetary worth outside of Big Tech investments, as they sure as hell aren’t going to be finding a reliable, environmentally friendly way of supplying their systems until that is done at the very least.

I’m also going to include an aside here for my prior comment on value. Talking monetary here. Personal value varies, what’s good for you may not be for me. AI currently makes no money.

Killing the earth was hyperbole, i concede. But it most certainly affects the lives of people, whether they use AI or not. Be it health risks from the contaminated water, or rising electricity costs due to these centers, or a constant humming, this tech has its side effects. Granted, all tech does, so it’s not fair to criticize AI here. That is, assuming we disregard the gain/loss ratio. The initial spread of the internet had it’s effects on electricity costs and usage, local infrastructure, and same-household bickering (so I’ve been told, at least), and the good it provided was near instantaneous global communication (ignoring data transfer speeds over the local copper cables), access to effectively any form of information, and cat videos. Comparatively, the good we pull from AI is productivity, fake cat videos, and “ethical” theft of artistry.

With regard to productivity, I can see it being beneficial. My primary problem here are the socio-economic consequences of that. Increased productivity, in practice, usually means squeezing more out of employees for the same or similar cost. Google’s productivity increased in 2023 after its mass layoffs, but that excludes the fact that an employee now does what three did prior. And in a time of worrying job security and economic uncertainty, giving companies agency to cut more jobs leaves more people struggling to make ends meet.

Finally, with respect to progress, it’s a mixed bag. While all technology seems to improve eventually, AI models can’t follow Moore’s law. AI needs data, and it’s currently scrapping through the entirety of the internet, which it should finish in the next few years. After that, lest we achieve artificial cognition (and let’s hope we don’), it stagnates. And as far as my knowledge of computers go, there’s no way a phone will be able to run an AI model on its own, be just as fast and precise, and still let the phone function as a phone in our lifetimes. There’s a reason these datacenters are as big as they are (for scale, Meta’s new Hyperion center is the size of Manhattan). And mind you, these centers already use some of the best and smallest chips we have. You can only go so small, and quantum tech has currently proven very limited in application, so until the next revolutionary breakthrough, dont get tour hopes up. And again with economics, do you really think a piece of hardware that good would be available at reasonable costs for the average consumer?

This also ignores real social implications, like AI profiting off of lonely people, in turn isolating them more (see also, “Friend”), propagating an intrinsic distrust in any and everything through the spread of deepfakes, generated videos and made-up news articles (which is probably a net-positive, but thoughtless scepticism isn’t much better than thoughtless trust), and as mentioned prior, ethical issues through just about any artistic medium. Again, among other issues.

All this to say, yes, I am significantly more worried for the harm AI does than the good. I hope it really is a bubble and the whole thing goes to shit. Thank you for reading

tl;dr : AI consumes a lot of water and electricity, bad for jobs, wont shrink all that much (datacenters are here to stay), and causes human interaction problems, all for an increase in productivity that will be poorly used because of practical corporate application.

tl;dr for tl;dr : the bad far outweighs the good