Thirsty Robots

By Gordon Hopkins Even if you never touch a computer (and are, therefore, probably not reading this,) Artificial Intelligence (AI) will still impact your life in more ways than you or I can possibly imagine. That impact will be felt in ways you thought could never have anything to do with AI at all.For example: water.It turns out, AIs are very, very thirsty. They use a lot of water. That is something that never occurred to me. I knew that AIs are major energy hogs. The creation of more and bigger data centers are requiring more and more electricity. Cities trying to become AI hubs are having to promise AI companies outlandish amounts of electricity, requiring more and more power plants.Anything that uses that much electricity gets hot. You think your tablet gets hot after spending two hours watching cat videos online? About 71 percent of the Earth's surface is covered with water, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).Sounds like a pretty abundance resource, doesn't it?Unfortunately, only about three percent of that is fresh water, also according to USGS, and that three percent includes ground ice, soil moisture, clouds and even the water in living things. Yes, you are part of that three percent. If you are just looking for handy surface fresh water, it is more like 1.2 percent.AI, like people, need fresh water to live. Data centers have to use fresh so that pipes, pumps and heat exchangers don't get clogged with contaminants. According to a report published yesterday by the BBC, “Microsoft's global water use soared by 34 percent while it was developing its initial AI tools, and a data centre cluster in Iowa used six percent of the district's water supply in one month during the training of OpenAI's GPT-4.”On this side of the (saltwater) pond, Forbes magazine published this last year, “At the same time, our world is racing ahead to advance AI into every aspect of our world.With the rise of generative AI, companies have significantly raised their water usage, sparking concerns about the sustainability of such practices amid global freshwater scarcity and climate change challenges.”AI, like people, need fresh water to live. So, who gets priority?That probably depends on who is making the decision. Which is why we should be very wary of letting AI make decisions for us. FJN jumped on the anti-AI bandwagon pretty early. If you scan the staff box this paper, you will see words “100% AI Free.” Whenever I look for stock photos to go along with the stories I publish that didn’t require me to go out and take a photo myself, I am always careful not to use any images generated by AI. For this column, I wanted to find a photo of big banks of data servers. Well, I found plenty, hundreds, and every dang one was made by AI. So, here’s a picture of my cats, instead.

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