I Don’t Care About The Water

Well I do, but it’s not my main priority. By 2030 Artificial Intelligence data centers are projected to consume up to 9.3 trillion liters of water annually.

المصدر: النهار

Cracked earth near Sidi El Barrak Dam with depleted water levels, in Nefza west of Tunis on January 7, 2023 (Reuters).

Chloe Shammas

Well I do, but it’s not my main priority. By 2030 Artificial Intelligence data centers are projected to consume up to 9.3 trillion liters of water annually. This amount of water is equivalent to the basic yearly needs of 1.3 billion people, which is over 15% of the global population. However it’s not as though AI runs on water. It has been estimated that an 100-word prompt into a generative AI such as ChatGPT can cost a bottle of water, but the process is not that simple.

When you send a prompt into a site such as ChatGPT, powerful chips in AI data centers need to make billions of calculations in order to respond. With this extreme amount of work these chips are putting in, they are also releasing an extreme amount of heat; which leads to overheating in data centers.

One common solution to this is evaporative cooling, which is exactly what is sounds like. Large cooling systems are pumping mass amounts of water into data centers, effectively reducing the heat in the systems.

So yes, asking generative AI to write a quick email for you can indeed use up an entire bottle of water, since the system would overheat without it. And when you add up the billions of people using this AI every day, the amount of water wasted can become extreme.

At this rate, we are using up our water faster than it can be replenished. But I still don’t care about the water. Not totally. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think you do either.

The global clothing industry consumes roughly 93 trillion liters of water annually. It takes over 6,000 liters of water to produce a single pound of beef. If we really cared about the water, we would stop buying clothes from H&M and Zara and become vegans.

When I tell people I don’t use AI in my everyday life, it’s not because I'm overly concerned with its water usage.

There are more important reasons to not be using AI. The main issue with using AI daily is not the water consumption, it’s making a computer do all your thinking for you.

If someone uses AI for the simplest tasks, they will eventually lose the ability to do them themselves. Let’s compare it to the most common of addictive substances, coffee. Once you start drinking coffee in the mornings it can be hard to feel awake without your daily cup of java. And instead of going through the discomfort of feeling groggy and jittery for a few days, you just pour another cup. What’s the harm in having one more cup right? It’s just coffee. Like the use of AI, it can become an addiction before you know it.

Maybe you don’t have time, or you don’t know what to say, or you simply cannot be asked. You ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini to write you an email or an essay for school. You tell yourself you’ll never do it again, but boy was it easy to just click send without having to do any of the work.

Using AI to do all your work becomes harmful when it turns into a pattern. Because suddenly no thought beyond a short prompt into the AI is being put into your work. It has already been proven that handwriting is more effective for conceptual understanding and long-term memory retention compared to typing on a phone or computer, and that’s when you are still engaging your brain. Now imagine not writing anything at all. Just copy and pasting the work of a computer.

When our brains become less active or lack mental challenge, they gradually lose the efficiency needed for deep critical thinking and independent problem solving. When I say I don’t care about the water, it’s because one question comes into my mind:

What’s worse, less water or an incapable population?

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