How could Artificial Intelligence become dangerous?

[paulsharvey]

When you hear 500,000 gallons per day; that sounds like a big number, but its really not. Average home in US uses 300+ gal per day; so thats less than a very small town.

 

[jjeff]

I think there's provisions in the glwqa to protect any water taken out of the Great lakes has to still stay in the watershed weather it ends up being treated sewage or not it's my understanding water can't be taken out of the Great lakes it's surrounding watersheds, tributaries etc. I'm not much of a so called environmentalist tree hugger but I will always argue to protect the Great lakes.

 

[DarkBlack]

Water usage is great way to divert the populace from what is actually going on
Water isn’t used in the sense it’s “used up”, and converted to another molecule, It’s simply a a conduit of heat energy.
At worst, it’s a cooling tower setup and you can worry evaporative loss, and/or about Legionnaires' disease. Normally it’s simply the same water being returned, but with a slightly higher temperature.
You should be more worried about the computers, and the people running them, than water being heated.

 

[drssg]

Travel agents are obsolete. Replace them with AI!

https://www.thetimes.com/world/article/chatgpt-perfect-holiday-ai-tech-x9lntjdsv

 

[BackRoad]

What DarkBlack said. In the grand scheme of things, generally water is in a big closed recycle loop. From ground to air to rain, back to ground again. Humans tap into it for use while the big recycle loop continues to operate. We use the same water that rained on the dinosaurs.

Generally water is a pass through for a data center. It's not retained, not contaminated, nor in contact with anything other than the pipes and pumps it runs in to cool systems and processors.

It's returned as outflow, eventually back to the ground, or else vapor for those DC's using swamps or cooling towers, with evaporated water returning to the atmosphere.

But there is heat being transferred into the water...and that's the real problem...the heat.

In a perfect world, that heated water would be piped within the local community in closed loop systems to warm homes in the winter. In our imperfect world, it is wasted.

Data centers operating in planned communities in Greenland make the most sense...but network latency would kill the business venture.
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Sorry, this reminded me of a funny aside. It was 2003, I was managing a private data center for a new start-up in Nutley, NJ...about 50,000 sf of raised floor. We used air handlers with roof heat exchangers (not as efficient as modern technology, but it worked).

So we had limited demand in the data center for water other than for human use, but nevertheless, somebody at the corporate office failed to pay the monthly water bill...

White city van pulled up, guy got out, popped the manhole cover, turned off water to the data center and drove away. We saw it all on the security cameras.

By law (I was later informed by HR), I should have shut down the data center and sent everybody home - but that was never going to happen on my watch!

30 minutes later, I was standing at the Passaic Valley Water Authority window paying the $1300 bill from my personal bank account to get the water turned back on!

I ended up managing that data center with a great team for 8 years...we had (0) down-time in that 8 years - but we came close a few times - and this was one of those times!

 

[EscapedSuburbia]

What DarkBlack said. In the grand scheme of things, generally water is in a big closed recycle loop. From ground to air to rain, back to ground again. Humans tap into it for use while the big recycle loop continues to operate. We use the same water that rained on the dinosaurs.

Generally water is a pass through for a data center. It's not retained, not contaminated, nor in contact with anything other than the pipes and pumps it runs in to cool systems and processors.

It's returned as outflow, eventually back to the ground, or else vapor for those DC's using swamps or cooling towers, with evaporated water returning to the atmosphere.

Everything I can find on the subject, including by companies that supply the cooling systems, says data center cooling water is treated with biocides, corrosion inhibitors, scale inhibitors, and sometimes antifreeze.

 

[kenmbz]

And the water comes out of the ground that is shared with residential and goes into the atmosphere, bit necessarily in a way that gets back into the local water reserves.
So the locals run dry. The bigger towers we see by the North NJ co-generation plants is certainly evaporating and being carried on the wind.

 

[California]

Everything I can find on the subject, including by companies that supply the cooling systems, says data center cooling water is treated with biocides, corrosion inhibitors, scale inhibitors, and sometimes antifreeze.

And spreads radiation, at nuclear plants.

I've mentioned this before: The last straw that led to a ballot initiative that closed SMUD's failed nuclear project, was when the techs who monitored the plant's runoff water into a local creek, said the 24 hour radiation reported to the public by management was actually their 1-hour readings.