However, that argument is actually helping drive their expansion, regardless of the fact that they also consume large tracts of land and their heat emissions raise local temperatures.
Thereâs many noise complaints relating to data centres that are next to residential areas.
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I am sure there are large areas of Clacton that would prove useful and they must be immune to hot air emissions by nowâ
I donât use AI and wouldnât do so even under torture 
. What I do come across (without having sought it out), for example when it summarises customer reviews, really annoys me, because itâs all too polished and banal. AI will never have that offbeat quality, that improvisation, that serendipity, which open the mind. And from an environmental perspective, I try to minimise my impact !
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But I only want to convert table spoons to grammes?
How did we manage before AI?
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When I started work as a surveyor, I used a mechanical hand calculator and 8 figure natural tables to perform a least squares calculation that took days to solve.
These days it can be done in seconds with a free app.
It is called progress
Some of us didnât manage at all, because there were tasks we could not do. I am now learning to do these tasks. 
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I first started working for Wellcome Research Laboratories in 1979. In those days the site library occupied a vast reception room in the mansion of Langley Court, and there was a motorised shelving system loaded with the Index Medicus containing keyword lookup information for all the commonly published journals for each year. When you wanted to investigate an area of study you would go to the library and look up keywords for the research topic over - say - the previous 5 or 10 years depending on how much literature was available. We would read the titles for each paper referenced and then order reprints from the British library at a significant cost, which would be delivered to you lab or desk about a week later. If more than half were relevant to your work then you were doing well. Google makes this process take minutes at most.
We managed essentially the same, but slower and less thoroughly while it cost a lot more to do. One of my colleagues with a little coding experience, recently generated software that would allow him to align DNA sequences in a particular way that was useful - previously this would have required hiring/sourcing a programmer and then creating a project for them to write the software, possibly taking a couple of weeks instead of a few hours spread over a week or so.
AI isnât a change, but rather another step on the path weâve been following for a long time.
The biggest danger to me is that people forget how to actually do things, relying on systems to look after them. We see this with cars, metallurgy, building work etc already.
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I do like progress, but it is not always appropriate !
No smiling/ironic emoji, so Iâm led to opine that I donât consider this is a thoughtful use of AI.
So many of its applications seem to be for really trivial tasks or generating mindless slop
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It will certainly be interesting to see what happens when this obvious AI bubble bursts. There should of course be no reason the concept dies if some of the big players do⌠had 90% of the worldâs AI not be based on one of those big players. When someone as big as Apple is choosing to piggyback on Googleâs AI because they couldnât get their act together with their own, and no company is as infamous for launching â the next big thingâ spending often hundreds of millions of dollars on it, then losing interest and killing it to save money, itâs quite the gamble. I suspect they chose Google as theyâre the most likely of the big players to still be around in a decade, but itâs still a massive risk. The way Open AI are burning through money is breathtaking. I wonder whether ultimately AI will end up in the hands of the likes of BlackRock or Apollo, and i cant imagine that will be a good thing for the world.
You may opine that you donât concider it is a thoughtful use of AI but why should my query meet your idea of thoughtful?
In terms of power consumed, that simple (thoughtless?) enquiry consumed the equivalent power of a 100 watt light bulb left on for 12 seconds.
OK I did simplify the query. Like you, I enjoy cooking and like to try various recipes from books or Internet. Personally, I find they often use ridiculous units of measurement. As we have discussed before, I only like to use grammes and nothing else. So, I post a copy of the recipe to AI and ask for it to be reformatted the way I like it & with all measurements in grammes plus a calculation of nutritional information per 100 grammes. It saves me a lot of time and effort. (it may still generate âmindless slopâ 
)
I take your point, but surely the problem is in the cumulative demands of many millions of minor enquiries and the ever increasing resources necessary to process all this stuff. Iâm sure that you know as well, if not better than me what they are. Data centres are burgeoning monsters that seem frequently able to circumvent local planning regs by appealing to central governments and supplying false info about their electricity sources and needs.
I donât understand why you keep saying things like that Mik, youâre clearly a very smart man, thatâs obvious for all to see, so why you take such a strange line baffles me. Of course your one enquiry didnât use a lot of power, itâs everyoneâs individual enquiries just like yours, the billions of them that happen that causes the issue, but just as me recycling my cans or taking the train instead of a plane or a car do very little on their own, itâs the combined efforts of us all doing it, or not doing it, that is what matters. When there are places struggling without water because vast data centres are diverting it to keep temperatures down, there are real issues with everyoneâs simple enquiries.
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Actually be careful what you wish for.. What youâre talking about is the metering of all AI access to everything which is of course the ultimate monetisation of everything.
I doubt benefits would be fairly shared - look whatâs happened to payment to YouTube content creators.
I hate following recipes; they make the result too predictable and itâs boring. A large egg doesnât weigh the same as a small one, so recipes that specify a number of eggs really make me laugh. You donât need AI to trust your intuition and cook by feel â even if it means tweaking things next time!
Of course demand arises from the accumulation of millions of queries but how do you solve the problem? Triaging queries in order of importance will cause even more problems. Should it be voluntary like rubbish recycling? That clearly hasnât solved the worldâs rubbish problem. Should it be compulsory? Who gets to decide? Remember this is an international problem.
The actual problem is power demand, cooling requirements, real estate needs and heating and noise inconveniences. In my opinion they can and should be addressed at government level.
I tried that and ended up in the serious burns unit 
Interesting POV from someone who would like people to stop driving IC vehicles in order to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. Why should someone do their bit to help when itâs a drop in the ocean?
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