People need to crowd out the pro-industry political consultants.
Dem politicians are listening to political consultants when they should be listening to their constituents, and we need to tip that math in the other direction.
This David Shor is a Democratic party political consultant. This means your representatives are listening to people like this if you're not up in their business on a regular basis making your constituent preferences known. They will assume that the artists with skilled work and your skyrocketing water bill is just "quibbles" and that the techno-rapture "singularity" preached by right-wing tech tycoons and their gurus is a real thing.
David Shor @davidshor · May 30 It’s crazy that the spectre of fully automated luxury gay space communism is upon us and the most anyone on the left has to say about it is some quibbles over artist IP and water consumption frances meek @MeekFrances · May 30 the water consumption seems important David David Shor @davidshor · May 30 The water consumption thing is fake seangoedecke.com Talking to ChatGPT costs 5ml of water, not 500ml Summarizing a whole lot of internet argument about the water usage impact of language models frances meek @MeekFrances No, it isn’t. Can’t wait until an AI can tell Democrats nothing matters for a living though. 6:49 PM · May 30, 2025
If the water consumption issue is “fake” why are data center owners going to court to try to keep the water consumption a secret?
There’s just so much fanciful hopium PR out there on social media regarding AI that it seems foolish, but the more people see it the more the mere exposure effect makes it seem real for a lot of people.
Futurism @futurism.bsky.social Follow If AI evolves towards efficiency with less reliance on massive data centers, we could see a decentralized, eco-friendly tech landscape emerge, prioritizing sustainability. #futurism Accountable Tech @accountabletech.bsky.social · 2d OpenAI’s Big Tech billionaire Sam Altman has high hopes for the future of AI – but when asked about whether AI really needs massive data centers when we’ve seen China do it with less, he just said, “there’s a lot of good models.” www.bloomberg.com/news/article... Sam Altman Says 2026 May Be a Big Year for AI On this extended interview from The Circuit with Emily Chang, the OpenAI CEO explains how the Stargate project fits into the future of scientific discovery. www.bloomberg.com June 12, 2025 at 6:54 PM
It’s always just off in the future somewhere, where it’ll make sense. Tech tycoon promises shouldn’t be taken seriously though.
And it's not just the computers themselves that need water, it's that these data centers have to be power plants too, to power those computers. (Or they're situated next to power plants, though even with that they still come with ill effects.) And the power plants may use water as well. Nuclear power plants sure use water, that’s why they’re built on rivers or coasts.
There was a meeting of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on restarting Three Mile Island recently. That's the nuclear power plant near Harrisburg Pennsylvania that melted down in 1979 in the worst nuclear disaster in US history, and which is slated to be restarted for the sole purpose of powering a data center (not providing alternative energy to the community). At this meeting there was an opponent to the plans who said that just for two nuclear power plants on the Susquehanna River, the water demand is the equivalent of half the rivers daily flow. I'm not surprised Peter Hall at Penn Capital-Star didn't dig into this to fact check at all, he's dropped the ball in science news before, but he's all we got covering this unfortunately.
I recounted this in a livestream of The Letterhack Presents, stipulating that I hadn't found corroboration on that yet. I also had misspoke when I said it was half the river’s flow for 3 nuclear power plants on the Susquehanna River, the guy opposing the Three Mile Island restart had actually said that just the 2 were already using half the river’s flow. So then I tried to fact check this myself, but I'm not really up to the task of this amount of conversions & math, but it is possible to figure this out. The Union of Concerned Scientists said that: "the typical 1,000 Mwe nuclear power reactor with a 30ºF ∆T needs approximately 476,500 gallons per minute." And the USGS Susquehanna River at Harrisburg monitoring has an option to see the flow of the river, but it's expressed as a daily median of cubic feet per second, and that varies.
But the nuclear plants are actually beside the point anyway because Karen Hao did extensive research on the water issue for the book Empire of AI, and she found, just like other reports on data centers have found, the water needed to cool the computers in the data center is substantial. And again, if it wasn't any big deal – why did Google make a municipal water utility sign an NDA to keep the water consumption of the data center a secret, and why did the municipality spend so much money in court to protect that secret?
And does David Shor work for the Democratic Party and Democratic politicians really? Or does he simply feed certain information to Democrats? Because I don't know why you'd want to misrepresent this issue in such an obvious way.
So even though I can't figure out the river flow math, I can figure out that David Shor's assertions just don't add up.
