Mechanical scams are drinking up our water.
Public safety with regards to life sustaining water supply should override any trade interest any company might have.
Why should our water and power go toward AI slop?
Why Does "AI" "Art" Suck So Much? - SOME MORE NEWS Some More News Jan 8, 2025 “What exactly is the point of creating an artificial intelligence that drinks more water than us? pretty much every AI company requires a stupid amount of water to cool the servers at their data centers and they know it's bad there's a reason why Google and other tech platforms are expanding their data centers to Latin America and other developing countries since it'll be less of a legal fight there this is sprouting protests in places such as Uruguay a country that's going through such a terrible and historic drought that they are actually rerouting seawater into the drinking supply and yet Google wants to make a data center there that would go through 2 million gallons of water per day” (..) “multiple AI tech companies are using cheap overseas labor paying $2 or less an hour to scrub through and moderate their chatbots because it turns out that you still need people to operate the miracle artificial intelligence. does everyone realize that do people realize that a lot of companies have had a history of hiring cheap laborers to pretend like they are AI to make their tech seem more impressive I cannot stress enough how unimpressive AI is”
The “stupid amounts of water” being used are hidden of course, by non-disclosure agreements blocked by even FOIA requests claiming the water usage threatening communities is actually a so-called “trade secret” that the municipal or private water companies won’t disclose. This is objectively wrong – even if it were a trade secret (it’s surely not by any rational definition, and obviously some think not by the legal definition) – even so, public safety with regards to life sustaining water supply should override any trade interest any company might have.
The Post and Courier - SC county sued over its Google data center water-use secrecy By David Wren Apr 21, 2024 Frank Heindel filed the complaint in state court this month after Google’s projected water and sewer usage was redacted in a document he requested under the S.C. Freedom of Information Act. The county has said the information qualifies as a protected trade secret under state law — an assertion that Heindel, who lives in Charleston County, said is false.
I had a dream about AI being a mechanical turk, after degrading experiences with chatbots deployed for customer service and tech support. I’ve had more than one too many creepy interactions with this kind of customer service by text chat that has been deep within the uncanny valley. In one case a chat support labeled as automated gave an answer that seemed oddly specific, and in another situation I was supposedly chatting with a real human, but they behaved just like a chatbot and I still don’t know for sure in either of those cases.
But there’s clearly a tendency to want to use this crap to replace humans, even though it seems like it would be cheaper and safer to just have humans because you need a lot of them in the loop with this crap, especially in potentially dangerous situations, no matter what the exciting puff pieces about medical deployment of AI might say.
Healthcare AI, Meant to Save Money, Turns Out to Require a Lot of Expensive Humans — Algorithms currently require oversight by Darius Tahir, KFF Health News January 10, 2025 There were likely real-life impacts. Ravi Parikh, MD, an oncologist at Emory University in Atlanta, who was the study's lead author, told KFF Health News the tool failed hundreds of times to prompt doctors to initiate that important discussion -- possibly heading off unnecessary chemotherapy -- with patients who needed it. He believes several algorithms designed to enhance medical care weakened during the pandemic, not just the one at Penn Medicine. "Many institutions are not routinely monitoring the performance" of their products, Parikh said. Algorithm glitches are one facet of a dilemma that computer scientists and doctors have long acknowledged but that is starting to puzzle hospital executives and researchers: Artificial intelligence (AI) systems require consistent monitoring and staffing to put in place and to keep them working well.
Because this is a multi-factor issue, I’ve got 2 separate letters, which should be sent separately so they both get tallied in the registers of elected representatives’ offices. (This is relevant to all levels of government.)
My letter to elected reps about chatbot fakery:
It needs to be required of tech companies to disclose to customers, users, and members of the public, and specify if they are interacting with an artificial interface entirely, in part, or if it’s a human, monitored by humans, or accessible to humans. People should not be tricked into thinking they’re talking to a person, nor should anyone be tricked into thinking that one is only interacting with a computer. The only reason to keep this obfuscated would be for dishonest marketing or other trickery and is unethical and bad for the consumer of goods and services. This type of dishonest and non-transparent practice needs to be explicitly prohibited.
My letter to elected reps about corporate utility usage disclosure:
Water and power usage of corporations should not be kept secret because these are life-sustaining critical infrastructures of communities. even if there were an argument that it’s a “trade secret” – and that’s ridiculous by any rational definition – the needs of the public should override their corporate interests. We need a law that requires these companies to disclose how much power and how much water they are using to run their data centers and other operations. You should not even need a FOIA request for this, it should be published publicly and in a timely fashion.