Launching anything into space is heinously expensive. And CO2 emissive.
With very generous math, you’d need a radiator like a mile across to cool a space data center, but practically? Larger.
Datacenter hardware is unreliable and goes obsolete quickly, and any kind of maintenance in space is basically cost prohibitive.
There are other smaller yet still crippling engineering challenges, like bit flips from radiation (which gets move severe as lithography shrinks; look up Nvidia’s research on this), assembling large structures in space reliably, cooling loops for such gigantic structures, and extremely difficult/expensive networking (with distinct issues in LEO or geosynchronous).
And most of all… Solar is dirt cheap on Earth, compared to that.
So is just sticking a pipe in the ground for a geothermal loop, or ambient radiative cooling. We literally have tons of mass to dissipate heat into for free, instead of having to radiate it thermally, yet that’s too expensive for ground data centers, apparently.
That’s the joke.
It’s like saying “air conditioning is difficult” and proposing “I know! Let’s live under the Antarctic ice sheet!” That’s not hyperbole. It might be more practical, actually, as getting mass there is waaaay cheaper…
I hate that the anti AI stuff is 90% idiotic planning permission and capitalism, 5% “The idiots making this put no effort into it” and 5% “I just don’t like it, yuck”.
Like, most of what AI bad is the cultism and corporate shit. Like literally shaving 2% off costs to drain a town’s water or something, or proselytizing scaling up transformers while ignoring the efficiency/scaling papers that keep coming out (because that would break the Tech Bro grift).
…At the same time, the absolute energy cost is ridiculously overstated compared to, say, global aluminum or steel production.
And then you have the ridiculous politicization. An example I often cite is a TV series that was ‘fan remastered’ and (as one component in a long chain) upscaled with an oldschool GAN that cost peanuts to train. Beloved years ago, but all of a sudden the fandom hates it because it has something to do with ‘AI’.
…At the same, you can’t ignore how irresponsibly its presented, where these companies are making pennies from spam/slop literally destroying everything. It’s quite reasonable to say “The idiots making this put no effort into it” or “I just don’t like it, yuck” when 99.99% of user-visible AI generation is slop/spam.
You’ve got most of it right, the part you didn’t show you picked up on/I didn’t make clear enough is the complaints that AI is taking all the electricity and water away from a town. Who the fuck gave the permission to have a data center be built that would impact the quality of life of the people living in an area? Why wasn’t the zillon dollar corporation responsible for this increase in power and water consumption?
And then because most people are using corporate ai with shitty , generic prompts, there’s never a chance to discuss using it as a technical art form or within it’s accurate placement in art history, which is something that would be intellectually stimulating to discuss.
See this comment for math and specifics: https://lemmy.world/post/38090104/20233592
But the TL;DR version:
Launching anything into space is heinously expensive. And CO2 emissive.
With very generous math, you’d need a radiator like a mile across to cool a space data center, but practically? Larger.
Datacenter hardware is unreliable and goes obsolete quickly, and any kind of maintenance in space is basically cost prohibitive.
There are other smaller yet still crippling engineering challenges, like bit flips from radiation (which gets move severe as lithography shrinks; look up Nvidia’s research on this), assembling large structures in space reliably, cooling loops for such gigantic structures, and extremely difficult/expensive networking (with distinct issues in LEO or geosynchronous).
And most of all… Solar is dirt cheap on Earth, compared to that.
So is just sticking a pipe in the ground for a geothermal loop, or ambient radiative cooling. We literally have tons of mass to dissipate heat into for free, instead of having to radiate it thermally, yet that’s too expensive for ground data centers, apparently.
That’s the joke.
It’s like saying “air conditioning is difficult” and proposing “I know! Let’s live under the Antarctic ice sheet!” That’s not hyperbole. It might be more practical, actually, as getting mass there is waaaay cheaper…
I hate that the anti AI stuff is 90% idiotic planning permission and capitalism, 5% “The idiots making this put no effort into it” and 5% “I just don’t like it, yuck”.
Not sure I understand you but I think I get it?
Like, most of what AI bad is the cultism and corporate shit. Like literally shaving 2% off costs to drain a town’s water or something, or proselytizing scaling up transformers while ignoring the efficiency/scaling papers that keep coming out (because that would break the Tech Bro grift).
…At the same time, the absolute energy cost is ridiculously overstated compared to, say, global aluminum or steel production.
And then you have the ridiculous politicization. An example I often cite is a TV series that was ‘fan remastered’ and (as one component in a long chain) upscaled with an oldschool GAN that cost peanuts to train. Beloved years ago, but all of a sudden the fandom hates it because it has something to do with ‘AI’.
…At the same, you can’t ignore how irresponsibly its presented, where these companies are making pennies from spam/slop literally destroying everything. It’s quite reasonable to say “The idiots making this put no effort into it” or “I just don’t like it, yuck” when 99.99% of user-visible AI generation is slop/spam.
You’ve got most of it right, the part you didn’t show you picked up on/I didn’t make clear enough is the complaints that AI is taking all the electricity and water away from a town. Who the fuck gave the permission to have a data center be built that would impact the quality of life of the people living in an area? Why wasn’t the zillon dollar corporation responsible for this increase in power and water consumption?
And then because most people are using corporate ai with shitty , generic prompts, there’s never a chance to discuss using it as a technical art form or within it’s accurate placement in art history, which is something that would be intellectually stimulating to discuss.