Can we just cancel the whole “ai” thing? It was fun for a bit, now it’s just problems.
This isn’t AI, but datacenters in general. EU stuff tends to accumulate in Ireland.
Ireland’s boom in datacentres and tech companies has been fuelled by its policy of low corporate taxation.
Of course it’s not only ai, but the article’s subhead: “Statistics raise concerns that rise in demand for data processing driven by AI could derail climate targets”
The AI meme will crash eventually. When? Can’t say. But eventually they’ll move on to the next meme.
I’m sure they’ll find something even more problematic to dump money into sooner or later.
I think it’s fair to say AI meme since there definitely is a meme component to it, but at the same time I think it’s worth pointing out it’s also not nearly entirely useless either like Web3.0/Blockchain/etc essentially was. There are a lot of cool and new things that are possible with “AI” that just weren’t possible before, there is some utility to it. It is impressive to me and for context I’m a senior developer, so I don’t necessarily get impressed as super easily as a layperson might.
More AI you say? Can do!
Every time there is a power shortage, they tell residential customers they are being wastrels and should turn their lights off…
Same for water.
Well yeah, because industry generates wealth while people’s homes and comforts do not.
Not saying its right of course.
I have had this argument with my politically minded friends. These are not all that bad. Ireland has an ever increasing percentage of renewables, they provide a high standard of living for their employees and the demand exists regardless of where we put them.
Some moved to block these, and so they would exist somewhere else. The only difference would be that place might have less renewables and Ireland loses opportunity for high income positions.
I’m not saying what anything in your post is wrong. I would like to add, though, that there’s a housing crisis in Ireland, and I know half a dozen tech workers that can’t afford their own apartment. Just saying.
Absolutely there is, the housing crisis is a result of long term failures by government. While it may be exasperated by refugees and asylum seekers, the system should have allowed for this but it did not even allow for natural population growth.
There has been a 20 year under delivering of residential housing. The government has failed to stop large funds buying up large swathes of new developments to rent out or sit on.
There are very simple solutions that could be immediately implemented like banning Airbnb, banning, corporate residential ownership, increasing taxes on multiple homes and introducing a meaningful derelict/unused home tax.
The problem is the governments pensions funds are tied to the real estate market and the level of taxation on other forms of investment has left property as the main viable option.
Commercial zoning is different, not entirely unrelated but the datacentres are not competing with residential property developers.
The future is in cold storage!
Hello AI, what do you know about planting tomatoes?
Yes, certainly!..you will find everything we know here 10.2.456 at your local SD card library.
For whoever’s interested in long form vid essays about likely root cause
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2R8q8GDwZ0
Looks like they have at least one more about Ireland but ive yet to watch that one.
As a tech professional, fuck AI, fuck Neoliberalism, and we need unions:
Date centers need a rule that says they can only run off renewable energy.
Why does the rule need to be specific to data centers? Why not just try to encourage renewable energy in general?
I really wonder how much large scale energy production we’d need if every building was required to have solar. I know we’d need some energy storage tech such as batteries but I’m focusing more on the generation part.
Requiring solar is good for certain regions, but it might be better to make this more generic for any renewables especially because there are areas that don’t get a lot of sun.
For instance, California requires all newly constructed homes to have solar installed, but that wouldn’t work too well for places that are mostly cloudy throughout the year, or for places like Alaska.
There are some data centres in the UK that use the waste heat to heat the local swimming pool. Seems a good idea, we need compute and we need heat, why not do both at once?
Surely it’s not too much of a stretch to have datacentres contributing to local district heating systems either?
Businesses use more power than people. They get it cheaper too.
I’m sure they’ll claim it’s not really an issue at all, immediately after jacking our rates up yet another time
Eh, Ireland sheltered a bunch of tax elusion asshole companies, turns out those companies are not looking out for the common good. Not really a surprise.
Still a good bargain, all things considered.
I dont think they do in this case.
Business & Industry uses over 75% of electricity in Ireland. Residential energy usage really is not that much, in any country in the world.
Same with CO2, almost all of it is created by industries.
Don’t worry - electricity also trickles down.
Although not an expert on that specific country, I can be sure that ’ almost all ’ is very misleading, even if it gets a lot upvotes because people find it convenient to blame some big bad other. Even if you have specific data for electricity, don’t forget a lot of CO2 is emitted by cars, and also by fuel to heat homes (including some peat in special case of ireland - and in that country a large fraction of GHG emissions is also methane from agriculture).
Well, in the US, here’s a decent breakdown by sector:
- 30% industry
- 31% residential & commercial
- 29% transportation
- 10% agriculture
I don’t know what the breakdown is between residential and commercial, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty even.
- 38% agriculture
- 21% transportation
- 14% energy
- 11% industrial (combined mfg combustion and industrial)
- 10% residential
- 5% other
So yeah, unless you count agriculture as “industries,” they are one of the smaller factors in Ireland, especially compared to other parts of the world.
Also no one ever mentions that the industries are building products for the public. They don’t just release CO2 and use electricity for fun lol
Is this any surprise?
