Andy Masley
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 12 Dec
Andy Masley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
If you look at like two milliliters and ask how much does this contribute to my daily water footprint, my best understanding is that the average American's total daily water footprint that they consume is something like 1,600 liters altogether.
So what this means is that this is about 800,000 times as much water as a prompt uses.
And so to raise your total daily water footprint by even 1%, you would have to send something like 8,000 median prompts.
And if you're spending your entire day doing that, just, like, constantly poking and sending these prompts, like, it's very likely that you're not doing a lot of other things that also use a lot of water.
And so it's actually very likely that using AI on net might actually significantly reduce your total water footprint, like, over the course of the day.
Like, the numbers are just so small that it's very comical.
It's something like, if you don't buy, like, one additional pair of jeans, that's, like, two million prompts, which is probably more than I'll do in my lifetime, you know?
Yeah, I mean, first, I just want to flag that I'm very happy that the conversation has shifted in this direction.
I think that whenever we're talking about climate, it's almost always a distraction to focus too much on your personal footprint.
And we should be talking about like the big systematic things in society and what impacts they can have.
So, yeah, there's a lot to say about the total industrial use of water by AI and data centers more broadly.
It's definitely a lot by the standards of an individual.
You know, like you can read about like millions of gallons used every day and think like, oh, you know, I don't use that much.
That's crazy.
And I think the first thing I want to get across to people is that literally all industrial use of water in society sounds crazy from the perspective of an individual.
Like if you report something as using millions of gallons per day, like this could either apply to like AI, it could apply to like berries that we grow, it could apply to the US steel industry and things like that.
There are just so many different ways that these huge numbers can pop up when we're talking about this stuff.
Again, instead of talking about big general numbers or numbers of gallons of water that AI uses, I try to contextualize it just using either the total amount that America uses altogether or just comparing it to other things.
Another complicating factor here is that the last
year we have really good data on this is 2023.
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