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
And I want to try to reach people who don't, basically.
If you think AI is bad, then obviously you should also like generally oppose it using water for the same reason that you should oppose anything else bad that's using water.
But that opposition should also come with a sense of proportion of like where the actual water issues are in the country.
And like there are a lot of other things I think are bad that use a lot of water, specifically animal agriculture.
And like there, I do actually feel a little bit more justified in focusing on that a lot just because it's using such a huge amount of the nation's water.
Something like a quarter of your total dietary footprint for water comes from like the food that is grown to eventually feed animals and stuff like that.
And so in thinking about this, I do want people to understand.
not be upset if they don't like AI, but I do want them to at least prioritize like, okay, if I care about water, will it actually make much of a dent at all if we shut down all AI data centers like tomorrow?
Like how much will this actually help America's water problems?
And my basic claim is that it's not really gonna make much of a dent compared to a lot of other issues.
The very final thing is that I do worry that in these debates, a lot of the potential positive aspects of data centers for local communities are getting drowned out.
And obviously, there are a lot of tradeoffs.
There are a lot of negatives, too.
But data centers also just often add a ton of tax revenue for sometimes very poor communities.
They can provide a lot of utility revenue for utilities to upgrade aging infrastructure.
And in a lot of places in America, the main water access issue isn't necessarily the raw amount of fresh water.
It's like aging infrastructure that might have dangerous amounts of lead or just make it more expensive to deliver the water in other ways.
And so like a new very large buyer can actually help water access here.
And again, I don't want to say that makes data centers good all the time, but I do want to say that we need to at least consider these tradeoffs and not just potentially steamroll something that might in very specific instances help communities rather than hurt them.
I mean, I love the video personally.
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