Yeah. It's unfortunate that they seem so intent on digging in their heels about this one issue of water use. Precisely because AI is so important, we should want to make sure we're clear on the facts and have the right context for them! And the larger point that AI is likely to consolidate power in the hands of increasingly few people and corporations is well worth making (although, that story can be told for most critical technologies , from the steam engine to the telegraph to the transistor, and I don't think Hao's framing of Empire/Colonialism is really the right way to look at it at all). I think there are plenty of books to be written about the social impact of AI from a more balanced, empirical, less ideological perspective.
Yeah, it is really unfortunate because, like, personally, I think there are a lot of very genuine, very good ethical, social, economic, and material arguments to be made against AI and then dragging their heels on this one transparently ideologically motivated and wrong criticism is just detracting from their credibility, distracting their messaging, and draining their time. And to be clear for me, like, I actually think, yeah, it would be good to have more books written about this, but Empire of AI is actually a pretty good book overall. This stuff it talks about with reinforcement learning workers and the weird bizarre fucked up culture of open AI and stuff are pretty good.
On the other hand, I think Emile P Torres and Timnit Gebru are ideologues that really shouldn't be listened to.
