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by zug_zug·8mo ago·view on hn ↗
Reminds me of "cancer alley" [1].

As somebody who's looked in to this a bit, the deeper I dug the more I ultimately moved toward the conclusion (reluctantly) that indeed big corporations are the baddies. I have an instinct to steel-math both sides, but not every issue has two compelling sides to it...

One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley

2. https://galiherlaw.com/media-manipulation-comes-out-during-m...

8 comments
You should consider dropping that instinct. If you look into how corporations have behaved historically you'd assume evil until proven innocent. Especially US corps.
> You should consider dropping that instinct.

This is the reason we have people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities.

If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic.

Edit: By the way, I also don't think we should trust big companies indiscriminately. Like, we could have a system for pesticide approval that errs on the side of caution: We only permit pesticides for which there is undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems for humans/animals/other plants etc.

"If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic."

I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong. The tendency to optimize for profits at the expense of everything else, to ignore all negative externalities is inherent to all American corporations.

The main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.

If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.

But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.

This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.

> I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong

You really can't. You can start off with a prior that it's more likely the corporation is wrong than not. But if you're assuming your conclusion, you're going to find evidence for what you're looking for. (You see the same thing happen with folks who start off by assuming the government is in the wrong.)

When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?

If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?

The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.

Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.

Many individuals optimize for profits too.
It might seem like bias will get you to where you're going faster, but at the end of the day it's just bias.
>people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities

Does it not?

"We estimate that 1 MWh of energy consumption by a data center requires 7.1 m3 of water." If Microsoft, Amazon and Google are assumed to have ~8000 MW of data centers in the US, that is 1.4M m3 per day. The city of Philadelphia supplies 850K m3 per day.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1/...

Why do we need to assume so many things, when we can peg it to reality.

Worldwide, Google's data centers averaged 3.7GW in 2024. Globally, they use 8.135e9 gallons of water in the year, which is 30.8e6m³ per year, which is 84e3m³ per day. Double that to meet the assumed 8GW data center capacity, 168e3m³/day. QED: the estimate 1.4e6m³/day is high by a factor of 10x. Or, in other words, the entire information industry consumes the same amount of water as one very small city.

I believe this is why Google states their water consumption as equivalent to 51 golf courses. It gives a useful benchmark for comparison. But any way you look at it the water consumption of the information sector is basically nothing.

Yeah, but that is for everything. YouTube, Amazon itself, AWS, Azure, GCP, ... not just AI stuff. I mean, it is still a lot of water, but the numbers are not that easy to calculate IMHO
Resource consumption of AI is unclear on two axes:

1) As other commenters have noted: raw numbers. In general, people are taking the resource consumption of new datacenters and attributing 100% of that to "because AI," when the reality is generally that while AI is increasing spend on new infrastructure, data companies are always spending on new infrastructure because of everything they do.

2) Comparative cost. In general, image synthesis takes between 80 and 300 times fewer resources (mostly electricity) per image than human creation does. It turns out a modern digital artist letting their CPU idle and screen on while they muse is soaking significant resources that an AI is using to just synthesize. Granted, this is also not an apples-to-apples comparison because the average AI flow generates dozens of draft images to find the one that is used, but the net resource effect might be less energy spent in total per produced image (on a skew of "more spent by computers" and "less by people").

how much is it in burgers and steaks? serious question
AI water usage is pretty bad on a local scale where a large water consumer(Data centers) start sucking up more water than the local table can bear at the expense of the people living there.

Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person. It's correct that these companies will push limits and avoid accountability. It's correct that they're generally a liability creating a massive bubble and speculation based on an immature tech designed to automate as many careers away as possible without a proposed solution to the newly unemployed besides "deliver fast food" or "die".

Despite legally treating corporations as people, there's no consistently enforced mechanism that can punish them like people. Monsanto can't be sent to jail for murder. Their C-Levels will never see a cell the way the average person can have the book thrown at them for comparably minor crimes.

Because companies cannot be held accountable legally and effectively, it's important to assume the worst, to generate the public blowback to hold them accountable via lost business.

"undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems"

Impossible standard. You cannot prove a negative.

But, I think it's fair to assume that any chemical that is toxic to plant or insect life is probably something you want to be careful with.

Your edit was a good one.

It's a rational default position to say, "I'll default to distrusting large corporate scientific literature that tells me neurotoxins on my food aren't a problem."

As with any rule of thumb, that one will sometimes land you on the wrong side of history, but my guess is that it will more often than not guide you well if you don't have the time to dive deeper into a subject.

I'm not saying all corporations are evil. I'm not saying all corporate science is bad or bunk. But, corporations have a poor track record with this sort of thing, and it's the kind of thing that could obviously have large, negative societal consequences if we get it wrong. This is the category of problem for which the science needs to be clear and overwhelming in favor of a thing before we should allow it.

Not at all. NOT AT ALL.

There are shades of gray here. But you are absolutely not required to extend benefit of the doubt to entities that have not earned it. That's a recipe for disaster.

Personally, I find myself to be incredibly biased against corporations over people. I've met a lot of people in my life, they seem mostly nice if a bit stupid. Well intentioned. Selfish.

Are corporations mostly well intentioned? Well, consider that some people tried to put "good intentions" into corporations bylaws and has been viciously resisted.

Corporations will happily take everything you have if you accidentally give it to them. Actual human beings aren't like that.

> …undisputed evidence… do not cause problems…

This is unworkable in practice; nothing will ever be completely safe. Instead, we need a public regulatory body that makes reasonable risk/reward tradeoffs when approving necessary chemicals. However, this system breaks down completely when you allow for lobbying and a revolving door between the public and private sectors.

Ai does us a crap-ton of water. Most data centers use closed loop liquid cooling with heat exchangers to water cooling. (At least all the big ones like Google and Amazon do)

I’m curious what evidence you think you’ve seen to the contrary. from my side, I used to build data centers and my friends are still in the industry. As of a month ago I’ve had discussions with Google engineers who build data centers regarding their carful navigation of water rights, testing of waste water etc.

AI does consume huge amounts of water comparable to entire cities. A single AI facility consumes more water than most cities.

That AI consumes somewhat less water than cities of millions is not a defense.

> We only permit pesticides for which there is undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems for humans/animals/other plants etc.

This is broadly how the EU operates. If companies want to start putting new stuff in/on our food, they first have to demonstrate it's no dangerous.

Not the best approach to everything perhaps, but I'd rather not have capitalists freely innovating on my food.

Corporations have to be assumed to be amoral, which means that practically speaking, you can assume they'll tend towards evil.

At least you have to continually monitor them as such.

Corporations should be assumed to act in line with their interests, which is the bottom line. "Morality" isn't the lens that you need to try to view them through to understand their intentions and actions. But yes, their motivations pretty much always lay outside of any moral good due to the nature of them.
> you can assume they'll tend towards evil.

An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage.

And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.

You can certainly accept a bias against corporations but you still should never assume every accusation is correct. Otherwise you'd be inclined to believe bullshit theories like Moderna wants our kids to have autism.
Perhaps, but it’s much easier to find contrived ways to stay neutral, than take a stance and actually be the change you want to see.
Legislatively allowed evil
If the corporate veil, a legislative invention, were abolished or significantly weakened companies would stop acting evil pretty quickly. So yeah, this tracks.
You're right. That's why I never took the Covid vaccine and I convinced everyone I know to avoid it as well. You cannot trust big pharma after all the evil things they've done.
>Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We need some more nuance here.

Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.

In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.

So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.

> If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good.

This is so naive.

People do not ask corporations to be evil and they certainly don't demand it. People ask for good value and convenience and corporations respond by doing by amorally pursuing that.

However, when you ask consumers if they want value and convenience at the cost of *evil*, they almost always say no.

Corporations have a demonstrated and well-documented history of actively hiding their evil actions because they know consumers are not aligned with them at all.

If consumers "demand" evil, as you say, then corporations wouldn't try to hide it.

Counterexample.

Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.

Also, while I consider organic food to be mostly (but not completely) a scam, most people don't buy organic. Which can be interpreted as "if it is cheaper with pesticides than without, I will go for pesticides".

In cars, emission control devices have to me made mandatory and almost no one would pay for them. And even with that, people sometimes break the law to remove them (ex: catalytic converter). It is common for all environmental laws.

Of course, if you talk to people face to face, most will tell you that they don't want value and convenience at the cost of evil, but in private, if can turn a blind eye, they will.

And most of these company evil practices are often not very well hidden. Sometimes, they are genuinely criminal, highly secret operations, but they are often not, as criminal lawsuits are costly, and secrets like that don't last long in big companies. But if it is legal and it brings value convenience to people, people usually don't want to look too much, even when some NGOs try to bring awareness.

This is assuming that every consumers knows what evil goes into their consumption. They don't, and not by choice, but because nobody will tell them. Ever. In fact, everyone will spend billions to make sure they don't know.

The problem with simplistic free market dynamics views is that they rely on consumer choice. Consumer choice relies on consumer consent and free information flow.

As soon as EITHER of those two are chilled, even just a tiny bit, the free market dynamics thinking falls down like a house of cards. Now the situation is orders of magnitude more complex, and we actually have to think about what's going on, inatead of appealing to a model so bare-bones it's practically impossible to see in real life.

The issue is when companies try to hide their evil, manipulate public opinion, lobby (bribe) lawmakers to disable the democratic process, ...

All of which happens regularly, and especially in this case, as the person you responded to showed.

Don't seek nuance where there is none.

> Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand

How do you define evil? Profit motivation at the expense of human life is as evil as anything you're ever going to find outside of fantasy literature.

This only really applies in a world of complete information. Pesticide side effects were an enormous externality, which only the company was aware of. And they obviously worked hard to keep that information out of the public consciousness. Perhaps there could be nuance to producing the pesticide, weighing food prices against health impacts, but that’s no justification for lying about what it does.
It is a consequence of our current model of living, where the only thing that matters is proffit.
Unfortunately, in the current political environment saying that there are things that matters more than profit makes you a Commie somehow…
It's a Chinese company selling this stuff so being a commie doesn't save you.
Checking in from cancer alley!

There are refineries within a stone's throw from my house. One of them sits on the highest point in our water table and the vacuum it creates has been destroying our famously soft water by creating underground fault lines which pollute the aquifer with leeched hard minerals.

But hey, oil.

I used to be a proponent of the industrial agriculture, because technological progress of all kinds (genetics, chemicals, mechanisation) are the reason why food is now abundant.

But the massive disinformation campaigns and targeted harassment of researchers, as well as the outright corruption of science is where they lost me. Surely you wouldn't do things like that if you had clear consciousness.

> One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].

It certainly looks bad but I'm not sure the logic really follows.

It's just modern PR. Companies used to just do that by having good relationships with journalist but now social media has taken a lot of that role away. It's a fairly natural transition for companies to make and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a lot of major corporations that don't do something similar.

And, also, it doesn't necessarily follow that they are either willingly lying or that their products are unsafe.

"Cancer Alley" is a good comparison because it shows how this plays out over decades
Seeing how much having an unlimited upside corrupts corporations seeded my first serious doubts about capitalism.