Whether people would switch off meat on their own is a separate issue. If water became scarce enough to start moving the price, then you'd absolutely see people eat less meat.

But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.

Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.

I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.

While I agree, the "meat is not sustainable" argument is literal, and evidenced in beef prices rising as beef consumption lowers over the past years. Beef is moving along the spectrum from having had been a "staple" to increasingly being a luxury.

The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.

Beef is not the only meat. Chicken is much less water intensive.

From the animal welfare perspective, there's much more suffering involved in producing a pound of chicken than a pound of beef.

That depends how sentient a chicken is: their brains are of similar complexity to the larger of these models, counting params as synapses.

Also, while I'm vegetarian going on vegan, welfare arguments are obviously not relevant in response to an assertation that Americans aren't going to give up meat, because if animal welfare was relevant then Americans would give up meat.

Well, yeah. And I'm not vegetarian either. But it's just a fact that beef production is a vastly less efficient user of water than datacenters.

> I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.

I don't see any signs that the US is going to give up on AI and data centers, either. (The coming AI winter notwithstanding)

For what it's worth, I've cut back quite a bit on my beef and pork consumption, and now mostly eat chicken. The environmental and ethical arguments finally got to me.