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I think its a mistake to fight datacenters and AI.

Taking a step back, if the US unilaterally stops producing AI will other countries stop? The answer is clearly no.

Datacenters and ai can be built and trained anywhere. If you want control over AI you should want it to be built in your own country where you have political representation.

All preventing datacenter buildout will do is ensure that the price remains high and only really rich organizations can access it.

Well realistically both are bad. Right now our government is purely dysfunctional, so I'm not sure anyone knows how to fight anything. We have a eunuch Congress, and in response each party just tries to push executive power as far as possible, never once considering that someone they dislike could get elected in the future and use that expanded power in a negative way.

I'm sure that right at this moment at least some people are thinking "if only we had a different executive, then we could rein in this AI problem." That is wrong at best. You could rein it in for ~4 years until you lost the next election. With a completely feckless Congress, very little can get done.

Data centers are easy to fight against because there is no constituency really pulling for them. They create only a handful of jobs. Ultimately the entire thing is a waste of time, data centers can be built basically anywhere, and that's why a lot of them are moving to rural red states where they welcome the construction.

The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage. We should also tax the hell out of anyone using AI as an excuse for layoffs. It's far past time to ban buybacks and dividends for any company doing layoffs. We also should have a requirement, you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.

Isn't "data centers are using all the electricity" the same as "we're not pricing electricity correctly"?

Instead of a ban just make sure they pay what's needed to keep capacity where it needs to be.

At the end it's a facility that costs the locals and benefits non-locals. Even if AI is the truly greatest productivity booster, the benefits are still distributed over all its customers, and the environmental impacts are mostly local.

It's like if someone is building a landfill in your hometown to bury the whole country's waste. Or it's like a factory that creates zero job.

If you fight either of those things in the US, you should do so carefully, as it may get you to be targeted by FBI and DHS as an extremist actor as per current government's policy as of approximately a week ago.

This is a wall of text but genuinely worth skimming: https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...

Poison Fountain on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/

> How can technology be used to make our society freer and more equal, and to augment human agency rather than diminish it?

The past 20 years of surveillance capitalism and the general deployment of technology against consumers should make everyone question whether this could ever be possible.

Electricity costs make the headlines, but I have also heard that the datacenters apparently make a loud perpetual buzzing noise that is audible from a large distance. That sounds like reason enough to oppose one being built near me.

They're fighting the centralization of the means of production, surveillance, and control*

You know what the largest cost of any goods are? The energy cost. You know what these datacenters are demanding massive amounts of? Energy.

Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. But I can't afford to tack on 30% more costs onto ever material object I need as someone not earning 6 figures doing tech work.

There is a reason the US doesn't process tons of aluminum or supply the world with fertilizer, we don't have all that cheap of energy. Go to Canada and build a hydroplant, or build a solar field.

And that is before we get into the fact that many people think the LLM boom is a massive crash waiting to happen when it inevitably doesn't change the world overnight to justify the trillions in investments.

It's easy everyone needs to stop using AI, yet the response is "China....." Let them destroy themselves maybe or they thrive more. A double edge sword we (U.S.) created!

I agree with the datacenter hate in spirit, but the thing that always bothers me is that most of us working in tech have been telling John Q. Public for DECADES not to trust big tech. Don't put all your data in the cloud, switch to open source alternatives, keep your physical media (or copy it) and don't rely on streaming, etc. I personally have offered my time and knowledge on numerous occasions to help someone make the switch from say, Windows to Linux, Google Drive to a NAS, etc. I've always tried to be as helpful as I can, avoiding jargon, breaking everything down into simple terms, making it easy to understand, being excited to teach people a way to interact with technology without being abused by a corporation.

You know what I learned? Nobody wants to. People will always choose the more convenient option no matter how bad it is in the long run, even when the far more ethical option is only just slightly less convenient. They choose instant gratification every time. They'll whine about it, they'll swear each new enshittified update or price hike is the last straw, but they will keep paying the bill.

And don't even get me started on trying to get people to donate money to open source projects.

So maybe it counts as victim blaming, and the sociopathic techbros that run these companies are certainly responsible for their own behavior, but, at a certain point... it's hard to blame the lion when the tourists keep walking into its den.

Ya'll wanted the cloud, you wanted Ring doorbells, you wanted Alexas, you wanted Kindles, you wanted ChatGPT to write your emails for you, you wanted iPhones... We've been telling you for years: It's just someone else's computer.

"Yet widespread cynicism about AI, I think, doesn’t stem from any inherent property of the technology itself, but rather from our politics."

No, AI is partly rejected as mind numbing, it produces SEO slop, it produces bad code, it steals IP. Is this author living under a rock?

She then proceeds to parrot the industry that we'll have arrangements that go in the direction of UBI. This whole article sounds like a trojan horse for Vox readers to distract them from the real issues.

EDIT: The pre-IPO downvotes get aggressive again. Mentioning how the press works is strictly forbidden.

This article is bullshit. It downplays the real, valid concerns people have about data centers themselves as more "ahh, poor uniformed populace" BS:

1. Electricity costs in Maryland jumped 89% over the past year, much more than anywhere else, largely due to an AWS data center expansion: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-electricity-pr...

2. At their heart, data centers are extractive. Their boosters always overstate the jobs they will create, but they basically take land and resources from one place and create the vast majority of the wealth somewhere else. They are giant windowless boxes, they don't support their community in any way, and in fact with AI they basically add to more job destruction in their communities.

While I agree that some downsides of AI are overstated (like water usage), this whole article smacks of paternalistic "the peons just don't understand what's really going on" nonsense. The same thing happened in the 80s, 90s and early 00s when many economists painted those who lost their jobs due to globalization as Luddites who just didn't understand economics. Only decades later did many economists readily admit many of the huge downsides to many populations from globalization and that reskilling rarely works.

Backblaze increased the price per TB (we should be getting emails "ten times the storage for the same price"). Reliable VPS for 5EUR/month are basically gone. Affordability of assembling own PC is back to maybe late 1990s.

Tear it all down.

No, it's not a proxy fight about AI. The data centers are just bad, for several, easy-to-explain reasons:

1. They get massive tax breaks;

2. Everyone else pays for the electricity infrastructure that they need to suppor tthem;

3. They pollute water supplies;

4. Everybody's electricity prices go up while the DC has a sweetheart deal that, again, everyone else is paying for;

5. There are no jobs unlike, say, if someone used that same money to buuild an auto plant; and

6. They tend to very far noiser than you might think, such that they probably violate noise ordinances when built near residential property but nobody enforces that. We have industrial areas for this reason but that zoning just gets completely ignored.

AI is a whole separate debate. That one, too, is pretty simple. AI is selling labor displacement and wage suppression. That's the only product. Getting rid of the data centers won't get rid of that. The DCs are just going where it's cheapest, where local officials don't have the resources to fight it and where people can be bullied or bribed into approving it. Move them somewhere else slightly more expensive and it'll still be displacing labor.

When a right wing party pushes a new tech really hard, it's usually a bad thing.

AI the technology isn't the problem. It's just a tool like anything else. Corporate persons as legal persons and the shielding of the people within that corporation from the consequences of their crimes and malicious actions are the problem. The ability to control elections by dumping unlimited amounts of money is a problem. We need states to change their articles of incorporation to make them accountable. We need states to start revoking corporate charters. Hawaii is leading the way on this. Of course this doesn't help that much when most corporations incorporate in states which are already co-opted and controlled totally by these non-human persons; like Delaware, which is now even given corporations the right to vote in state and local elections.

Well to be fair AI scaling and large compute are the real problem. It's just another enshittification scheme. And data centers are the black holes that suck the industry dry like a vacuum.

This is paywalled. Without reading the article, I don't think Americans are fighting data centers because of AI.

I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.

I realized that the belief that datacenters are bad for the water supply (either evaporating it or polluting it) is weaponized self-delusion. People don't care if it's true or not, because it gives people a way to fight back against (perceived) AI job losses.

AI if fucking awesome and a small minority that’s fighting is not all Americans .. either way, postmen were fighting emails and weavers were fighting power looms .. no one cares .. what a ba article

The politics of anti-* is tiring. Where are the people and politicians with optimism and a vision? The issues with data centers are manageable. It's quite hard to bring X back to America if Americans oppose the buildings we need (factories, power gen, data centers). I wonder how much of this is the powerful and adversarial poisoning the discourse so America continues to stumble and fall from hegemony?

I think people are also literally fighting datacenters. As others have said the increase in energy costs is a problem for the average person. Not only is AI potentially competing for your job, it's also competing for your access to energy to power your home or your vehicle. Energy costs also affect the price you pay for basically every good and service.

Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?