Americans don't know how to fight AI so they're fighting data centers

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.

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.

"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.

> 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?

Sure but you can say this about everything. Where are the protests about the wine industry in California? 500,000 acres of land for vineyards, far more water used for growing grapes than cooling data centers, all so a handful of people can make fortunes selling empty calories to the rich?

If you want to focus purely on utilitarian "optimal land use for essentials only" arguments there's way worse offenders than datacenters, the anti-DC sentiment is purely part of the anti-AI wave.

If you want people to support anything, show them how it benefits them. Do it as directly as possible - new jobs in their town, lower energy bills from a new plant, etc. People will generally follow the money.

What won't work is something like "it'll be better for the economy in the entire country, so put up with some disruption for a while." No one likes higher electricity bills while a power plant is being constructed, a new building going up too close to their homes that doesn't create jobs they can apply for, etc. It's a losing message to promise the payoff only years later or indirectly.