101–110 of 219 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're starting with an assumption that AI is, on the whole, a net positive for society. A lot of people would disagree.
Of course and a lot of people disagree that vaccines work, why does this negate any hard evidence?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're starting with an assumption that AI is, on the whole, a net positive for society. A lot of people would disagree.
Of course and a lot of people disagree that vaccines work, why does this negate any hard evidence?
Now you understand why anti-vaxxers ignore evidence. Because it doesn't fit with your worldview and you're too narrow-minded and selfish to consider that your viewpoint might actually be wrong and bad for others.
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.
On this note, I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs. Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure? If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?
In some sense, sure, any time you buy something you apply some upward price pressure. Of course, whether the resulting price changes measurably depends on many things, like the scale of your purchase relative to the scale of the market, the price elasticity of demand, who the marginal buyers and producers are, etc.
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.
> 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.
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…
We do not have a eunuch congress - but we do have a Congress that believes their balls have been removed despite being there the whole time. This is a solvable problem, happily. It does, however, require some will and for folks to remember they actually have some power as elected representatives to the highest legislative body in the land.
But the admin has repeatedly ignored such restrictions. This check on power also loses it's teeth when the oligarchs align themselves behind the executive branch.
When a right wing party pushes a new tech really hard, it's usually a bad thing.
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.
On this note, I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs. Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure? If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?
Energy hungry infrastructure projects pay something called a "large-load tariff" to try to contain their second-order costs from leaking into residential rate payers pay for. It's not perfect, so a datacenter project could trigger some upgrades that cause rates to go up.
The situation is confusing everyone right now because it's impossible for the average person to tell why rates are going up. A lot of utilities are doing things like finally addressing old fire-prone infrastructure (see the California fires) and dealing with inflation for everything from their generation input costs to inflated costs for infrastructure to putting straight of Hormuz-inflated gas in the tanks of their fleet. Customers only see that their rates are going up and AI datacenters are on the news, so they put them together and assume datacenters are to blame for everything. Yet rates are spiking even in places with zero datacenters.
The topic has entered the domain of emotionally charged topics so nuance is hard to come by. Many of the anti-datacenter people are against datacenters as a proxy for their hatred of AI and the electricity and water arguments are just convenient justifications. This is how we arrive at the article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be illegal to lay workers off for AI like it is in China, where sensible policy exists.
I have long said that AI is an excuse, but in reality people are not laid off for AI. People are laid off for the economy or "restructuring", and they use the fad of the day - which is AI these days - as a reason. If it was AI they would take those extra people to get more done. I know of no company that doesn't have more work than they have people. (but they lack the funds/ROI to pay more people)