141–150 of 219 posts
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…
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Is the hard evidence of AI being a net improvement for society in the room with us now?
Depends, is the net improvement of the internet, electricity, agriculture, steam engine also in the room?
Despite this, because of its other effects, the cost to clean up and stop using asbestos is greater than the sum total of any benefit from all mined asbestos worldwide.
Even a miracle technology can still be a net disaster.
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.
How is this different than a cornfield? A data center is probably a better neighbor because it doesn't kick up dirt, pesticides, and fertilizer into the air.
In the worst case, if your local municipality sides with business over the little guy, that means potential brownouts and water shortages for you.
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…
As far as I can work out, tokens aren't fungible which makes them a pretty poor thing to tax instead of just taxing the profits of the companies behind the models.
Not again...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the hard evidence of AI being a net improvement for society in the room with us now?
Depends, is the net improvement of the internet, electricity, agriculture, steam engine also in the room?
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 downst…
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?
Seems like an assumption on your part that being pro-data center reflects "vision" and "optimism."
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 alway…
Best part is when they figure out how to take their $10-20k donations to the local community as "doing good" and turn it into positive PR spin to the local yokels that don't know any better that they're getting robbed blind daily. They have a full playbook to rob local communities and get them to fall for it and it sucks.
I've watched it happen in Upstate NY and we certainly aren't seeing any benefits of any of it.
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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.
The only power congress theoretically has to impact the administration is that of the purse. 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.
- impeach
- pass new laws / revise old laws
- hold real hearings
- amend the constitution
Now practically will this congress do so? No, but in principle they wield more power than the executive.
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You could say this about anything, but it's being said about AI datacenters. People like wine! They don't like AI and the NSA. It's really not a mystery.
That's exactly my point! Everything has negative externalities, and focusing on them is the way to seem "rational" even though you don't actually care about them. It's the same as how people will protest high density residences "ruining the character of the neighborhood" when they really just don't want poor people living near them. You can't just outright say you don't want poor people in your neighborhood, so you t…