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

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

Hear hear.

LLMs can generate a lot of great value. But the pouring of resources like gasoline on a wildfire is dumb. Continuing the analogy, fire is great when controlled and terrible when let loose without regard for impact.

I think a Doctorow-style setup of domain-specific AI and edge compute are where real value with AI will exist in ways our grandchildren may enjoy -- and it happens to be antithetical to the ridiculous overvaluation we in the "hyperscalers" (which seem to just want to pump and dump the market by extracting cash from US 401ks via indexes and IPOs).