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.
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.
The well-actually testicle TED talk misses the point. Representatives have power, and sometimes that power is for sale. And that position to represent was also for sale. As was the attention of the electorate.
Honestly, calling Congress castrated is fine because it is healthy venting about how ineffective they seem at their charter.
Even though it's really charming and compelling to believe, there is no one solvable problem simply requiring elbow grease, voting harder, proprioception of comically vulnerable reproductive organs, etc.
The framing that congressional politicians have "forgotten" that they have power is a silly and dishonest trope. They absolutely know that they have power, but they also just watched multiple incumbents (Cornyn, Cassidy, Massie just to name a few) who didn't get Trump's endorsement lose their respective primaries, effectively ending their political careers.
Members of Congress, just like everyone else, act in their own self-interest. And unfortunately for pretty much everyone else, their best method of self-preservation is to do nothing, hence the "eunuch" Congress.
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.
Except datacenters are actually very low environmental impact. As long as they provide their own power, they have MUCH lower impact than most farms would.
Key point doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Do all these data center buildouts include providing their own power? Seems like the answer is largely no. These companies expect power infrastructure to be supplied by the government, but also want lower taxes.
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.
Why should I think that I "own" or control a datacenter built in my town compared to one built in another country? It's pretty unlikely anything I do will have any effect on what goes on inside one even if I work there.
The greatest control I have is probably to have it not get built, though even that is minimal as it has failed to stop the one that is indeed being built in my town.
Even if you do want datacenters built in your country, you probably don't want them built at the maximally explotative locations that their developers pursue.
They don't provide appreciable community value and they effectively mine limited local resources (power, grid capacity, land, water) and sell it as compute, immediately diverting the profit back out of the local economy and into very distant business accounts instead.
Builders choose their targets specifically by how well they can strong-arm weak/vulnerable communities into letting them build these mines through political influence and misrepresentation. It's bad.
What you probably want is to leverage their global market value to establish new power and grid capacity in undeveloped areas, perhaps to someday become a seed for
new communities that grow around the infrastructure development work.
But that's much more expensive than bullying and seducing a weak city council so it won't happen with regional/state/federal regulatory protections or incentives that push them away from the exploitative opportunities and towards the constructive ones.
If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and engineering. These improvements get drowned out by the AI Cheerleaders, but they're there.
We could have had this same argument about social media 15 years ago before hard evidence showed it's not quite the net benefit to society it was touted as.
You presume there is hard evidence that AI is good for society. In reality, the inverse is true.
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.
For people worried about their livelihoods, there's value in slowing AI adoption to give our economy time to transition rather than just throwing a lot of people out of work all at the same time.
There's no such thing as 'control over AI'; that goes double for someone who is a complete nobody plebian with a little baby stock portfolio. You know, basically everyone except for a select few.
Yeah, and it should be. But the USA, at least in this current moment, builds regulations catering to corporations and the rich over people's general needs. So the regulations that are on the table at the national level are ineffective.
It's easier for normal people to influence local regulations, but local regulations just push the problem somewhere else. However disdain for AI is so widespread that this is actually kind of effective.
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.
Banning buybacks and taxing dividends like earned income (or at least with higher tax brackets for higher dividend income, just like earned income) is basically the same thing as taxing tokens. I'd go even further and reduce income taxes by the same amount that is raised by taxing dividends.
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.
> 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.
There’s no such thing as a red state or blue state, these are fictions created to generate political fighting for no value to society.
Second - many states such as Ohio have begun pushing back strongly against data centers. In Ohio we had been offering tax breaks for construction because we welcomed the economic activity, but thankfully the government here after seeing a lot of pushback across the state has realized providing tax incentives or subsidies is economically and politically stupid relative the benefits of the new data centers.
To your point, they can be built anywhere. So many folks are saying yep, let’s build them somewhere else and drain water and raise energy prices there instead of here.
Smart politics in a state like Ohio would require data centers to relocate corporate jobs to the state or face full or perhaps even surcharges for utility rates because why not?
You would purchase an AI tax stamp! Just make sure you’re being honest about your token usage. Or maybe we can have AI licenses! Sky’s the limit when you can just make up policy on the internet for free.
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)
I mean if AI is really powerful the reason is "profitability as our competitor steals our contracts at a fraction of the price". Your competitor just doesn't hire in the first place of course.
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?
Your house goes through different approval processes than large infrastructure processes. You also pay a different rate than commercial customers.
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.
But it's a circular problem. The price wouldn't be exorbitant if these rural areas were left to their own devices. But their utility build outs must be done per rules passed at the behest of the richer urban areas.
We're dealing with this bullshit in my own city in another state. From the parks to the roads to the sidewalks to the library every goddamn thing we touch gets driven up to the point of "can't actually do what we wanted" in cost because some rich assholes 100mi away in the vicinity of the capitol have taken a "build it fancy and rich or don't build it at all" attitude and enshrined that in state law and rules.
Sometimes they'll be so kind as to eat part of the cost with state grants, as long as we sell our freedom away in other ways.
Rural power was always expensive, but now due to wildfire risk, it needs to be ruinously expensive. It's not for the benefit of the cities, and driven by corporate risk management.
>I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs
electrical supply is not infinite. datacenters have high electrical demand. more demand + same supply = increase prices.
>Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
the problem is that added infrastructure is not built instantaneously. it lags behind. so costs will be high until more supply-side infrastructure is in place.
i agree that there should be some sort of stipulation that when you build your mega datacenter that you also have to build out electrical infrastructure at the same time. but unfortunately, that is not how it is.
This is basically just the normal dynamic with American tax law where tax jurisdictions are terrible at coordinating, so they end up approving things and agreeing to tax things at a very low level in order to win the competition. Even when states/counties try to work together on this stuff there's a huge defector problem, like "hey I can back out of this multistate tax compact agreement and get 500 new jobs which will let me win local reelection".
I suppose you can reduce a lot of both good at bad things about the country to "because federalism".
Thanks, that's really useful. I guess in my head I had the impression that costs could potentially be static. eg: if you had 10 customers total, each needed to pay $1 to generate electricity to serve their needs. So when you scale up to 100 customers, you can still have everyone pay $1 and come out to the same place.
I totally get the general principle that not everything scales linearly like that. But, I also know very little about electricity generation, so I have no idea where the breakpoints are. (I would also guess that if the demand dips low enough, there could be a case where after decreasing costs for a while, costs actually start to rise again as there is some minimum infrastructure needed but fewer customers to bear the cost.)
> Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
In some states (like Oregon and Virginia) they do, but in a lot of states the regulations for rate structures are flat among all users so when there's a large surge in new demand the utility will build out new capacity and spread the cost of that new capacity to all rate payers with no regard for the fact that the new capacity would not have been needed without the new demand (from data centers). So everyone who was already using the electricity pays the new higher rates along with the new large-load user.
These companies building data centers will often make a lot of PR statements about how they are fine paying the extra cost for extra use while at the same time lobbying behind the scenes to actually avoid that happening and fighting against changes to utility rate structures that would raise their costs. By and large they can't be trusted.
> 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?
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.
In many cases, I'm sure they are paying the cost of the added infrastructure. However, the increase in electricity costs come from having overall more electricity demand than before the data center was built. An increase in demand raises the cost for everyone.
First, increased demand drives increased prices. This is the least controversial axiom of modern economic theory. So if you add a huge power consumer to a market, all consumers in that market will have to pay more. You can mitigate that some if that new, big consumer builds their own power facility, but the fact still remains that the local price in fuel (oil, coal, etc) or materials for renewable generators (turbins, solar panels, etc) will increase. Again, because demand increased.
Second, its one thing for things to cost more in a market that has a booming economy and plenty of high paying jobs. Home prices in the Bay Area are horrifying, but the poverty line for a family of 4 is $80k, which sort of grounds things. If energy costs go up by $100/year in the Bay Area, nobody notices. But if energy costs suddenly skyrocket in Great Falls, Montana (poverty line for 4: $33k) or similar that lacks a vibrant economy, the residents don't have much choice but to tighten their belts over the suddenly larger electric bill that has done basically nothing to actually revitalize their economy.
In many places there is little excess capacity. Many protesters know that their electricity prices, like gas prices, will soar and price them out of AC.
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.
> 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.
Yeah whenever I hear someone say this I can’t help but think they are delusional. Like, have you looked around? What rational person could possibly believe this tech will lead to MORE freedom.
Do you feel poison fountain is actually effective? To me it seems like free chaos engineering for ingestion platforms. Wouldn't it paradoxically harden data ingestion?
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.
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.
> 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).
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!
"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.
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.
> 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.
The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally.
It should be noted that modern globalization (post 1945), with Bretton Woods, GATT/WTO, container shipping, and eventually the internet creating the integrated global economy we have today, is but the latest milestone in a long history.
Industrial wave of 1829 - 1914 radically reduced the cost of moving goods and information.
The first globalization happened 1490s - 1800s, when Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 route to India created the first truly intercontinental trade and migration networks, linking the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe for the first time.
I think a lot of the cost increases come from utilities being in bed with government and both going "aha we've found our scapegoat" more than the demands of the data centers themselves.
But yes this article is absolutely the "usual sort" of paternalistic garbage.
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.
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.
A lot less people would be mad, yeah. In my own area, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to galvanize activity and get write-ups in the local news. The focus, generally, was on how it would raise electricity costs for the county and use up variable water resources right as we are facing water shortages here.
A lot of people here are in precarious financial situations, they do not want to see any costs go up. Inflation at the grocery store, high gas prices, high mortgages/rent, and a lousy job market have people on edge. I don't know if the average Joe is worried about AI leading to a dystopian hellscape, but he at least doesn't see AI providing any benefit to making ends meet.
Turned out not be a data center, but just the possibility caused a stir.
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.
It’s actually insane they call themselves conservatives when the whole platform has been instituting sweeping social changes and embracing new technologies.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Especially when the payoff is "AI will create exciting new jobs" and no one can come up with any jobs that are not just "AI Accountant" where the AI Accountant is just an existing Accountant replacing one of his colleagues.
For sure, a couple of those arguments I've heard recently
1. The taxes can offset the federal cuts so local taxes do not need to be raised. Requires the local gov't officials signing onto the deal in this way, which seems more likely given the massive pushback nation wide.
2. The data centers should be forced to build the energy generation they require. Excess (during off peak) can be fed back into the local grid and lower prices. It's quite likely the energy deficit will be the primary limiting factor to build out. We can also force the data center to pay premium prices, this is within the capability of regulations.
Yes, a few issues / approaches, largely around politics and regulation. The discourse mainly focuses around the bad cases and extrapolates to all data centers (incorrectly). I run our company workloads in a data center that is 95% renewables (mainly wind).
1. About 25% of data centers use close water cycle systems [1]. This could be part of the approval process. It costs more, but these companies are flush with cash.
2. Where they go matters for water table impact and energy generation mix, both geographically and per zoning laws. There are good and bad places to put data centers.
3. Energy shouldn't be a problem, but we have under/mis-invested. A world with limitless energy is possible, what happened to that vision for massive renewables to realize that?
4. A responsive government is required, which seems to be what is happening (as evidenced by the significant pushback). We should be more reasonable (the middle path), but that seems not within the politics of our times.
Yup, mainly focused on wind mills because he's still butt hurt about losing in Scotland. Solar is still growing at a good clip. The economics has reversed and many renewables are now cheaper.
We've heard a lot of optimism about Facebook, Google, etc. and now see all those companies having too much power over us and sucking worse eeach year. So we've evolved our thinking. Sorry it's tiring.
I'm fully on board with the Big Tech / Big Ai / oligarchs having far too much power. I am involved with my local indivisible towards creating a better future. We are currently focused on getting voter turnout so we can get people elected to slow the damage the current admin is doing. It's hard to have any nuanced discussions right now.
Interestingly, the group is mixed on the Ai topic. Some are anti, some are very excited. We have had amazing discussions without it becoming heated, IRL, because people communicate differently in the flesh.
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?
Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.)
If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.
> 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.
It takes 870 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of wine -- if people were genuinely protesting water waste it would be a good idea to start there. Almonds too.
I like wine and almonds. They are valuable commodities with a variety of uses and anyone can enjoy them for a modest price. They can be used and made into many additional valuable things, from sangria to baklava. What can LLMs do for me?
I am glad you like some things. Some people like other things, such as LLMs, or hosted server infrastructure.
Now explain to me why you are allowed to have the things you like which use a lot of water, while other people are not allowed to have the things they like which use a lot of water.
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 talk about how these residences ruin neighborhood character, disrupt view cones, cause traffic problems, etc.
Here it's the same thing--the people protesting don't give a damn about water waste, electricity usage, or wasted land. If they did, there are tons of other offenders who are way worse. But they don't want to outright say they're protesting against AI because it makes them seem like luddites.
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.
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.
Remember? ... Memories have a price. Nothing's changing any time soon while the elected represent money, and paid-for interests.
Of the dollar, by the dollar, for the dollar ...
The well-actually testicle TED talk misses the point. Representatives have power, and sometimes that power is for sale. And that position to represent was also for sale. As was the attention of the electorate.
Honestly, calling Congress castrated is fine because it is healthy venting about how ineffective they seem at their charter.
Even though it's really charming and compelling to believe, there is no one solvable problem simply requiring elbow grease, voting harder, proprioception of comically vulnerable reproductive organs, etc.
The framing that congressional politicians have "forgotten" that they have power is a silly and dishonest trope. They absolutely know that they have power, but they also just watched multiple incumbents (Cornyn, Cassidy, Massie just to name a few) who didn't get Trump's endorsement lose their respective primaries, effectively ending their political careers.
Members of Congress, just like everyone else, act in their own self-interest. And unfortunately for pretty much everyone else, their best method of self-preservation is to do nothing, hence the "eunuch" Congress.
What reigning in would you do if you had the power to do it for the US?
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.
Except datacenters are actually very low environmental impact. As long as they provide their own power, they have MUCH lower impact than most farms would.
> As long as they provide their own power
Key point doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Do all these data center buildouts include providing their own power? Seems like the answer is largely no. These companies expect power infrastructure to be supplied by the government, but also want lower taxes.
Let them eat tokens.
But the farms! is the new but her emails!
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.
Why should I think that I "own" or control a datacenter built in my town compared to one built in another country? It's pretty unlikely anything I do will have any effect on what goes on inside one even if I work there.
The greatest control I have is probably to have it not get built, though even that is minimal as it has failed to stop the one that is indeed being built in my town.
Even if you do want datacenters built in your country, you probably don't want them built at the maximally explotative locations that their developers pursue.
They don't provide appreciable community value and they effectively mine limited local resources (power, grid capacity, land, water) and sell it as compute, immediately diverting the profit back out of the local economy and into very distant business accounts instead.
Builders choose their targets specifically by how well they can strong-arm weak/vulnerable communities into letting them build these mines through political influence and misrepresentation. It's bad.
What you probably want is to leverage their global market value to establish new power and grid capacity in undeveloped areas, perhaps to someday become a seed for new communities that grow around the infrastructure development work.
But that's much more expensive than bullying and seducing a weak city council so it won't happen with regional/state/federal regulatory protections or incentives that push them away from the exploitative opportunities and towards the constructive ones.
You're starting with an assumption that AI is, on the whole, a net positive for society. A lot of people would disagree.
Nuclear bombs and ICBMs aren’t a net positive for society either, but not pursuing them is bad geopolitical strategy.
It’s great for society. It may not be working for you, but don’t project that on the rest of the world.
Of course and a lot of people disagree that vaccines work, why does this negate any hard evidence?
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?
If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and engineering. These improvements get drowned out by the AI Cheerleaders, but they're there.
I am unsure what you mean by hard evidence in the context of AI then, what is the evidence we are negating in your view?
What is the hard evidence that you speak of?
We could have had this same argument about social media 15 years ago before hard evidence showed it's not quite the net benefit to society it was touted as.
You presume there is hard evidence that AI is good for society. In reality, the inverse is true.
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.
Are you really comparing LLMs to vaccines? Jesus
For people worried about their livelihoods, there's value in slowing AI adoption to give our economy time to transition rather than just throwing a lot of people out of work all at the same time.
Counterpoint: Only C-suite members and billionaires have representation in the US.
Yes, it is vital to create more slop and Anime figures. We need to win that race at all costs.
So urgent that Andreesen has a Super PAC to push the dangerous China narrative.
There's no such thing as 'control over AI'; that goes double for someone who is a complete nobody plebian with a little baby stock portfolio. You know, basically everyone except for a select few.
The industry can be regulated and taxed like anything else.
Yeah, and it should be. But the USA, at least in this current moment, builds regulations catering to corporations and the rich over people's general needs. So the regulations that are on the table at the national level are ineffective.
It's easier for normal people to influence local regulations, but local regulations just push the problem somewhere else. However disdain for AI is so widespread that this is actually kind of effective.
[delayed]
You could say the same of human intelligence and competence and social trust.
I think it's a mistake to stop producing those things.
Fair point, but you dont produce intelligence, competence and social trust. Essentially a society earns it.
Is the reason that competence and social trust are declining because of AI? Maybe, but not only that.
Uh yes you could but what's your point. If we make ourselves dumber, it doesn't make China dumber, human intelligence will just leave us behind.
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.
Banning buybacks and taxing dividends like earned income (or at least with higher tax brackets for higher dividend income, just like earned income) is basically the same thing as taxing tokens. I'd go even further and reduce income taxes by the same amount that is raised by taxing dividends.
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.
> data centers can be built basically anywhere
this is especially true for AI use cases, where compute is hugely more important than latency / bandwidth
> you have to provide a bonus pool that goes dollar-for-dollar for any buybacks or dividends you do.
So, reallocate some exec comp to a pool that gets bigger when you give shareholders back money?
Would be great to balance the market better between labor and capital, but there's no easy button...
> 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.
There’s no such thing as a red state or blue state, these are fictions created to generate political fighting for no value to society.
Second - many states such as Ohio have begun pushing back strongly against data centers. In Ohio we had been offering tax breaks for construction because we welcomed the economic activity, but thankfully the government here after seeing a lot of pushback across the state has realized providing tax incentives or subsidies is economically and politically stupid relative the benefits of the new data centers.
To your point, they can be built anywhere. So many folks are saying yep, let’s build them somewhere else and drain water and raise energy prices there instead of here.
Smart politics in a state like Ohio would require data centers to relocate corporate jobs to the state or face full or perhaps even surcharges for utility rates because why not?
> The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage.
What about self-hosted models?
You would purchase an AI tax stamp! Just make sure you’re being honest about your token usage. Or maybe we can have AI licenses! Sky’s the limit when you can just make up policy on the internet for free.
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)
how is AI an excuse when it can replace team of 10 people to 3? It is very efficient in doing menial jobs for sure.
You just lay them off for another reason
I mean if AI is really powerful the reason is "profitability as our competitor steals our contracts at a fraction of the price". Your competitor just doesn't hire in the first place of course.
Wow, what a genius. You'll make millions in China!
Well done, you've saved human jobs at a cost of lowering the salary to fractions.
(Until the bots are still more efficient)
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?
Your house goes through different approval processes than large infrastructure processes. You also pay a different rate than commercial customers.
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.
Yes. That is a central problem with power distribution in California.
The cities are paying exorbitant prices for electricity to pay for safer infrastructure for rural customers (undergrounding).
Some cities have divested from PG&E and enjoy much lower electricity prices as a result.
But it's a circular problem. The price wouldn't be exorbitant if these rural areas were left to their own devices. But their utility build outs must be done per rules passed at the behest of the richer urban areas.
We're dealing with this bullshit in my own city in another state. From the parks to the roads to the sidewalks to the library every goddamn thing we touch gets driven up to the point of "can't actually do what we wanted" in cost because some rich assholes 100mi away in the vicinity of the capitol have taken a "build it fancy and rich or don't build it at all" attitude and enshrined that in state law and rules.
Sometimes they'll be so kind as to eat part of the cost with state grants, as long as we sell our freedom away in other ways.
Rural power was always expensive, but now due to wildfire risk, it needs to be ruinously expensive. It's not for the benefit of the cities, and driven by corporate risk management.
>I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs
electrical supply is not infinite. datacenters have high electrical demand. more demand + same supply = increase prices.
>Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
the problem is that added infrastructure is not built instantaneously. it lags behind. so costs will be high until more supply-side infrastructure is in place.
i agree that there should be some sort of stipulation that when you build your mega datacenter that you also have to build out electrical infrastructure at the same time. but unfortunately, that is not how it is.
This is basically just the normal dynamic with American tax law where tax jurisdictions are terrible at coordinating, so they end up approving things and agreeing to tax things at a very low level in order to win the competition. Even when states/counties try to work together on this stuff there's a huge defector problem, like "hey I can back out of this multistate tax compact agreement and get 500 new jobs which will let me win local reelection".
I suppose you can reduce a lot of both good at bad things about the country to "because federalism".
Thanks, that's really useful. I guess in my head I had the impression that costs could potentially be static. eg: if you had 10 customers total, each needed to pay $1 to generate electricity to serve their needs. So when you scale up to 100 customers, you can still have everyone pay $1 and come out to the same place.
I totally get the general principle that not everything scales linearly like that. But, I also know very little about electricity generation, so I have no idea where the breakpoints are. (I would also guess that if the demand dips low enough, there could be a case where after decreasing costs for a while, costs actually start to rise again as there is some minimum infrastructure needed but fewer customers to bear the cost.)
Generally, electric networks benefit from economies of scale. So more customers will _lower_ prices per-customer in the long term.
> Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?
In some states (like Oregon and Virginia) they do, but in a lot of states the regulations for rate structures are flat among all users so when there's a large surge in new demand the utility will build out new capacity and spread the cost of that new capacity to all rate payers with no regard for the fact that the new capacity would not have been needed without the new demand (from data centers). So everyone who was already using the electricity pays the new higher rates along with the new large-load user.
These companies building data centers will often make a lot of PR statements about how they are fine paying the extra cost for extra use while at the same time lobbying behind the scenes to actually avoid that happening and fighting against changes to utility rate structures that would raise their costs. By and large they can't be trusted.
> 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?
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.
In many cases, I'm sure they are paying the cost of the added infrastructure. However, the increase in electricity costs come from having overall more electricity demand than before the data center was built. An increase in demand raises the cost for everyone.
Well, no.
First, increased demand drives increased prices. This is the least controversial axiom of modern economic theory. So if you add a huge power consumer to a market, all consumers in that market will have to pay more. You can mitigate that some if that new, big consumer builds their own power facility, but the fact still remains that the local price in fuel (oil, coal, etc) or materials for renewable generators (turbins, solar panels, etc) will increase. Again, because demand increased.
Second, its one thing for things to cost more in a market that has a booming economy and plenty of high paying jobs. Home prices in the Bay Area are horrifying, but the poverty line for a family of 4 is $80k, which sort of grounds things. If energy costs go up by $100/year in the Bay Area, nobody notices. But if energy costs suddenly skyrocket in Great Falls, Montana (poverty line for 4: $33k) or similar that lacks a vibrant economy, the residents don't have much choice but to tighten their belts over the suddenly larger electric bill that has done basically nothing to actually revitalize their economy.
In many places there is little excess capacity. Many protesters know that their electricity prices, like gas prices, will soar and price them out of AC.
Politicians are bribed by these companies, so why would they price electricity correctly?
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...
This is one way you know billionaires have too much sway over the government.
> 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.
Yeah whenever I hear someone say this I can’t help but think they are delusional. Like, have you looked around? What rational person could possibly believe this tech will lead to MORE freedom.
Poison Fountain on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
Do you feel poison fountain is actually effective? To me it seems like free chaos engineering for ingestion platforms. Wouldn't it paradoxically harden data ingestion?
They're fighting the centralization of the means of production, surveillance, and control*
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.
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.
> 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).
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!
"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.
> 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.
The question is whether globalization is a net positive and whether people understand that, even if it comes at a cost to themselves personally.
It should be noted that modern globalization (post 1945), with Bretton Woods, GATT/WTO, container shipping, and eventually the internet creating the integrated global economy we have today, is but the latest milestone in a long history.
Industrial wave of 1829 - 1914 radically reduced the cost of moving goods and information.
The first globalization happened 1490s - 1800s, when Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 route to India created the first truly intercontinental trade and migration networks, linking the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe for the first time.
This. 100% this. Data centers drive up our energy costs and are external to the local economy for the most part.
Blocking them should be a priority until rates are negotiated with your G&T / major provider (PJM and FERC in Maryland and many other states)
RE blaming the peon reader: you’re talking about Vox so that is expected unfortunately.
I think a lot of the cost increases come from utilities being in bed with government and both going "aha we've found our scapegoat" more than the demands of the data centers themselves.
But yes this article is absolutely the "usual sort" of paternalistic garbage.
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.
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.
In theory, let's say that a data center was proposed that:
1. got no tax breaks
2. self-generated electricity with greenest of green generation
3. did not pollute water supplies
4. made electricity prices go down somehow
5. (can't figure out a theoretical version where there are lots of jobs, sorry)
6. was extremely quiet
Would people still be mad about them?
I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers. Or if it's really more about "AI bad."
A lot less people would be mad, yeah. In my own area, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to galvanize activity and get write-ups in the local news. The focus, generally, was on how it would raise electricity costs for the county and use up variable water resources right as we are facing water shortages here.
A lot of people here are in precarious financial situations, they do not want to see any costs go up. Inflation at the grocery store, high gas prices, high mortgages/rent, and a lousy job market have people on edge. I don't know if the average Joe is worried about AI leading to a dystopian hellscape, but he at least doesn't see AI providing any benefit to making ends meet.
Turned out not be a data center, but just the possibility caused a stir.
I think at least it would be hard to get a nimby protest movement going with those conditions. Maybe add in building it somewhere people can't see it?
Personally if your 6 points were true, I would not be mad about them.
Yes, people were mad about them due to the tax breaks here in Sweden long before LLMs were a thing.
> I'm trying to figure out if the bad reasons are the _actual_ reason people are generally against data centers.
The list is long and includes things like people not being able to afford AC anymore; why are you trying to figure this out?
It's also absurd how few jobs or income they provide to the community that is expected to host htem
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.
When a right wing party pushes a new tech really hard, it's usually a bad thing.
It’s actually insane they call themselves conservatives when the whole platform has been instituting sweeping social changes and embracing new technologies.
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 is why we have a federal government. Too bad it's been gutted by decades of neoliberalism and corporate lobbying
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.
https://archive.ph/DqPNZ
Exactly. There are many costs associated with data centers regardless of the type of data processing they do.
The term "data center" was not even in the typical person's consciousness before the current AI era.
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.
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?
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.
Especially when the payoff is "AI will create exciting new jobs" and no one can come up with any jobs that are not just "AI Accountant" where the AI Accountant is just an existing Accountant replacing one of his colleagues.
For sure, a couple of those arguments I've heard recently
1. The taxes can offset the federal cuts so local taxes do not need to be raised. Requires the local gov't officials signing onto the deal in this way, which seems more likely given the massive pushback nation wide.
2. The data centers should be forced to build the energy generation they require. Excess (during off peak) can be fed back into the local grid and lower prices. It's quite likely the energy deficit will be the primary limiting factor to build out. We can also force the data center to pay premium prices, this is within the capability of regulations.
> The issues with data centers are manageable.
are they? whats been done to solve the infrasound pollution?
governments haven't even managed to get datacenters to follow clean air regulation
Yes, a few issues / approaches, largely around politics and regulation. The discourse mainly focuses around the bad cases and extrapolates to all data centers (incorrectly). I run our company workloads in a data center that is 95% renewables (mainly wind).
1. About 25% of data centers use close water cycle systems [1]. This could be part of the approval process. It costs more, but these companies are flush with cash.
2. Where they go matters for water table impact and energy generation mix, both geographically and per zoning laws. There are good and bad places to put data centers.
3. Energy shouldn't be a problem, but we have under/mis-invested. A world with limitless energy is possible, what happened to that vision for massive renewables to realize that?
4. A responsive government is required, which seems to be what is happening (as evidenced by the significant pushback). We should be more reasonable (the middle path), but that seems not within the politics of our times.
[1] https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275...
You might remember the current president cutting renewable subsidies and adding regulation to slow down building them?
Yup, mainly focused on wind mills because he's still butt hurt about losing in Scotland. Solar is still growing at a good clip. The economics has reversed and many renewables are now cheaper.
The US has always had reactionaries, especially around topics construed as existential threats
We've heard a lot of optimism about Facebook, Google, etc. and now see all those companies having too much power over us and sucking worse eeach year. So we've evolved our thinking. Sorry it's tiring.
I'm fully on board with the Big Tech / Big Ai / oligarchs having far too much power. I am involved with my local indivisible towards creating a better future. We are currently focused on getting voter turnout so we can get people elected to slow the damage the current admin is doing. It's hard to have any nuanced discussions right now.
Interestingly, the group is mixed on the Ai topic. Some are anti, some are very excited. We have had amazing discussions without it becoming heated, IRL, because people communicate differently in the flesh.
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?
Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.)
If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.
> 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.
Please, tell how much energy an equal sized vineyard uses compared to a data center?
It takes 870 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of wine -- if people were genuinely protesting water waste it would be a good idea to start there. Almonds too.
> 870 gallons
Is this based on an assumption of irrigation being used?
I like wine and almonds. They are valuable commodities with a variety of uses and anyone can enjoy them for a modest price. They can be used and made into many additional valuable things, from sangria to baklava. What can LLMs do for me?
I am glad you like some things. Some people like other things, such as LLMs, or hosted server infrastructure.
Now explain to me why you are allowed to have the things you like which use a lot of water, while other people are not allowed to have the things they like which use a lot of water.
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 talk about how these residences ruin neighborhood character, disrupt view cones, cause traffic problems, etc.
Here it's the same thing--the people protesting don't give a damn about water waste, electricity usage, or wasted land. If they did, there are tons of other offenders who are way worse. But they don't want to outright say they're protesting against AI because it makes them seem like luddites.