I mean, it should surprise no one that the sheer dislike of the billionaires making AI is ruining the perception of the technology they are building. If we should go and blame someone, it's certainly them. I agree 100% with OPs article.
The hysteria around datacenters will be to the US/Western world what the burning of its fleet was to China, or (more recently) what the banning of nuclear power was to Germany. Bravo to whoever coordinated this generational psyop.
Not only that, but this is basically the sales pitch of AI:
Voter: So, tell me about this AI stuff. You wanna build one in my backyard right?
AI CEO: That's right! It'll increase the cost of your water, electricity, and likely lower your property values due to people leaving because of the 24/7 daytime lighting and noise pollution!
Voter: Well I kinda don't like that at all!
AI CEO: Great! Because that's not all! Once we really improve on our AI, it will eat your job for now and forever! And, wait till we embody them in robots. Whoo-boy! You won't even be able to drive a truck or plumb pipes for a living! Ain't that great?
Voter: What? No! That sounds terrible!
AI CEO (thinking): Why can't I get to these schmucks?
It's the economy stupid. If you don't offer material improvement with UBI instead of selfishly flexing your utopian visions of Star Trek robes and replicators and you and only you living for a thousand years, don't be surprised if voters don't give you what you want politically.
It's a real problem because we were sold a post industrial dream which could only happen if the hardest computation anyone would ever have to do is sending an http packet.
Electricity is destiny, if you can't produce it you will be a puppet of those who can. See Germany.
A lot of capital was looking for a place to get parked. AI and hardware seems like it has the best prospects going forward - especially with baby-boomers retiring and the new generation getting less opportunity to climb the economic ladder (aka catering to them is not attractive to investors).
AI is attractive to governments similar to any tech capable of war, so the race for offer capacity would give tech giants massive capital from lucrative government contracts that then gets into the flywheel of model training and selling to the masses.
The problem was they built data centers in a sloppy, dirty, loud way. Imagine if the first cars were like that? Or the first electric distribution methods? Do it right if you want to grow it.
I think something that isn’t talked about enough is how the tech industry burned its bridges in the last era before AI.
For example, Facebook was a site you trusted for enjoyable socializing and it morphed into a horrifically evil platform.
Amazon.com is a massive rug pull where it used to be an amazing place to buy good products at good prices, now it’s a hellhole of dark patterns, sponsored listings, and upsells.
Try to find one popular Internet company from ~2010 that hasn’t been massively enshittified or turned into dystopian surveillance/algorithm/addiction capitalism.
The tech industry trained its own customers to believe that any product they launch will eventually get way worse than it is now.
It is obvious that is about fight for resources and supremacy between humans and the machine where the machine is also the capital that seeks the discount for human labor. How can the competition between capital and labor be resolved when capital has found a replacement for labor and competing for resources to serve its own needs? Will capitalists and technocrats give up? zero chance of that. Will labor and humans accept the machine and capital supremacy? zero chance of that.
So the conflict of interest will just escalate more and more.
I mean, it should surprise no one that the sheer dislike of the billionaires making AI is ruining the perception of the technology they are building. If we should go and blame someone, it's certainly them. I agree 100% with OPs article.
The hysteria around datacenters will be to the US/Western world what the burning of its fleet was to China, or (more recently) what the banning of nuclear power was to Germany. Bravo to whoever coordinated this generational psyop.
The protests are a good counterweight to the big tech AI propaganda. The former is a consequence of the latter.
The increase in the cost of power per kWh is a real problem for a lot of people.
Not only that, but this is basically the sales pitch of AI:
Voter: So, tell me about this AI stuff. You wanna build one in my backyard right?
AI CEO: That's right! It'll increase the cost of your water, electricity, and likely lower your property values due to people leaving because of the 24/7 daytime lighting and noise pollution!
Voter: Well I kinda don't like that at all!
AI CEO: Great! Because that's not all! Once we really improve on our AI, it will eat your job for now and forever! And, wait till we embody them in robots. Whoo-boy! You won't even be able to drive a truck or plumb pipes for a living! Ain't that great?
Voter: What? No! That sounds terrible!
AI CEO (thinking): Why can't I get to these schmucks?
It's the economy stupid. If you don't offer material improvement with UBI instead of selfishly flexing your utopian visions of Star Trek robes and replicators and you and only you living for a thousand years, don't be surprised if voters don't give you what you want politically.
It's a real problem because we were sold a post industrial dream which could only happen if the hardest computation anyone would ever have to do is sending an http packet.
Electricity is destiny, if you can't produce it you will be a puppet of those who can. See Germany.
I think people would like AI technologies a lot more if they were the ones making money off of it.
https://isaiprofitable.com/
You are forgetting about the grifting part where they dump all of this crap on our 401ks
A lot of capital was looking for a place to get parked. AI and hardware seems like it has the best prospects going forward - especially with baby-boomers retiring and the new generation getting less opportunity to climb the economic ladder (aka catering to them is not attractive to investors).
AI is attractive to governments similar to any tech capable of war, so the race for offer capacity would give tech giants massive capital from lucrative government contracts that then gets into the flywheel of model training and selling to the masses.
The problem was they built data centers in a sloppy, dirty, loud way. Imagine if the first cars were like that? Or the first electric distribution methods? Do it right if you want to grow it.
I think something that isn’t talked about enough is how the tech industry burned its bridges in the last era before AI.
For example, Facebook was a site you trusted for enjoyable socializing and it morphed into a horrifically evil platform.
Amazon.com is a massive rug pull where it used to be an amazing place to buy good products at good prices, now it’s a hellhole of dark patterns, sponsored listings, and upsells.
Try to find one popular Internet company from ~2010 that hasn’t been massively enshittified or turned into dystopian surveillance/algorithm/addiction capitalism.
The tech industry trained its own customers to believe that any product they launch will eventually get way worse than it is now.
It is obvious that is about fight for resources and supremacy between humans and the machine where the machine is also the capital that seeks the discount for human labor. How can the competition between capital and labor be resolved when capital has found a replacement for labor and competing for resources to serve its own needs? Will capitalists and technocrats give up? zero chance of that. Will labor and humans accept the machine and capital supremacy? zero chance of that.
So the conflict of interest will just escalate more and more.