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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

Poison Fountain on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/

They're fighting the centralization of the means of production, surveillance, and control*

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

When a right wing party pushes a new tech really hard, it's usually a bad thing.

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.

You're starting with an assumption that AI is, on the whole, a net positive for society. A lot of people would disagree.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Counterpoint: Only C-suite members and billionaires have political representation in the US.

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.

You could say the same of human intelligence and competence and social trust.

I think it's a mistake to stop producing those things.

> rural red states where they welcome the construction

The state legislatures might be all for it, but I can say as someone who lives in South Texas, the actual communities are up in arms against datacenters. Of course there's lots of irony in that one of the reasons the datacenters like the area is that there is a gas pipeline that the locals welcomed that can be used to run turbines.

> 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?

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...

> The fight against AI should just be about taxing token usage.

What about self-hosted models?

It should be illegal to lay workers off for AI like it is in China, where sensible policy exists.

On this note, I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs. Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?

If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?

In 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.

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.

Politicians are bribed by these companies, so why would they price electricity correctly?

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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."

It's also absurd how few jobs or income they provide to the community that is expected to host htem