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.

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.

This is a wall of text but genuinely worth skimming: https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...

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.

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.

Instead of a ban just make sure they pay what's needed to keep capacity where it needs to be.

Dig more coal -- the PCs are coming

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tear it all down.

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.

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.

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.

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?