The point isn’t that people who’ve worked for Google aren’t allowed to criticize. The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”. He’s become a GenAI critic, and he knows GenAI critics get mad at datacenters, so he’s adopted extreme rhetoric about them without stopping to think about whether this makes sense or is consistent with his other beliefs.

▲

allturtles 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”.

Of course they could. (1) People are capable of changing their minds. His opinion of data centers may have been changed recently by the rapid growth of data centers to support AI or for who knows what other reasons. (2) People are capable of cognitive dissonance. They can work for an organization that they believe to be bad or even evil.

▲

SpicyLemonZest 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s possible, yes, for someone to change their mind. But this process comes with sympathy for all the people who haven’t yet had the realization, which doesn’t seem to be in evidence.

Cognitive dissonance is, again, exactly my point. If you sat him down and asked him to describe in detail how some guy setting up a server rack is similar to a rapist, I’m pretty confident he’d admit the metaphor was overheated. But he didn’t sit himself down to ask.

▲

TomatoCo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think he claimed that "some guy setting up a server rack" is similar to a rapist. I think he's blaming the corporations. I don't think that individuals can have that big of an effect on the environment (outliers like Thomas Midgley Jr. excepted, of course).

I think "you people" is meant to mean the corporations in general, or if any one person is culpable, the CEOs. Who are definitely not just "some guy setting up a server rack."

▲

SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It can't mean that, because the people who sent him the email that prompted the complaint are neither corporations nor CEOs.

▲

xantronix 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I will grant you that, however, it does not take much reading-between-the-lines to understand that Rob is referring to the economic conditions and corporations that exist which allow people to develop things like AI Village.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.