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.

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.