The problem is that we don’t correctly price pollution: it’d be one thing if this boom meant acres of solar panels and wind turbines getting greenlit but in practice it means keeping some dirty plants online and building out new pollution capacity, sometimes completely illegally like what happened in Memphis.

All of this would go away overnight if we taxed carbon.

> in the long term

being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.

for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.

so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.

effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.

It's quite amusing how easily people fall into the trap of Malthusianism when talking about water/electricity consumption of certain industries.

> In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers.

The same should apply to memory and GPU manufacturers and yet I have seen no commitments from them to increase supply, so the end result is that consumer electronics are becoming ever more expensive compared to even just a year ago. That doesn't feel like a working economy to me.

Don't all states have public utility commissions that regulate electricity provisioning? I don't know if the market has much to do with anything since it's all government regulation.

You're right, but that doesn't mean opinions will evolve towards viewing the technology more positively. With AI, it's increasingly the opposite.

"The beatings will continue until opinions evolve."

Can you share something you’ve made with AI?

I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.

I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.

> The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.

Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.

> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.

Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."

Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.

> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs

Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.

> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast

This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.

> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.

Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.

But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.

I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.

The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.

Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.

It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.

Okay, now produce something meaningfully more appealing than everyone else with the same tools - when you do that, then you have the start of a leg to stand on to claim that it’s worth the cost to everyone.

Enjoy it until the subsidies end and the economics catch up. You can afford it now with broad subsidies, but likely not the true cost.

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-a...

https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover

https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companie...

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trill...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY

>Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds.

God forbid people have concerns over companies out in the open talking about replacing their jobs with AI.

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