Anyone else think the AI environmental backlash is astroturfed?

I keep looking at the numbers. The power use numbers are not that problematic. Ordering a burrito on DoorDash uses more power than a few days of heavy AI use. The water argument applies to some locations, and is mostly a local governance problem... if the data centers are using too much water, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll push toward closed loop cooling.

Yet the visceral pile-on here is so extreme, it feels fake.

One thing I've learned after 40 years on this planet is: propaganda works, and much of what a large fraction of people believe across the entire political spectrum (left, right, anything else) is there because someone paid to put it there. It's depressing but it's true, and it makes sense. Propaganda is an asymmetrical attack on human cognition and discourse, and in information security the attacker always has an easier job. Crafting viral bullshit is orders of magnitude easier than fact checking. On top of this, humans are busy and don't have time to fact check and logic check everything they read. As a result, much of what we believe is "sponsored content."

People get mad when you talk about this because everyone wants to believe they're too smart to fall for propaganda.

In any case, the US AI labs deserve to lose for their stupid "safety" regulatory capture monopolization push, which ended up blowing their own feet off and handing the lead to China.

> Yet the visceral pile-on here is so extreme, it feels fake.

Driven by people in the few roles that are soundly replaced by AI-- e.g. low tier media slop producers, who hate AI because it threatens their socially negative worthless jobs. The arguments are so paper thin because the environmental impact isn't their concern, it's just a target that sounds convincing to people who don't know better.