While I’m sure there are people profiting off these movements, there is very real grassroots support for blocking datacenters and generally anything relating to AI and I can’t blame anyone other than the companies building it. I think in 30 years this will be studied as the worst marketed technology ever. It’s one thing if outsiders try to say your technology is dangerous, it’s another if the companies themselves are telling the public that they’re technology is either going to a) exterminate humanity or b) eliminate all jobs and institute a permanent underclass. I think they’re right that these are concerns and while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology, all the wider world sees is multi-national tech companies taking advantage of areas with high political inequality to push through genuinely unfair contracts that saddle utility rate payers with higher fees, potentially negative health effects, and with very little long term job creation. This is also coming from companies that have ignored complaints about the overriding addiction and division which their platforms have allowed to propagate over the last 20 years all while many Americans watch historic levels of corruption in government in favor of those same companies go unpunished. At this point I think the tech world has really burnt all of its political capital with the wider populace and while we may sit back and complain that progress is being blocked by luddites, its not irrational to want to block the creation of a technology which you will pay the cost for while seeing a disproportionately small percentage of the rewards. I think if we’re going to see the actual proliferation of this tech and the benefits it will bring, their needs to be a) more publicized news of real benefits to human quality of life in visible fields like medicine and b) an actual plan for how to confer the rewards of technology more widely rather than just continuing to center in the hands of so few people and not just approaching it as higher gdp but also lower wealth inequality as long as its correlated with political power

> while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology

While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.

Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.