It sure seems like the data centers fundamentally would exist to take your attention, take your money, and take your job so that someone who already has more money than god can have even more. And in the process as an added bonus they accelerate the destruction of the environment and blow up the energy demand/supply curve. What's not to love?

Well, with power generation and the grid not up to the scale-up in the unreasonable time-frames the bubble calls for, a lot of gas-turbine generation is being used. The prospect of having jet engines going 24/7 in their neighborhood is unacceptable to most people. I've been running a generator the past few days, after a derecho/tornado combo ripped through town and took out the grid, and the noise is not something I could deal with long term.

In addition to this, where they do manage to get grid power, they add substantial costs to the utility company, that then end up in consumer bills.

Then there's the waste heat, excess CO2 and particulates, and subversion of local governments to bypass the will of the people.

Almost none of the above appears in the article. 8(

They have pretty significant negative externalities in the communities they are built in, which would be reason enough.

They have historically tended to get approved through means verging-on “graft/corruption/lies” - the promised benefits don’t materialize, the costs are worse than initially claimed, the politicians who approve it seem to profit when their constituents don’t - this would also be reason enough.

And they’re the physical reification and arguably the Achilles heel of the otherwise nebulous and impossible-to-defy yet hugely disliked phenomenon of AI everywhere all of the time, which yet again would be reason enough (multiple times over - ethical concerns, environmental concerns, etc).

Compounding these many good reasons to dislike them, there also aren’t many (or any?) good reasons to actively like them.

This quote stood out to me:

“Everyone else, I would say, was more of a ChatGPT person, and again, using it for small secretarial tasks or consumer fun use cases. But I didn’t meet a lot of people who suggested to me that AI was essential or important to their work.”

Personally, apart from the environmental impact and fresh water demands, I want to own my software and hardware and not "subscribe" it from some corporate.

cause they got our stuff in them, and we didn't put it there

I am not a number, I am a free man.

it's a very good psyop by non western aligned government actors.

Convincing people that it slurps up infinite water and contains the world's stolen information like some bad National Treasure script is genius.

Am I out of touch? No! It's the population who are wrong.

The CPP is funding the anti-AI data center movement.

See https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5920573-openai-chinese...