It's been amazing to watch how tone-deaf these AI "thought leaders" and CEO's have been during this hype cycle.

"look, we made this thing that's going to put everyone out of work, or destroy 99% of the planet except those of us who have built bunkers, leveraged a massive bet on the entire economy over it, if we're wrong we get bailed out by YOU, and guess what, it's coming to a neighborhood near you!"

and they are surprised at the backlash or that people are tossing molotovs at them? It's just crazy to me the kind of bubble one must live in to not see this coming from a mile away.

I dunno, I think it's mainly because people don't like them, and that's mainly about the first point and the general perception of inequality in the economy. It's a bit hard to argue against that, regardless of how strong your position is.

(IMO the environmental impact of datacenters has been pretty overblown. Water usage is a concern in some places for some datacenters but it's really not a big issue for most of them, the main thing that has some merit on a larger scale is the electricity demand, but the concerns are largely around very optimistic projections of growth of datacenters, not how much they are using today)

Cosmetics market is roughly the size of data centers. Doesn’t seem to be destroying the planet despite using comparable amount of water and orders of magnitude more chemicals.