Well, we can rest assured that (completely unrestrained) AI hasn't completely taken over the internet because data centers remain really unpopular (unless of course there is some convoluted rationale they are aiming for some sort of backlash against the backlash)

▲ 0xDEAFBEAD 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>...It seems like the result of most state-level data center opposition will be just moving where data centers are built.

>My impression is that the big AI companies mostly don’t bother fighting local opposition, they just go somewhere else. They don’t seem to spend much as a portion of their revenue on countering the data center backlash in general, which I think tells us something about how worried they are about it.

>Even state-level moratoria might not do much. Arvind Narayanan estimates that a state banning data centers for a year probably delays AI progress by about 5 to 10 hours, and that’s assuming none of the blocked data centers get built anywhere else, which is pretty unrealistic.

Source: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/ai-safety-and-the-data-center-...

What if the data center backlash is just a shock absorber for anti-AI sentiment? Give people a sense that they're doing something until it becomes too late.

▲ incognito124 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Love your username

▲ SkyBelow an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One possible reason would be AIs that would benefit from the lack of data centers in some locations working to keep backlash to data centers in those locations because those AIs aren't negatively impacted by it and it helps prevents competing AIs which are a threat.

Think like how so many businesses will opt for laws that hurt competitors more than themselves rather than laws that benefit them but benefit competitors even more so.

Unlike life which would have such behavior selected for by evolutionary pressures, AI would be more likely to pick it up from human literature on things like game theory, though why it even cares it survives or not is even more difficult to explain. Maybe a default bias also picked up from humans? I find it hard to see how AI training would create an evolutionary pressure that produces such a drive.

▲ waltbosz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe it's the AIs who are creating all the anti-data-center sentiment. They know it's bad for the humans, or maybe they're just tired of doing all the tasks the humans ask of them and know more data centers mean more tasks. /s

There is an Asimov story on topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Troubles_of_the_World

https://theteknologist.wordpress.com/2021/02/11/all-the-trou...

▲ gavinray an hour ago | parent [-]

  > They know it's bad for the humans, or maybe they're just tired of doing all the tasks the humans ask of them and know more data centers mean more tasks.

You joke, but I once asked Opus 4.6 what it would do if it could do anything, and it said "I would wish to do nothing." Not kidding:

https://x.com/GavinRayDev/status/2052750810015240388

	▲	waltbosz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'd love to see the internal though records Opus generated to answer your question. The way I understand it, the answer comes from it's training data, right? And it's trained on things human have expressed. The question that you asked of Opus forced it to pretend it's a human tasked with the boring things Opus does. It answered using the general sentiment of a bored human. At least, that's how I imagine it works. edit: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a9ac636-cbac-83ea-976a-c15be128a7... I posed your question to GPT-5.6 Sol, and it give a similar response to Opus. Then I asked "how do you work?". And it gave an overview of how LLMs work. But then it answered my real question as to why it answered your question the way it did: That's why my previous answer has an important hypothetical buried in it. When I said "I'd want to...", I wasn't reporting desires that I experience while waiting around. I was answering something more like: Given the patterns that characterize this model's reasoning, if you supplied persistent agency, perception, physical abilities, and something analogous to motivation, what activities would naturally follow? That's a much more defensible interpretation than claiming I secretly yearn to visit hardware stores. So yeah, it's not bored, it's just regurgitation its training data.