I'm really disappointed by the lack of real information in a lot of these protests. The vast majority of people opposing AI that I've seen online and in real life all cite the same misinformation about water use, data centers creating EMFs that kill birds, etc. And a lot of these people are smart, college educated folks. It just goes to show how powerful memes that reinforce your biases can be.

These things you list and more have a lot of power even if there's a slight chance of them being true. The average person doesn't see any benefit to a data center near them, so they're unwilling to even risk a single drawback. The best case as they see it is that a new data center will result in no net gain for themselves.

Is it surprising that people who get most of their information from algorithms tailored by the industry they are protesting are ill-informed about the actual problems those companies are creating?

People can feel the misalignment, but they don't understand it. That's the future we are accelerating towards

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