> They don't have paramilitary thugs

In many municipalities across the country they have purchased the police department, made them to sign NDAs, and had them arrest people for speaking against data centers in open forums.

So tell me about the red tailed hawk. Why is it interesting, and how will you apply that in your life?

According to current theories of learning, the best learning happens at the point of struggle, where you internalize that you went down a wrong path, and needed to backtrack. What part of the struggle of learning did you experience as a result of this, and how did it reshape other thought patterns?

Being able to look something up real quick isn’t the same as knowing something, is it, especially in the specific absence of some reinforcement mechanism to retain it?

Same.

Reminds me of this cartoon: https://imgur.com/life-before-google-q0eP1Rg

__

"Life Before Google: A Short Story"

dog: I just thought of something I'd like to know more about.

rabbit: That's a damn shame.

THE END

I mean for me personally I have always had an obsession for knowing these things anyways, it just lowered the barrier to entry for me a little bit in terms of information gathering

First I went from asking my parents then reading lots of books then specifically researching on google and forums now for most general knowledge information I can just ask AI

>These are things around me that I wouldn't have bothered to investigate just due to time and effort. And now I appreciate all these little curiosities more than ever.

I think you're conflating access to information with genuine learning.

Honestly, a lot of people could stand to be a lot more informed about what they're getting into. People could use a lot more skepticism when interacting with AI, social media, news feeds, and basically every other form of media, especially those originating at the top of some pyramid or another.

I don't tend to like controls or regulations, though. Not that they aren't needed, but I don't trust the people responsible for writing and enforcing them. More often than not, they are just the top of the pyramid squashing everything beneath it.

Oh, they're more than a drop in the ocean for sure. Which doesn't mean there's not other things to address, where population is definitely not the main problematic factor, but consumerism is (and throwaway culture). This kind of whataboutism is fallacious, you can do better.

EDIT: As a small anecdotal point, any new human activity that is measured in GW of power consumption is not a drop in the ocean. Admitted, some of these data centers projects are "only" in the 100s MW scale, but all of this combined is increasing electricity consumption by a vast amount overall.

It's not just the data centers, but it's part of a bigger trend of massive industrial projects depleting natural resources for questionable benefits for humanity. There's basically two approaches to ecological problems: either pretend some wonder technology (AI?) is going to save us all and keep driving straight into the wall, or seriously question any industrial activity in a cost/benefit analysis.

Our society is currently headed in the first scenario, building ever more useless shit and accelerating environmental collapse, pretending CO2 capture, AI, unlimited energy storage, agro-bots, desalination and on-site recycling of complex materials will magically keep life sustainable despite any scientific evidence showing otherwise.