| ▲ | kittikitti 3 hours ago |
| US voters will do absolutely anything but stop using the apps and technology from Big Tech that are powered by these data centers. It's always hilarious when someone shows me a Reel or TikTok about how they hate data centers. Often, they will also send off an AI response on why data centers are problematic. They are completely oblivious or knowingly ignorant. |
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| ▲ | danans 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| We live in a system wherein our survival is gate kept by oligopolistic technology, energy, and health insurance corporations. One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital. Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few. |
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| ▲ | philipov 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So are you saying they should have voted for data centers? Because I don't want them to vote for data centers, even if they're a bunch of hypocrites about it. |
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| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think they're saying that "data centers" have become a totem, where people believe that rejecting datacenter development projects will solve problems that cannot be solved this way. I've encountered more than one person who thinks, for example, that if we just ban datacenters there will be no powerful AI systems so we won't need to study their capabilities and risks in detail. | | |
| ▲ | philipov 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You don't need to have the correct reason for making the correct decision. What rejecting data centers will do is slow down the obscene excessive demand for more memory being taken off the consumer market, even if just a little bit. It will force AI models to become more efficient within their resource constraints instead of sucking up all the air in the room. | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure. But it's risky to let people make correct decisions for incorrect reasons, because they may react in very silly ways when their goals aren't achieved. If the populist tide turns onto memory companies ("stop making AI chips!"), and a widely supported protest encampment blocks Micron's new fabs, that's going to increase your memory woes more than datacenter moratoriums helped them. |
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| ▲ | linsomniac 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The city I live in is currently struggling with the issue that decades ago they banned ugly cell towers, but it turned out that resulted in a lot of dead zones for cell coverage in town, and now people are complaining about that. |
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| ▲ | philipov 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Obviously the solution is to make the cell towers less ugly :p | |
| ▲ | AlexandrB 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about democracy lately. The average voter will ask for a grab bag of contradictory things and then complain about attempts to deliver any one of them. My local subreddit wants cheap housing but also wants to preserve farmland and maintain historic buildings and welcome more immigrants at the same time. | | |
| ▲ | renehsz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yup, can't have your cake and eat it too. Political choices have trade-offs. We have to give up some things to gain others. But somehow politicians get away with promising to solve all problems all at once, even though that's clearly impossible. | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | My gripe is less with democracy and more with the ad-driven economy that has taken over. The competition is so intense that in order for media to survive now, it needs to relentlessly farm clicks/views. So a story about a datacenter being built near a migratory goose pond carries way more value than the story about the pond actually is a Walmart parking lot runoff pit. There is like this business game of whoever can fear monger and misinform the most without outright lying wins, and being honest and truthful gets you punished. |
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| ▲ | bigblind 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I enjoy eating meat, but I don't support everything thea meat industry does, does that make me a hypocrit? The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing! |
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| ▲ | raincole 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Yet you participate in society, curious! I'm very intelligent." |
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| ▲ | phoghed 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think in this case that’s not exactly right. TikTok isn’t exactly foundational to our society, you can get by without it. Smart phone or other things this sentence is usually trotted out for not so much. | | |
| ▲ | raincole 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Tiktok isn't. But how many people can get by without using any service that depends on datacenters? | | |
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| ▲ | AlexandrB 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A ridiculous gotcha on a site where every other article is about using AI to automate your job, solve frontier math problems, or port old video games to new platforms. So to be clear nothing is our fault here? It's all just about the billionaires "making us" use AI for all these things? | | |
| ▲ | raincole 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If my government just decided to wire $1B account into my personal account without strings attached I'd 100% accept that in ecstasy. So if I say "spending money this way is unfair" I'm a hypocrite??? Or maybe, just maybe, one can acknowledge that a thing benefits them personally isn't necessarily justified for the whole country or humanity as a whole, and admitting this makes them less hypocritical? | |
| ▲ | ktimespi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Companies do mandate AI usage from the top, no? |
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| ▲ | expedition32 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One of the nice things about living in a rich country is the ability to externalise certain costs. |
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| ▲ | cubefox 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Exactly. We need a word for this common mixture of naïveté, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, and petulance. Common pattern: "I'm campaigning against A." "But you want B, which clearly is caused by A." "I don't care!" The problem is that they often will never suffer from their irrational campaigns because the campaigns are prevented by other powers, so they don't learn that they were irrational; or they do suffer from it, but only much later and in an unspecific way, so they never connect the dots and again don't learn from it. |
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| ▲ | whoanoway 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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