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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   22806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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They are being built, just have not yet finished being built. and no one besides investors are being asked to give them anything

Money is fungible. To a first approximation, if a trillion dollars is going into trying to build data centers (and failing, in many respects) that's a enormous chunk of resources that isn't going into fusion research, hiring, fixing bridges, what have you - things that could directly and meaningfully improve people's lives.

FWIW I'm optimistic about AI as a normal productivity-improving technology for improving people's lives, but this is explicitly not what the frontier American labs are aiming for, and it seems extremely difficult to justify the trillion dollar investments in a AI-as-normal-technology world where tokens are inevitably commoditized and primarily inferenced locally.

Should we squander it?

I guess I'm just feeling a disconnect from your posts. If you want to be a hard-nosed historical realist, OK: in the same way that the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression made WW2 inevitable and Hitler was merely in the right place at the right time, I agree that race dynamics ensure in no realistic world does a bilateral pause happen, and that as soon as Attention Is All You Need was published realistically no force on the planet could have stopped the AI race from accelerating - Altman and Amodei were merely in the right places at the right times to ride the wave.

But then you go on about "how can you not be excited" and "[bringing] about a new age of American prosperity" and I'm just confused about how you can think we're being forced into a world where if anyone builds it everyone (probably) dies and think this is a good thing. At best, if by some miracle alignment is inherent, you're under the heel of God-Emperor AI Frontier Lab Leader or God-Emperor Democratic/Republican President (adjust for your outgroup party) for all time and at worst all America's done is won the "created the Torment Nexus first" award.

At the end of the day "American" and "Chinese" are merely constructs of society as we know it and not immutable laws of reality - I fail to see how "superhuman general intelligence" and "liberal democratic All-American values as we know them" or "superhuman general intelligence" and "socialist values with Chinese characteristics as we know them" could meaningfully co-exist, so what benefit does the median person really get from ultimate, unaccountable power being instantiated 2000 vs 6000 miles away from them?

Money is fungible. To a first approximation, if a trillion dollars is going into trying to build data centers (and failing, in many respects) that's a enormous chunk of resources that isn't going into fusion research, hiring, fixing bridges, what have you - things that could directly and meaningfully improve people's lives.

Their money is not fungible with our money or the state's money. much of it is debt that can only be created because of the promise of a return. If you want to be more sophisticated you could say the labor being used to build these things was bid up and would otherwise be able to be allocated more cheaply to other projects but even then what you're arguing for is that trades people get paid less which seems kind of counter to the rest of your position. Trillions are spent on much less worthy consumption than building durable data infrastructure.

it seems extremely difficult to justify the trillion dollar investments in a AI-as-normal-technology world where tokens are inevitably commoditized

Yes, the question of whether the tokens get commoditized is a major factor on whether these investments will pay off for the labs. But why is that your problem? So in one potential future a bunch of investors who aren't you get soaked and you get to enjoy the fruits of incredibly discounted inference capex. This is a gift directly from frontier lab investors to you, you should cheer on their generosity.

where tokens are inevitably commoditized and primarily inference locally.

Unless many breakthroughs happen this will not be the case any time soon. Batched queries are several orders of magnitude more efficient than single thread inference.

But then you go on about "how can you not be excited" and "[bringing] about a new age of American prosperity" and I'm just confused about how you can think we're being forced into a world where if anyone builds it everyone (probably) dies and think this is a good thing. At best, if by some miracle alignment is inherent, you're under the heel of God-Emperor AI Frontier Lab Leader or God-Emperor Democratic/Republican President (adjust for your outgroup party) for all time and at worst all America's done is won the "created the Torment Nexus first" award.

There's some difficulty of keeping multiple potential futures in your head at once. It goes something like:
Outcome Probability Thoughts
World where someone builds it and everyone dies but they wouldn't have if we told more blatant and ridiculous lies about the American data center build out <0.0001% whooops
Somebody builds it and everyone dies 15% This is indeed too high and we should seek bilateral global treaties to try and sort out alignment while we can. Unilaterally hamstringing our labs doesn't change this possibility, even us and china both hamstringing our labs only pushes the date back some number of years.
Scaling plateaus and inference is a commodity soon 25% The lab investments don't pan out, all go bankrupt, the models and datacenters get acquired and are served incredibly cheaply. This is bad for some investors but good for most consumers of tokens, which is practically everyone else. A gift from them to us. We should be broadly happy that these datacenters are on our soil and subject to our laws
Scaling plateaus and inference is a commodity in a few months or years when the models are so good that they can do most but not all jobs 30% The lab investments may or may not pan out as their commodity is still meaningfully scarce it just turns out more of that scarcity is in the data centers than the models, some go bankrupt. We see a lot of job displacement but also a tremendous amount of value creation. Robots advances in leaps and bounds. After a shake up this is potentially a very good future. It is critical that these data centers are on our soil and subject to our laws, that are incredibly important geopolitically.
Singularity event where we don't all die 25% basically by definition these are difficult to predict but I'm confident we'd rather have it kicked off on our soil than chinese soil. The marginal progress we make in alignment work between now and the kick off will be critical and china doesn't broadly seem to even understand alignment to be a meaningful concept. If I had more time I'd break this into several worlds but I think in nearly all of them there'll be pivotal moments that I prefer be performed by americans.
I'm a retarded hype monkey with deep ai psychosis. AI can't even do what I can plainly see it doing now. 5% Hey, at least I'll get some credit for acknowledging it's possible

Essentially across all of these worlds and acutely in some these data centers are pure upside epsilon the handful of upset caused by any construction project that should be easily sorted out locally.

Money is fungible. To a first approximation, if a trillion dollars is going into trying to build data centers (and failing, in many respects) that's a enormous chunk of resources that isn't going into fusion research, hiring, fixing bridges, what have you - things that could directly and meaningfully improve people's lives.

No, production is not zero-sum and in any case money is not the limit of these things. God could come down from Heaven and declare a halt to data center development, and we would not get one step closer to fusion (might actually slow things down), and not one more bridge would be fixed (possibly fewer, in that the data center people might need a bridge fixed).

Money is an abstraction over resource allocation in this context - I agree that production is not zero-sum, but many of the inputs to production are obviously rivalrous; land, power, raw resources, construction workers and chip fab allocation are all finite and rivalrous to name a few.

If you're just trying to be edgy about lack of state capacity being why shit doesn't get built then I agree, in many cases resource allocation is not the limiting factor as to why no progress is made, but it's farcial to claim that resource allocation isn't the limiting factor for anything that might directly improve people's lives.

Not a matter of edginess at all. Land is rivalrous, but it's not a limiting factor for any of your examples. Even if (theoretically) we needed to restart the Superconducting Supercollider project for fusion, land wouldn't be an issue; heck, you could build data centers on top inside the ring. Power is rivalrous but not fixed; both Alphabet and Microsoft have literally had nuclear plants started or restarted for data center power.

Your claim implicitly depends on a fixed set of resources that are already 100% utilized, and neither condition is true.

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