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There is a great new Substack article about the populist backlash to AI data centers by Jasmine Sun. She also did an interview with Ezra Klein for those of you who like audio content.
I like the article because Sun speaks fluent Silicon Valleyish while also taking the time and effort to visit and talk to the people on the ground in the rural Midwest instead of condecending at them from the coasts. She asks an important question: why precisely do people hate data centers so much?
Looking only at the statistics, AI land use and water use issues are fake. Nowhere is running out of land, and nowhere (West of San Antonio at least) is running out of water. Are the people in these communities stupid? Do they not know how to shut up and multiply?
It turns out that a lot of the fear and anger stems from a combination of distrust and PTSD from deindustrialization. An interesting example is Janesville, Wisconsin, a town with a giant concrete slab in the middle of it where the GM plant used to be.
Fascinating. The collapse of the auto industry in 2008 was apparently so bad that it is better to prevent industrial development alltogether in order to avoid the risk of another collapse. It almost makes sense until you think about it for 30 seconds.
Some of the objections Sun hears in other towns fare a bit better.
This is the steelman of the anti-data center position. People are worried that the big companies proposing data centers are going to Foxconn them and not deliver the supposed benefits.
One of the things that comes across especially clear in the Ezra Klein interview is just how unprepared the AI companies were for the backlash. They didn't realize how sketchy it comes across to insist on NDAs with local officials when negotiating deals. They thought, as a straightforward application of Coase's Theorem would tell you, that any bumps in the road could be ironed out by handing over a big bag of money. It turns out that people don't work that way. It feels like a bribe, and Americans do not like being bribed.
I haven't read the Substack article yet, but I did read the Klein interview, and what stood out to me was this:
A big part of the dissonance, it seems to me, is around the perception of what 'AI' is and whether it's valuable. Clearly a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe that this is a massively transformative technology that will be vital to the future of the country if not the world. They're frequently either outright singularitans, or simply believe that it willl turbo-charge the economy, massively increase wealth, change everything about employment, and so on.
But these people, and I admit I think they sound a lot more sensible than the tech people online, actually use the technology and go, "meh". They see it as a mildly amusing toy. Maybe it has some uses, in some niche fields, but for the most part it's just not very interesting. If they didn't get access to it, they would not particularly care.
An auto factory - you at least understand why cars are useful, and why the factories need to be built. A data centre is a huge investment for a thing that... isn't useful. All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
There is the marketing issue as well, of course. Pro-'AI' people tend to sound very cult-y online, at least in my experience. Many of them sound like lunatics. A lot of them also, well, to be blunt, are un-charismatic nerds. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., are not convincing ambassadors for a technology. I can understand nobody believing their promises - none of them project credibility, or even really respectability. The 'tech billionaire' is a cultural archetype at this point, and it is an archetype that one associates with immaturity, frivolity, narcissism, and callous disregard for other people and for human value in general. Last week I was talking about the book destruction story and it fits with the image again, as if there's this small cult-like group of anti-human tech-heads eager to sell the whole inheritance of the human community for digital pottage. I understand, in my gut, the feeling of disgust.
Yeah, that's the thing. All the proselytising for AI that I see - and that includes people discussing it on here and giving examples of what they use it for - is nearly all "it's great for coding". Yes, and I'm not a software engineer, have never coded in my life, and used Copilot once where, admittedly, it was useful. But in my day-to-day job, I don't use any AI and don't really as of yet see any need for it.
And most people are like that. "I work as a school caretaker. I'm a childcare practitioner. I work in a supermarket. I'm a nurse's aide. I'm a panel beater. What is this amazing difference AI is going to make to my life, make me 100x more productive, and give me $$$$$$ in stock options as my employer's valuation goes to the moon?"
Now, if we get proper business-oriented AI, not the "just use it, everyone says it'll make us a zillion times more profitable, no I don't know what you can use it for" versions being pushed now, then that will change. But right now it's "don't need to hire junior coders, our senior guys can do five times the work now" and "maybe office work? maybe?" for work, and mostly "ChatGPT for your online buddy/therapist/girl or boyfriend". That is the major use for ordinary people, I think: AI as 'my online best friend and lover'. And if you're average enough that you have a real world girlfriend or spouse, you don't see AI as being any good to you.
That's certainly the pattern I've noticed in the replies to me here. People who work with data think that LLMs are great and the wave of the future. They automate so much, they increase productivity, and so on. Laptop people, so to speak, think the tech is valuable. People who work with other people or with the world, though, still don't see the use. LLMs do nothing to help in roles that are primarily about interacting with other human beings, or which are primarily about interacting with physical stuff.
I wonder if there's a level of myopia here, where the data people assume that their kind of work is the whole world. Then again, to be fair, you could make the case that I, with my people-centred job, think that people work is the whole world, so we are both blind to a whole section of society and economy. On the inside view, I'd defend myself by saying that statistically, people and physical stuff do in fact make up almost all the economy, but on the outside view, should I trust myself?
As a laptop person, I’m confident LLMs are useful, but under no illusion they’re useful for everyone and everything. Not even for myself, because I don’t in fact just sit and work on my laptop all day.
Likewise, even very non-technical people can benefit from LLMs, for example by placing an LLM between themselves and the modern bureaucracy (forms, customer service complaints, legal issues, medical diagnoses etc.).
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I'm not a programmer either, and I do get annoyed at the way 90% of AI discussion is centered around coding, but come on. Software is eating the world. Anything we do, we do with software. Cars have software, TVs have software, phones have software, books are increasingly read in e-ink readers, etc. Software is as fundamental to our life as oil, or electricity. Imagine a technology that made oil workers 5x more productive, and thereby made oil cost 1/5th as much. It would not just be about how much you save at the pump; it would mean cheaper groceries and plastics and plane tickets and probably entire new applications that nobody has ever implemented because they did not make sense at the previous price level. That's what AI is.
My vintage Land Cruiser doesn't have software, nor does my record player, my guitar, my film camera, or my porch swing.
And you know what? I'm a helluva lot happier when I'm using any of those things that I am using just about anything with software.
Given the way cars are going, I'm inclined to say that having software is a downgrade for my car.
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In the UK we don't really have the same data centre showdowns described in this article, because the UK is already such a planning hellhole that no one would bother. Battles tend to be a lot smaller, focused on random businesses and housing developments. Nonetheless, so many of the NIMBY arguments seem to apply regardless of scale, one of the biggest of which is some kind of weird, communist, demand-management approach. "We don't need that here". "No one wants that". "Why are they building X instead of Y?"
Well, who the fuck cares about your market opinion, random local? Why are you the arbiter of supply and demand? Very obviously, somebody wants it; that's why people are putting their time and money down to build these things, whether it's a data centre or a bakery.
Now, I do accept that there is one difference when it comes to scale: data centres are so massive that a failed construction could leave you with a giant ruin somewhere, destroying local environments for nothing, whereas a small housing development or business won't have anywhere near the same impact. But even in this article, the first example is a proposal to replace the treasured, historic ... industrial wasteland. If something goes wrong there, you end up in exactly the same position!
It doesn't seem like any of the opponents in the substack even made a general "AI bubble" or similar argument (and that's putting aside the fact that data centres are the backbone of all modern infra, not just AI. There'd still be a ton of data centre construction if LLMs didn't exist). Their complaints are much more local, and concern about the companies doing the building is rooted in general distrust of corpos rather than anything AI specific.
I'm of course aware of the meme template you are invoking, but surely it applies to every instance of regulation. If there were no consenting market or investors for, say, selling cocaine, slaves, thalidomide or rat meat labelled as "beef", then banning those things would not be necessary. Conversely, the meme presumably is not funny in its original context to people who do think that Jesus/Allah/middle-aged ladies have a right to restrict the sexual dealings of consenting adults. While it may serve as a catchy package to convey the memester's value system on the topic, it rarely conveys any information or insight that would force someone else to change their judgement of a situation based on theirs.
It's not your main point, but I'm a Christian and I find that meme hilarious even as originally presented.
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I'm going to make the same point I've just made to Bombadil: the point of the meme reference is that the third party in this case has zero relevance to the transaction. There is party A, wanting to buy AI services, and party B, wanting to sell AI services, and then party X, saying that the demand doesn't actually exist and this transaction isn't real.
I'm not trying to make a fully general counter-argument against regulation here, and the above example would be different if party X felt that the AI services being traded carried dangers or externalities for the wider public. But for the specific quotes above, no one is making that case, they are simply claiming that because they don't see a value in a product or service, the value must not exist.
The problem is party X is impacted - by electrical infrastructure upgrades whose costs are often spread throughout the community, by construction blocking traffic and making noise, by the eyesore on the way to work. There are concerns about water usage, which might not be based on facts but the impression a lot of party X has is that their water pressure could decrease and there's nothing they can do about it.
And in return they get.... maybe five janitorial jobs while the bulk of the "new jobs" go to people on the coasts. And a construction crew who will likely be lead by people out of town and will hire less-skilled local labor for two years before trapezing away with those paychecks.
And the taxes, how do they tax the data centers? If a data center in Ohio is responsible for a billion of dollars of sales made in California, who gets that tax money? What is the tax revenue of a data center after its built?
Maybe someone would be ok with these problems if they felt like they were contributing to a better future, if they thought everyone was benefiting in some way. But if they honestly believe these things are making everything worse, they are not worth the sacrifice.
Consider the possibility that people in small towns have a pride. Being the home of a GM factory was a source of positive identity and worth some sacrifices for the greater good. Being the home of a world-destroying machine mind is not.
Typically the local tax revenue is via property tax, to which the end usage of the datacenter is irrelevant. It's assessed based on the fair-market value of the land and improvements.
Many states would get income tax if data centers were actually employing people locally, many cities get sales tax if sales were made in the city, etc.
The point is that money is being made in ways that don't really benefit the people closest to it. The incentives are all wrong.
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As per my earlier response, this is not a claim that externalities don't exist or that local communities have no right to regulate local construction. I am remarking on the argument that construction shouldn't proceed because there is no demand, and this lack of demand is unevidenced and based entirely on the vibes of the objector
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People living in a city should get a say over what is build in the city though. Data centers impact the environment, housing prices, and electricity availability. These are all issues that markets and investors do not care about, but locals do. And I don't see why the concerns of investors should be more important than the concerns of the people whose lives they will impact.
Right, but that's a different argument. OliveTapenade quotes the article:
And adds his own opinion:
This isn't saying that cities can't regulate what gets built nearby, it's saying that regulation is needed because they don't believe that a market exists for building X. To use a much simpler example I've seen in the UK, it's saying that you can't open up a new chain coffee store in my town because there are already several coffee stores nearby and it's not needed - essentially saying I know you're willing to invest your own money in this business venture, but I've decided I know better than the markets.
This thing is not that useful to me. The citizen has no reason to believe a datacenter will impact his community positively. The dispute is not that the things won't be useful to the owner or shareholders. The issue is that it won't be useful to those asked to sacrifice for it.
I'm not disputing that, I'm saying that the argument is very often "This thing is not that useful to me, and therefore, to anyone"
I think this is a common pattern, where people who hate something feel inclined to also dismiss everything associated with it as worthless.
A typical example is the surprising overlap between people who hate Elon Musk for his political views, and those who insists that Teslas are bad cars to own, even though these those beliefs feel like they should be uncorrelated (c.f. nobody thinks the CEO of Jeep is a piece of shit just because Jeeps are notoriously unreliable).
It feels like a version of Yudkowsky's arguments as soldiers, where the most vocal haters feel like they cannot admit there is anything good at all about the thing they oppose, for fear that acknowledging nuance undermines their own position. And I think in a lot of cases people internalize these beliefs to the point that they don't recognize how they arrived at them, so they become true to them.
The real opposition to AI datacenters seems to be a mix of general opposition to capitalism/big tech, and specific fear about AI replacing white color workers, shifting political power further from labor to capital, and consequently further concentrating wealth among the richest. I think those concerns are valid, but they are valid only in the sense that the Luddites concerns about industrialization were valid: obviously industrialization was bad for people whose jobs were replaced by machines, but equally obviously society at large benefited from the associated gains in productivity.
Clearly if the AI boom is like industrialization, then we cannot afford to miss the boat, and the discussion isn't about whether AI data centers should be built, but how many, where and who should own them. But acknowledging that makes it much harder to argue against building any particular data center here and now. So instead of taking a nuanced view (data centers can be built, but with reasonable restrictions on emissions of noise and use of water and power), opponents adopt the view that AI is categorically worthless, which makes not building any more data centers the obviously correct conclusion.
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Except the people spending all this money on them? Dave wants his book proofread more cheaply, Pete wants to ERP, Melanie wants dashboards to show key business insights, John wants some spreadsheets analyzed, Dean wants to fix bugs in his software. Even Johnny Jihadi wants to know how to make use of unexploded munitions left by govt forces in the Sahel and he goes to AI for that.
Why would the opinions of people who don't pay for the product because they don't find it useful outweigh those who do?
Because everyone gets an equal vote, and I'll bet less than 5% of people have ever used AI in any form, and even fewer have found it repetitiously valuable.
Almost a supermajority of Americans use AI at least multiple times a week. Let me know how you want to pay up.
I found this study absolutely impossible to believe; I'm a Millennial who's on the internet way too much and have been since the early 90s, and I've never used AI.
But then I remembered that Google force-feeds you an AI answer when you use the search bar the same way you've been doing for 30 years. So, touché. I'll still defend the fact that it's not something that most people go out of their way to intentionally engage with.
Almost half of Americans use chatbots specifically, with about a quarter doing so daily.
Really?? Again, maybe I'm not thinking broadly enough about what "AI" is defined as. I suppose it would include things like Alexa/Google Home/Siri? We called those "voice assistants" in my day.
I wasn't even hearing the term "A.I." as anything other than the movie (or Allen Iverson) in any remotely mainstream sense, unless post-Covid.
Well, no, those are not chatbots.
Huh? The prominence of the AI boom is largely a post Covid phenomenon.
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In 1980 you could say the same about the PC. When I was growing up, you could say the same about the internet. Lots of people's only interaction with the internet these days is Youtube and Facebook, because you need compelling content and incredible simplicity to interest the lower-than-average user, but that's enough for them to care about it now. Took ages.
If LLMs are anything like computing and internet and the youtubes, then people aren't going to have to do anything and the market will eventually sort itself out. Supply will come to match demand. It doesn't need your help or advocation. Well, discounting a bubble or two.
But we're not in a bubble, right?
The entire thing at discussion here is whether the government should intervene to prevent the market from clearing.
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We could well be, I think some of the claims made are silly.
This is my hope! My concern is people turning it into a nuclear-power situation, where a perfectly good thing is loaded down with so much taboo and fear and regulation that it's no longer accessible even when everybody calms down.
And there are those of us who think such a comparison is doing alot of heavy work not in evidence. To copy my reply on the topic above;
There's no getting around the fact that I use LLMs near-constantly, find them incredibly useful, and have considerable expectation for future use cases once the bottleneckers like Apple get off their arses. You don't.
I have old family friends whose ancestors felt that electricity was a fad and literally bankrupted themselves buying up candle factories 'cheap' in anticipation of renewed demand. My own grandmother felt that heated houses were fripperies and didn't get central heating until her 90s. I give these examples not to call you a luddite but just to say that literally neither of us knows yet and good, sensible people have been skeptical of in-hindsight very useful technologies (and vice-versa of course). My preference would be that we leave LLMs 20 years and see how it looks.
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Yeah, but I'm not even sure that the entire history of personal computing has consumed 474 gigawatts of power in a single state. The massive demand for resources and accommodations should rightly be scrutinized through cost-benefit analyses and public discussion.
I'm not opposed to this in theory but this feels like the wrong time: you can't do a cost-benefit analysis when neither the costs nor the benefits are readily apparent.
More generally... the conversation around AI feels like a Culture War conversation between lovers and haters squabbling over the pool of haven't-trieds. Both sides seem to have very strong confirmation biases; I'm a member of the lover faction myself and the 'I downloaded it, it told me a square has six sides, I deleted it' stories that haters tell me sound like they come from a different world which is a pretty good indicator that we're not operating on good epistemics here. If we're all operating on Conflict Theory then I don't think a big public discussion would produce very good results.
What is the right time, if not now? Waiting until after trillions of dollars have already been consumed?
Cost-benefit in business and life generally has to be fairly forward-looking. And there are plenty of conversations to be had, beyond the actual capabilities of the software itself. For example, is there any infrastructure plan in place for actually powering all these things without frying the grid and/or driving energy costs to Neptune?
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How does that address the point? People advocating against data centres do so on the basis that constructing data centres affects the communities they live in. That's why they get a say. People care about things that affect them. People who pay for chatbots don't get some sort of veto over people who don't. That would be lunatic.
That was the point of Sun's comparison to cars. You may grumble at an auto factory, but you do, at least, understand why cars are necessary. Even if you personally don't own a car and rely on public transport to get everywhere, it's obvious that there's real public demand for cars, on the basis of their obvious usefulness. You might not want a factory near you, but you understand why there need to be factories somewhere. LLMs have not cleared that hurdle. It seems that large numbers of people do not see why these things are so necessary that all these data centres should be built. We could just, you know, not have LLMs. That's an option.
The examples you give - proofreading a book, cybersex, reading spreadsheets - are generally all in the 'toy' category. Even the serious one, the hypothetical Jihadist, could just as easily google the munitions. The use cases for LLMs are so marginal that there is no publicly-felt sense of why they are needed, certainly to the extent of justifying the demands that data centre construction make on the public.
I don't think you're completely wrong here, but in this case the comparison to make if you think AI will be extremely useful would be if the anti-car urbanists started showing up to protest your car factory. Sure, you might not want it in your neighborhood, but you buy a new (to you, at least) car every so often and don't want them to become scarce resources, and people show up to protest every single car factory on the basis of "induced demand" traffic claims, "just walk, bruh", accident statistics, and a demand that you commute by never-to-be-finished passenger rail instead. They are convinced cars have no real use, and it'd be rather frustrating to normies if they doubled car prices without delivering any of the promised better alternatives first.
How to tell which framing is more relevant seems difficult from inside the situation.
I suppose the point of the comparison is to disambiguate two scenarios.
In the first scenario, people generally concede that the unwanted facility needs to be built somewhere. You don't want an auto factory or solar farm near you, but you concede that it needs to go somewhere, because we need cars and we need energy generation.
In the second scenario, people don't want the unwanted facility built at all. You do not want it anywhere, because you do not think the product or service that it enables needs to be made full stop.
The people that Sun interviewed, at least, are in the second scenario, and that changes the kind of conversation you would need to have with them, at least if you're pro-'AI'.
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No offense, but this is an incredible statement of ignorance. I use them at work and they are amazing. Not in any way a toy or marginal in value.
You get it. Same thing for LLMs. Most Americans regularly use LLMs. A vast supermajority of younger adults do. There's such real and obvious demand.
What do you do, out of curiosity?
I design electronics. I can make layouts and order PCBs. I design RF structures. I also test my designs myself. I need practical coding skills to automate testing, run FEM simulations programmatically, process measured data, etc.
I currently work for a major tech company and some would call me a tech bro. My work gives me LLM access for free. The Google search free LLM is mentally retarded. If you tried free LLMs and found them to be dumb, try a good one instead.
Are you using it mostly for coding, then?
To the latter point - I hope you can understand why many people are skeptical of arguments that go, "oh, of course the samples of our product that you can try are crap, you have to pay us, then you'll realise why it's worthwhile". Well, no. It's the company's job to sell the product to me, not vice versa. There's also a bit of a psychological trick there as well, in that once you pay money for something, you have a bias toward convincing yourself that it was worthwhile. Lastly, I am skeptical because people who seem to have good judgement who do pay for it also seem to report that it's crap. All the patterns of conversation look the same. I've read transcripts of LLM conversations on advanced models and... I'm sorry, it's all the same old beige. There is no evidence available to me that they're worthwhile, and "oh, you have to pay for it in order to understand why it's worth paying for" is not a reasonable argument.
For what it's worth, I work in a very different area to you. I work in aged care, and I cannot think of a use for LLMs here. The main way they have changed my work is just by requiring me to sort through and filter out a lot more slop when I try to find a picture, piece of music, or video to show to residents, so the main way they have featured in my workplace is as a mild annoyance. What on Earth could I use generative 'AI' for?
As another data point, I currently use a $100/month Claude subscription, duck.ai free from the browser, and midjourney.
Claude was paid for and set up from work, and it is very, very good. I am an artist, and it is much better at coding than me, and is able to implement code solutions for the technical problems I run into integrating my art into my company's project. It is tremendously efficient and effective so far with all the tasks I've thrown at it.
Midjourney, I paid a hundred bucks for a year's subscription. I used it very heavily on a project, and got some excellent results out of it, but the project petered out and trying to apply it to other projects has not worked well so far. Mostly I've dropped it for the time being to work on other things.
Duck.AI I've found is pretty good at solving code problems, but more than that is very good at assisting in finding solutions to technical problems with complex art software like blender. It is much, much better than the old solution of googling questions, even before google search enshittified, because it generates topical summaries aimed specifically at the question presented rather than websites which contain keyword matches somewhere within them. I've been making really good progress in areas that were too frustrating to pursue previously, and it's frankly pretty great.
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LLMs are obviously useful in the same way that businesses obviously need to analyse spreadsheets and obviously need to write code, amongst a myriad of other tasks where LLMs are useful.
The point you were putting forth is that because LLMs aren't very useful (except for some niche fields) and aren't interesting, there is no need to build datacentres. But that's not the case. We can discern that's not the case because people are prepared to pay for these LLMs. The general public. Coders. Companies. Militaries. Governments.
It is abundantly clear that LLM technology is in fact useful and there is an abundance of examples to back this up. Use of LLMs for targeting/ISR in the Iran war, use of LLMs in hacking, use of LLMs in writing code, use of LLMs in mathematics research, chemistry and biology, use of LLMs in entertainment, making images, translation, proofreading, examining legal or financial data. These are not niche fields.
So people are prepared to sacrifice money for these things, which is why these companies are building datacentres. They're not being built without reason. Companies are paying for all this compute and electricity. Sure, the electricity use is an issue for local communities. Industry has been known to require power, make noise and pollution, which should all ideally be minimized.
Again, this is not the case. If googling was just as easy then he'd do that and not waste time jailbreaking AIs instead.
It does seem that many people don't see a use for AI. But they're wrong about that, maybe they haven't looked into it or misunderstand what is going on.
For most people current AI is a little bit useful and a lot ominous, whereas the car, say, is a lot useful and only a little bit ominous. For coders this calculus may be different. You point out that it's also useful in law, finance, proofreading and entertainment, and these are indeed not niche fields, but I don't think there are all that many genuinely advantageous use cases of AI in these fields. In most cases one just gets increased convenience with evident downsides as well.
People may well have misunderstood how well AI will serve them personally in the future, when it's even smarter, but that's something reasonable people can disagree about.
Just speaking from experience, the increased convenience is a really big thing. I'm having trouble with my employer in a way that's very time-sensitive, and being able to check their work while my lawyer was away on summer holiday was a life saver. I cannot stress enough how much it helped me.
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I'm not actually sure they are widely useful. So far the primary use case for them is coding, right? But not very many people are coders, it's a niche field, and as Freddie has argued (disclaimer: I do not wholly agree with him), very little has actually come of this supposed improvement to coding. We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
But even if we grant that LLMs are very useful in the handful of niche fields where they are currently used, the problems remain that 1) most members of the public do not understand or care about those uses, and 2) most members of the public do not think those uses are worth the costs they are being asked to bear.
Also, don't forget that there are plenty of programmers who do not find LLMs useful for programming either. To be fair I will say that there are those who do, but anyone who tells you that LLMs have revolutionized the industry is not telling you the truth. The truth is that the level of benefit they bring is controversial and not settled, even among programmers.
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So besides coding, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, images, translation, proofreading, analysing contracts, tech support, playing Minecraft with, ERP, military targeting analysis, cybersecurity (defensive/offensive), drafting emails, summarizing documents, explaining history/science, doing everything that a search engine can do and more, writing and analysing spreadsheet functions, making charts and dashboards, sales research, writing fanfiction, earnings call analysis, document dump analysis, home repair/DIY fixes, recipes for cooking, car diagnostics from symptoms, real-time captioning for the deaf and literally lifesaving medical diagnoses...
Besides this handful of niche fields, what have LLMs ever done for us?
Doesn't it surprise you that Google is planning to spend $200 billion on AI this year? Mysteriously they don't seem to think it's a niche use-case but vital to their whole company's future since their core business of 'search' is another word for AI. And LLMs are at the heart of AI.
When I have issues with a piece of software not working and spitting out some incomprehensible error message I can now ask an AI and get a much better answer compared to trawling through forum posts from 8 years ago. Or get it to directly analyse and fix the code. Most programs have gotten much better in useability.
There are strong arguments against AI but 'it's mostly useless' is extremely silly. If it were useless nobody would care much about it, mostly useless is Siri-tier AI in the 2010s. Nobody cared much about Siri.
Furthermore, the general public's opinions don't really matter much. Concentrated, wealthy lobby groups like big tech and the military-industrial base have much more of a say.
That's a long list you've got there, but it includes things that LLMs have not made any useful contributions to (e.g. teaching, physics, chemistry), things that are obviously frivolous (e.g. cybersex, playing video games), things that LLMs are fundamentally untrustworthy with (e.g. legal contracts, most analyses), and things that LLMs are just plain terrible at (e.g. fiction, image generation), so... yes, besides those things. I think that was a long list of nonsense intended to overawe, rather than a serious discussion of what these bots are able to do.
I think there are some use cases for LLMs, but overall much less than their boosters think. When the general public rejects this technology as not useful for them, the general public is mostly correct.
This is exactly the problem. What we are talking about is public opposition to data centres, which, as Sun discusses, is predicated at least in part on the judgement that bots are not particularly useful. If 'AI' companies want to earn the public trust, they need to demonstrate both their trustworthiness and the usefulness of their products, and thus far they are failing at both those tasks. Sneering at the peasants is certainly not going to help them in these tasks.
Fiction is middling at best but LLMs (or adjacent technologies) are now pretty great at image generation. perhaps a bit narrow but the six-fingered hand is a thing of the past, and text is more or less solved on top models.
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Partly it's happening, just slower than you think and concentrated on business-to-business because these days building software for users has very high expectations for ease of use and frankly it's not worth it.
But the main issue is regulation and incumbents sitting on top of the bottlenecks. Want an app on your phone to point out you've missed an email that's urgent? Tough, only Apple gets to see your emails. Want it to be able to point out when you're doomscrolling? Tough, Apple doesn't let apps see what you're doing. Want your phone to take care of some trivial tasks without you? Tough, Apple definitely doesn't allow apps to use other apps. There's good security reasons for this but it means massive swathes of AI use cases can literally only be looked at by Apple and Google, who are slow-moving and mostly uninterested because they already own the market.
And this extends all over the place. Want to help people with something medical? I hope you've got a twenty person compliance team and you're friends with the regulators, and that's before you have a clue if your putative product will be popular or profitable. Similar for legal, similar for finance.
In short, the number of people who can do interesting things that you @OliveTapenade might notice in your personal life are limited to about 1-10 companies, who mostly have other priorities.
I also think this is too narrow. I've had a dispute with my employer and having something that can not only go through thirty pages of legal documents immediately and spot traps but also provide a legal fix so I don't have to rely purely on their drafting has been incredibly useful.
This is always the case with technology: it can take a surprising amount of time to replace existing infrastructure even when new technology is clearly better. Existing equipment was expensive and still works, teaching staff new workflows has overhead, and the impetus to actually change things is often low. OPM was still processing paper records for employee retirement until very recently. How many industrial machines are still running DOS out there?
I can imagine AI being both transformative and seemingly-ubiquitous, but still not reaching all the dark corners of the workforce for a generation or two.
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This may still be overly optimistic. I think many people's main impression of modern software is negative experiences like ubiquitous data harvesting, addictive social media algorithms, and frustrating experiences with confusing or buggy new technology.
Promising to deliver more of these faster won't be considered a positive effect of AI.
This is kind of where I'm at. Sure, my phone has some cool new toys that let me edit my photos and identify bird calls, but by and large my experience with tech is significantly worse now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It seems like most recent advances have mostly just ennabled increasing enshittification by making it easier to track me and engage in variable pricing. About 10 years ago, things stopped getting better and just started getting more expensive.
There is real value in the ~10% of my time it saves in researching and drafting emails. But I'd trade that 10% efficiency gain for no more AI ads/scams, no flock cameras, less bot spam, no more people using screenshots of AI hallucinations as evidence for stupid arguments, etc. in a heartbeat. I'm not even convinced AI is worth the price of free, let alone using my tax dollars to build a windowless concrete box in the middle of town.
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As far as I can tell, most Americans think that AI is making society worse. More and more Americans have encountered and used the technology, but it is the most widely-despised technological advance in a generation.
For this story I think the key part there is Pew's point 10. Experts are vastly more optimistic about LLMs than the population in general. That divergence is what drives this conflict. If many members of the public believe that the situation is that a small, wealthy elite are forcing a technology on the country that the country does not want... well, those members of the public are correct.
I mean, good? I do not want members of the public to have veto power over what smart engineers are permitted to develop (as long as they're paying for it, of course). Imagine if we'd held a plebiscite on whether universities should continue spending money on this "Internet" thing in friggin' 1973, 4 years after ARPANET began. Imagine if journalists were publishing articles in 1907 asking for the government to shut down research on these new-fangled planes because they're flimsy and dangerous and nobody they know has seen any benefits from them.
Experts have, well, expertise in the subject. They know the technology has a ridiculous number of use cases. But it takes time for it to percolate through society.
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If software is a niche field, then the US is a niche economy. And, although the public might think math and software is pointless stuff for nerds, they do care about cratering the economy.
Do the majority of software developers do math? I don’t do software so I don’t know, but my guess is software developers doing math stuff was a niche.
Obviously, 50 years ago every software engineer did math.
I don't know how you can do software development without doing math. Maybe they aren't doing the kind of math that people usually recognize as math, because we never bother to teach things like algorithms or automata as "math", but they are very much doing math.
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No, not typically. But it's one of "the handful of niche fields" where AI has proven very powerful and successful.
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There are 1.84 million software developers in the U.S., so roughly half a percent of the population. I suspect most of these are heavily concentrated on the coasts, rather than scattered throughout the areas of the country most of these data centers are going.
Joe Six-Pack probably knows umpteen different welders, heavy equipment operators, machinists, and he certainly knows plenty of people who drive cars. He's probably never met a software developer, nor does he see any reason to. In his mind (and many others), AI might as well be fictitious.
Joe Sixpack may not know any software developers, but he uses the Internet, including some kind of search engine... which probably includes AI prominently now. If he doesn't live near Detroit or one of the few other centers of car manufacture, he probably doesn't know any automotive engineers either, but he damn sure knows about automobiles.
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There are only 350k machinists, I propose a moratorium on building tooling for this niche field of which I personally know no practitioners.
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I think more than that there is also the case that people understand the value that a factory provides to the local community while data centers are just a blight locally and producing value elsewhere, perhaps not even in your state, nevermind your town.
So you might then say that the companies should compensate the locals for this. Well, for one, they're generally not proposing to do that (remotely commensurate with the costs they impose) and secondly people don't believe them even when they are proposing that. Companies a well known to lie outrageously about things like data center employment even before the AI boom.
Sun did talk about the companies trying to figure out how much they need to 'bribe' people. I'm not sure the deficit is just money. It seems like, in her argument at least, it's a combination of both trust and public utility.
I agree, but I wanted to expand on why the deficit involves both trust and public utility. Data centres disrupt the usual tacit bargain between a community and a major industrial project: the community accepts some local costs because the project also creates visible and durable local benefits.
With data centres, the costs are highly concentrated, land, water and electricity use, infrastructure demands, noise and visual blight, while most of the benefits are diffuse and accrue to users, employees and shareholders somewhere else. They generally provide very little permanent local employment, and the companies involved have a history of exaggerating those benefits and stiffing the locals. That makes promises of compensation harder to trust, not just in some general sense but for data centers specifically.
A factory can also impose serious costs, of course, but once operating it normally has an obvious continuing relationship with its community through employment, suppliers and associated economic activity. A data centre is less a reciprocal relationship and more like a company extracting locally scarce resources to produce value elsewhere. So even if people accepted that AI had some public utility, there would still be a separate question of why particular communities should bear a disproportionate share of its costs and why they should believe the promises of the relevant companies that have a history of lies.
I don't think the people involved quite understand scale of the costs they impose and the lack of benefits they give relative to other regular businesses or even doing nothing at all. The issues with data centers aren't something new, recognition of them and opposition too them have been growing for a long time, this rapid expansion just highlights it and makes it a news story.
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People would be just as happy to continue doing the same thing they always have. Only a minority of workers are interested in improving productivity numbers, and they're significantly outnumbered by those worried about the change and displacements improved productivity will bring.
What thinks AI is worth massive sacrifice and investment is Capital itself. Capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence etc. Whatever complaints humans might have, they're just the collective substrate that a higher agency is built on, and that has its own desires for reproduction and extension and data centers.
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Interestingly, Pat Boyle dropped a new one that delves into the financial crux of the problem surrounding AI. I think these data centers are being built in a similar vein to all the ghost cities that went up in China before their enormous overcapacity really hit them in the face. It’s being built on the expectation that everyone is awaiting with eager anticipation for this “boom” to happen, that’s unlikely to materialize.
There won't be an overcapacity of compute even if AI ends up hitting a hard plateau. I know Google was basically always short of compute even before AI got bag; they and Amazon and many other companies will find something to do with it.
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My understanding is the Chinese ghosts cities eventually all became populated with a few exceptions that end up on zero hedges for bubble doom porn. China did move an insane amount of people from rural life to urban life in half a generation.
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Normies use the ChatGPT app, and from what I see, the results are often worthless garbage. I mean a significant fraction of the time it's literally on the level of "Please design me a rectangle." "Ok, here's that triangle you asked for."
A lot of that is surely user error, but the entire pitch is that it can field natural language requests. There's a minor IRL issue of local flyers with QR codes that don't work because the person just asked for "A flyer with a QR code" and the free version on mobile at least doesn't ask follow-up questions like "Is the QR code supposed to actually do anything?"
I will say I used free GPT for a couple of years and never got this. But also:
How hard is it to put “please ask any relevant follow-up questions” in your prompt? This isn’t wizardry. We were doing this is 2023. Yes, you have to put in a modicum of effort.
And if you have an ounce of curiosity in you then you should really ask it ‘what is a QR code and how does it work’ when you say you want a QR code on your flier!
But for the average person it's being sold as "you can now do all this yourself because the AI will do it all for you". Someone who says "put a QR code in this flyer" assumes that the AI is like a human being that you would ask to do this, and the human would understand what was meant. They don't know that the AI doesn't understand and that you have to be very exact in your prompt, because the sales pitch is "This is your friendly helpful assistant who is a real person too, talk to Claude or Bob or Iris or Sally the chatbot for what you want!"
Giving human names to the machine is all part of the deliberate pitch to humanise the product and sell it as "this can replace a person, now you don't need to pay an artist or a designer or a secretary to do this for you" and that's not true as of yet. Saying people are stupid for not knowing what they have not been told they need to know is dismissive and condescending.
No, I get that, I don't like the marketing campaigns. But at some point you have to pay attention to what you're doing. If you're putting up flyers with a QR code, why haven't you scanned them at least once to know they work? And if you find they don't work, and I'm guessing 'work' here means 'link to your website' then why don't you ask the AI why they're not doing that? And if you've got no idea what you want the QR code to do, why are you asking for a QR code?
Managing AI is very much like managing humans. In both cases half the job is clarifying your thinking and soliciting follow-up questions and checking you're on the same page all the time, and "Well, I know what I want," doesn't work for AI or humans.
Sure, but Ordinary Joe putting up an amateur flyer is only copying what he sees other things doing, and he's not going to know anything about "this is why you do such a thing" (QR codes are on every damn thing I'm seeing right now, including soda bottles).
And he certainly won't know "In fact, the AI assistant we promise you is exactly like a real person and a professional who will make this better than you could on your own and you won't have to pay a real professional designer to do this level of work for you, is an idiot machine that needs you to spell out exactly and precisely what you want and why you want it".
That moment of, "oh, shit, I have no idea why I'm actually doing this thing," is how you learn and grow, though. I've been there dozens of times. I just think that it's bad if the response becomes "I paid $10 for this piece of shit and it can't even do what it's told!" instead of, "okay, I need to sit down and think for a minute and learn some stuff and figure out what I actually want".
The former is a waste of time that, as @gattsuru says, isn't going to work well with most human professionals either. The latter is how you gain experience and expertise. I'm not being condescending to our hypothetical Joe, it's exactly the advice I'd give a friend or junior.
I agree with you that to the extent LLM companies aren't open about this it's bad.
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I'm gonna caution you that "real professional designer" does not stand anywhere near as high of a level of capability or reliability as you're implying here, including for this specific problem.
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I think you drastically overestimate how well the typical normie can use anything related to computers.
I despise Apple and their products, but their entire schtick (and greatest strength in the market), at least until recently, was making their products and software as idiot-proof and smooth to use as possible. They did so at the cost of gimping it for power users in many ways, but there's a lot more money to be made from normies than power users in most cases.
The various AI companies have a long, long way to go in making stuff idiot-proof for their target audience.
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The selling point in the commercials is that you don't. You can just talk to it like a person. Most normies don't quite get that it's sort of like a brutally autistic person you can just talk to, but you have to carefully phrase everything and anticipate mistakes that would normally come up and be dealt with over an actual conversation. In actual practice, it's less effective at anticipating your needs and problems than the 16 year old girl with a tablet standing outside a Chik'Fil'A.
The marketing for these things has been terrible from the start, I agree. Solving stupid 'problems' in stupid ways, stoking needless terror and antagonism...
And so unnecessary, too. These things percolated perfectly well with no marketing budget whatsoever.
You'll never become a quadrillionaire who rules the world with that kind of attitude.
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Free AI:
Paid AI:
https://x.com/goodside/status/2084088205582778713
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing
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People want better food, clothing and shelter. They want better healthcare. They want safety, love, belonging and a feeling of self-esteem. Lastly, they want to self-actualize.
AI helps with none of the physiological needs. It actively makes job security worse and channels our communications through a digital middle-man, worsening shared love and belonging. It renders your skills moot by skill-mogging you, decimating your self-esteem. And lastly, its nature questions the reason for our very existence, throwing self-actualization into a tizzy.
AI automates humans. AI makes 'creative' content for free. AI personalizes ads perfectly. Other than those in the capital class, who wants this. What member of proletariat 'benefits' from AI ?
That's underselling it. If you wrote super-villians that behave like Altman, Dario, Zuck and Elon, then the editor would can your script for being too on the nose.
Is it an archetype ? or is it reality.
Honestly, I expected a lot more negative pushback on that post from the Motte, which I do think of as a relatively tech-positive community. Calling Anthropic a 'doomsday cult of autists' made me laugh (if anything I want to protest on the basis that it's not fair to lump perfectly innocent autists in with 'AI' people), but the whole rationalist community is at least adjacent to that cult.
It's very much insider criticism.
I work in AI, my compensation depends on it. Most folks on here (me included) are rat adjacent in some way. On paper, I'm sympathetic to Anthropic's motivation. I have friends who work at Anthropic & OpenAI, and they're normal people.
Talking to my peers in the field is why I am jaded. They express bewilderment at the opposition to AI. These are smart people. It means they're either willfully ignorant or lying. In either scenario, it scares me that the harbingers of the next era of humanity understand so little of what makes us human.
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Well, the only way out of capitalism, that doesn't involve replacing big macs with eating grass to survive, runs through building an AI capable enough to simulate the economy and coordinate economic decision-making (this was already obvious in 1970). It's really a mark of the deep intellectual unseriousness of leftists that they're freaking out about Current Thing AI instead of scheming to align it their way.
Left-leaning westerners are still capitalists. They oppose the 'turn the level up to 11' form of hyper-capitalism practiced in America (globally) and China (internally). At least the CCP periodically disappears prominent entrepreneurs, so they know its place. That's regulation. The US on the other hand, is headed towards a tyranny of an ugly coalition of mega-corps and boomer NIMBYs.
The hyperbole is unproductive. Makes your argument seem unserious. Yes, we need to replace beef = cows feasting on alfalfa. Practically all other forms of meat are valid replacements. (Note, unlike Americans, other nationals aren't as entitled about what type of meat they're eating). Lab grown meat is valid. Changing your meal's composition (eat beef 2/7 days, instead of 7/7) & eating fewer meals (Ozempic) is valid. People aren't reproducing, so fewer people is also a valid option.
Besides, AI does very little to help alleviate concerns or accelerate research in these domains.
This has been possible to do for a very long time.
People do not coordinate because they have different incentives, goals and emotional hangups. No amount of AI is going to convince a NIMBY to allow new housing or Texan to use public transportation.
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If we can reach post-scarcity by becoming vegetarian, then I am more than willing to make that sacrifice. That seems way better than trusting the people arguing for LLM's.
We cannot reach post-scarcity by becoming vegetarian, because vegetarianism IS scarcity.
That seems like moving the goalpost. If I can live comfortably, have high quality (though meat-free) food, and not have to work then that is post scarcity. Vegetarian or not.
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