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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.
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, it's 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.
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.
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.
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