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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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