This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
One thing about data centers I keep hearing is that they don't meaningfully contribute jobs to the local community, and I'm not sure why this would be, relative to any other commercial project of similar scale in a given community. Even if the compute on these servers are being used at some arbitrary location on Earth that's completely unrelated to the data center, that specific server needs to be installed, maintained, upgraded, replaced by someone who is physically there. In the long run, sufficiently cheap AI- or remote-controlled robots could replace this, but we're not there yet and I don't think that many people think it's around the corner either, like how so many people seem to believe AGI or even ASI is right around the corner. That person who physically checks on the servers and fixes or replaces it when something breaks or upgrades it just when faster hardware is sufficiently cheap and available to make economical sense would almost definitely live near their job at the data center, and so either that person would be a local or a local import who would spend the money the data center company pays them buying stuff and services from local shops. This seems exactly analogous to any other job of e.g. being a baseball stadium clerk or a warehouse worker.
Yet data centers get talked about as if they're just big slabs of compute that these AI companies build and just place somewhere for other people to be bothered by, never to require paying humans to actually maintain or upgrade the thing. Do these data centers require less jobs or less paying jobs on a per-dollar-invested basis than other similar commercial projects to such a great extent that they can be rounded down to zero? If so, what if we mandated that data centers provide make-work jobs to the local community where people are paid to stand watch to maintain computers that need 1000x less maintenance than they can provide? I've sometimes thought that, given the sheer complexity of the code and tools AI is capable of generating, which far outstrip the ability of any human or even possibly team of humans to understand, and the fact that AI lacks agency or the ability to be held responsible, every company in the future would eventually have precisely one and only one employee, whose job is just to sit around watching the AIs that are literally incomprehensible to them and be summarily fired and replaced if anything goes wrong as a result of AI behavior. Give them an official job title of "scapegoat." We could start doing something like that with AI data centers (give them all golden parachutes so that the money flows to the local economy regardless).
Contrast AI data centers with more traditional industry, say a car factory (perhaps from 20 or 30 years ago).
Per million dollars invested, the car factory created tremendously more local economic activity. I imagine they might have multiple full-time jobs per million dollars, welders and mechanics and office workers who would in turn go to cinemas and super markets and so forth.
In AI, 1M$ buys you perhaps 25 H200 GPUs. They probably fit within a single 2m rack. You install that rack, along with thousand similar ones, and send a technician to replace failing fans. I don't think that this is the price segment where you care about saving a few dollars on fans, so it seems entirely plausible that your 1M$ investment will never require a technician during its economic lifetime. Sure, there is some overhead, like power supply and cooling, but this likewise is stuff which can be made reliably if you are willing to spend big bucks on it.
The intellectual labor of running the data center (to the degree that it still involves humans) is not local at all. The nerds sit in SV and do not spend a dime in the local economy.
For a community, the liability of an industry is proportional to the investment. Permitting someone to build a small theme park for a few million dollars is a limited risk, at worst the town can cough up the costs and shut it down. With a billion dollar investment, things look different. Once that data center is built, it will run, come hell or high water (though paperclips or the bubble bursting might still cause it to be shut down), because the investors have billions on the line and will be sure to phrase the contract in such a way that whomever is running on a "cancel the datacenter" platform will not be able to do so.
If the datacenter offered a thousand local jobs, that might still be worth it. But it does not, it offers a handful of jobs -- plus some temporary economic surplus while it is being built.
Furthermore, the locals likely have an acute awareness of how likely their elected representatives are to actually make a great deal instead of a complete blunder.
From their perspective, it may be fairly described as a Faustian pact -- you do not know that the demon is going to fuck you over, but you know very well that he is much smarter than you are and does not have any straightforward incentive not to fuck you over, so you do the math and decide that you will pass.
More options
Context Copy link
Loudoun County, Virgina is the data center capital of the US. There's 50 million square feet of data centers built or being built there.
Despite every hyperscaler, data center leasing company, and major tech company having at least one and often multiple data centers there, only Amazon appears on a recent top employers list in the county. And Amazon operates more data centers there than anywhere else in the US and has significant management of other data centers from there.
Loudoun County only claims 15,000 jobs in the data center ecosystem (meaning not just operations but the jobs associated with building them, too).
An older study (from a time when only 30 million square feet in were in operation) lists 5400 jobs actually operating those data centers and 65% of those jobs being outside the county (no break down of fully remote or commuting from a neighboring county).
Compare that with Witchita Kansas which is a major location of aviation assembly. Sprint Areosystems has a 20 million sq ft assembly campus in Witchita, which employes 16,000 directly.
That's 3x the direct jobs, for 2/3 or 2/5th of the space. If most of those non-county jobs are fully remote, that's more like 10x the local job density between advanced manufacturing and data centers.
You're right in general, but some of it is just that high paid tech workers don't want to live in Loudon County over the other nearby areas. My prior job was for sw infra engineering work on a (first party, non-AWS/GCP) data center in that area, where physical proximity to the building didn't matter for my role but did for people on teams I worked with every day. Our office was in Herndon (Fairfax County, right on the other side of the border), and I lived with the other yuppies in Arlington.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, but realistically most places don't have the choice between an aviation assembly plant and a data center. They've got the choice between a data center and some sort of unused land.
Sure, the contrast was just to illustrate the relatively low job density.
The local issue is more about how much tax incentives get offered and how much electrical infrastructure and how well area generation can supply the new electrical demand. Sometimes land may be better for everyone except the local politicians.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The "choice" in a local planning sense for a municipality choosing where to zone for AI, if you have a site for a 1,000,000sqft industrial building, is between a data center that might have two dozen or so permanent employees and a warehouse that would support a thousand unskilled jobs or a factory that would have 800 skilled workers.
So yeah, rounds down to zero.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link