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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.
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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