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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9314 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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I haven't read the Substack article yet, but I did read the Klein interview, and what stood out to me was this:

And I went in and asked these organizers: Do you guys use A.I.? Do you find it useful? This was one of the top questions that my friends in San Francisco wanted me to ask: Are these people using ChatGPT, and they don’t even realize that the data centers are how they can use it?

And what I found was that a lot of these folks did say: Yeah, I’ve used it to draft an email or make a meme. They’re not denying that A.I. might have any possible utility at all, but they clearly didn’t see it as essential in the way that cars, energy and housing are essential.

They clearly saw it as like a widget — a toy — and maybe there are these risks, maybe there’s the job stuff, but fundamentally they were like: This thing is not that useful. I don’t really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations.

And so I was talking to, for example, Charles Franklin, who runs the Marquette Law School Polls in Wisconsin, and he was explaining that usually you see 50-50 polling on issues where you have a strong anti case and a strong pro case. And the only reason you’re seeing this 70-30 bipartisan opposition to data centers, no matter whether you live near a data center or you don’t — which means it’s not just NIMBYism, it’s you don’t want a data center in anyone’s backyard — is because there is no strong pro argument for it. There is not even a fight that’s really going on.

“Nobody wants it” was a phrase I heard over and over.

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.

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.

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.

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?

We could well be, I think some of the claims made are silly.

people aren't going to have to do anything and the market will eventually sort itself out. Supply will come to match demand

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;

Nuclear you can point to solid returns that would benefit the common consumer directly - less reliance on hydrocarbons, energy independence, cheaper energy.

Data Centers you point to with the returns that basically boil down to 'Big Businesses need it, LLMs are magic bro, trust me, we've got to beat China!'

So color me a skeptic. On Data Centers, not Nuclear. For fuck sake people, just use the magic rock and be done with it.

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.

And my reply to that is that if you gave a metal lathe to a skilled user, you'd likely get something beautiful, but if you gave it to a random guy off the street, there's a real chance they'd loose a limb and bleed out before anyone could get to them.

As I read this thread, I'm noticing a similar and similar implied arguement crop up - the 1% that can use LLMs beautifully naturally assume the moment the general masses they will be freed like a butterfly bursting from it's crysalis into something beautiful and everything will be wonderful.

Yet we all know what occured the last time something like that happened.

I'm not trying to argue that we shut down LLM development. What I'm trying to say is that a good chunk of LLM development and movement and usage isn't from honest improvement but from sales department buzzwords and artificial push.

Nor does it really help your side when people argue otherwise you immeadiately and covertly imply that they're just luddites(in your case - like, c'mon, really?) or building strawmen(elsewhere). Yet you forget that you're the one making the outlandish claims, with very little evidence beyond single datapoints - IE, what you can do with it.

A single datapoint is data, yes. But it does not equate to an overall data trend. I've no doubt that you and people like this guy can do alot with LLMs, but I've yet to see any broader overall concrete benefit to the world at large nor any market uptick that would imply this is making things better.

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