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Notes -
It does seem to me that the most parsimonious explanation is that the developers involved in this are mostly treating it as a gold rush rather than coming in with well-thought-out plans. OK, maybe it's cheaper to convert an old company headquarters into a data center, but it's also certainly understandable that people don't like it. Not helped by the AI companies' intentionally terrible PR strategies.
And you'll get similar results, as well.
One of the claims I've seen for the benefit of data centers is, well, jobs. As someone who has friends looking to get into Data Center construction, given from what I've seen, the timeline for construction seems to be around 2 to 3 years for each new data center.
In the local area, for those 2 to 3 years, the numbers will probably be rather rosey - you'll get a glut of new people spending a fair amount of cash from things from groceries to restraunts to RV parks to hotels - business is booming! Numbers go up!
Until they leave.
Whoops. So now businesses that were operating under the assumption of a cash flow that no longer exists - and as someone who's watched more businesses fuckup due to accounting budgeting and making really stupid decisions than I care to admit to, oh boy is this the likely outcome - if they can't react to the economic shock, more than likely they'll go under.
So now you've got a data center likely set in the most moronic of location and a bunch of businesses now no longer able to make ends meat because the circumstance under which they were flourishing no longer exist.
And you've still got the fucking data center.
Do I have numbers to back this up? Studies? No. All I'm going off of is a little bit more economic knowledge than the average person and watching businesses do really stupid things during covid. (Businesses got flush with cash during Covid due to government grants to stay open. So they planned around that sudden cash flow. Guess what happened when it dried up?)
Putting all that aside, even people who are pro-data center have no issue pointing out that the entire PR look is bad. And, in my personal pet peeve, I'd seen more than a few people try to compare anti-data center people to anti-nuclear power, nevermind how moronic such an arguement is.
One of these days, I'd love to see a social study to find out what causes people's brains to flip and do the meme.
What's moronic about it? It sounds very easy to me. Nuclear could have been the next generation of energy but was constrained by regulations protecting the places where they would be built. "Data centers" could be the next generation of tech but are threatened by a movement that wants regulations to protect the places where they would be built. And in both cases it scans really simply as all mixed with more than a little bit of Luddism.
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.
> is it a strawman or an argument
> "it's a good argument sir"
> look inside
> it's a strawman
We wouldn't be having this conversation right now without data centers.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You(and others) are making comparisons that Data Centers are just as important(if not more, from what I've seen people say) than Nuclear Power. And when I go digging around, that's the answers I typically find.
Brother, you accuse me of building a strawmen when all I'm doing is rooting around in your hayfield, looking for a point. Hell, you haven't even offered up a rebuttal. If you've got something in your pocket, I'm all ears.
I asked you a question about something you said, and you proceeded to defend a different statement. You then claimed that data centers do not have “solid returns that would benefit the common consumer directly,” and that nobody can come up with any. Now that I point out that this is an obvious strawman, you become hostile accuse me of bad faith.
This is ridiculous.
This is besides the fact that it appears you appear to misunderstand simile. At least, when people say “opposition to data centers is like opposition to nuclear,” it is not relevant for you to assert that nuclear is more important than data centers.
I’m happy to continue this conversation, but I’m confused as to whether: 1) You want to defend the notion that AI is useless 2) You want to defend the separate notion that AI is less important than nuclear 3) You want me to introduce some other opinion so you can argue against that instead of having to defend your own contradictions
Sigh.
If it was so easy to point out how LLM benefits the common man, then you'd have an easy response in your back pocket. You didn't, and instead responded with ridicule, the equivalent of 'lolno'.
I'm not accusing you of bad faith. If anything, the only hostility in this argument I'm seeing comes from you. I'm asking you to back up your argument with something. I've seen instances of LLMs being utilized to impressive degree, and I know of atleast one person that I find interesting to follow who says similar, so while I'm skeptical I'm atleast willing to hear him out.
My basic argument boils down to this: I don't think you can extrapolate the above and expect similar return out of the common man, or ways it benefits them.
Still, I do want to step back and clarify something. When I see the argument in the wilds - I'm not talking about the motte, I'm talking elsewhere about people comparing Data Centers to Nuclear Power, I read their implied statement as to say that, yes, they equate Data Centers in importance to Nuclear Power. And when asked 'why', they never give a solild answer - they either reflect, or attack. Or, as you called them, my strawmen arguments. It's why I brought it up. I find the comparison rather silly, or an actual use of a slippery slope fallacy.
You said something very unusual and, when I asked for elaboration, proceded to defend a different statement.
Now you want me to defend my position when I have not advanced any.
Ok.
Here are some things I use AI for every day:
Here are some things I know my friends have used AI for:
Here are some things I have seen AI being used for on the internet:
These are all multi-billion dollar industries. Translation alone is probably $100B+, dare I say even more if people get over the privacy concerns and we have babelfish auto-translation wearables.
Nobody has been able to explain any benefits of AI to you? What on earth are you talking about?
I’m not even sure what a charitable explanation looks like. Maybe you just got out of a coma? Maybe all your previous interlocutors couldn’t speak English? Maybe you are blind and use text-to-speech and have missed a lot of news?
You didn’t just stop there. You said that data centers themselves have no benefits for regular people. Need I point out that we would not be having this argument without data centers. Data centers are not some new category of invention. They are large networks of computers specialized for processing data. We would not have militaries or banks without data centers. We would lose a lot of industry and a lot of farms.
Now, if the statement is just that nuclear is more important than data centers, well, that’s debatable, that’s fair, I can squint and I can see the case. Energy is pretty important. Nuclear would probably be even more transformative if it hadn’t been limited by so much regulation. Nuclear and data centers, it’s hard to say which is more important, the water or the glass.
Now not all of these changes have been positive, and if you want to we can debate whether the good outweighs the bad. (I lean toward the good.)
And there has been a lot of hyperbole about what AI is ultimately capable of up to the belief that it could destroy the world. (I say not.)
And there are a lot of practical problems that merit a lot of caution, and I don’t like the way AI art makes everything uglier either.
But if your position is that AI has done nobody any good and nobody can explain to you how it has… I’m not even sure how to parse that. I think the most charitable explanation has to be that you’re just strawmanning, because that makes a lot more sense than the ignorance otherwise required. There are wars being fought on intelligence produced by AI, financial markets are being optimized by inputs from AI, satellites in space, computer chip factories, farming schedules, weather forecasts.
You are benefiting from AI in hundreds of small ways right now even if you don’t touch a chatbot.
If we went back five years and described this technology people would call it fantastical. It’s changing the way we understand language and thought itself, this is before we get robots and self-driving cars and satellites to blanket the earth in WiFi. The worst AI slop applications are wildly more impressive than what was thought possible even a few years ago. Science fiction.
And now that we have a miraculous machine that can turn dirt into thought we have a political movement that wants to stop this because they don’t like data centers.
Actually I don’t think that’s it at all, I think they’re just worried, with a lot of justification, and data centers are just how you attack this thing that’s changing everything.
Unfortunately, though, all that’s going to do it make this world-changing technology more expensive, and therefore rare, and therefore concentrate its power in the hands of the few.
It turns out it’s a property of math, you string enough transformers together with enough data and computers can translate into arbitrary languages and draw pictures and write code and do math. There’s not really any stopping it, the question is whether we can harness this change for good or will passively sit and let it change us for the worse. Because the genie’s not going back into the model.
Anyways, I hope that the above goes some way toward clarifying my position, which I hope is not too bloomer or too doomer. But when I hear that you can’t think of anything good to come from AI, I wonder if you’re doing yourself a disservice, because all that belief is conditioning you for is passively accepting or even resisting changes that you could actively harness to your own great good.
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