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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   23156 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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Transcending the Culture War: the Foundation of a New Polis

I wanted to share with the Motte an idea. The culture war is premised on several rarely debated foundations. Key among them is the idea that there should or must be a tug-of-war within existing Western countries.

For a long time, I have lurked the Motte, and I never questioned this premise. But recently, I have started to think outside of this box. My ultimate desire is freedom. I increasingly doubt that this can be obtained through the Culture War. Both sides have serious flaws.

What if, instead, smart people focused on a new type of state for a different type of human? Don't wage the culture war, cut through the culture war. What if instead of effective altruism 1.0, smart people embraced effective altruism 2.0, which is premised on the necessity of founding a new state which is run for and by humanity's best? Which is devoted not to war, like the United States, or equality, like Europe and China, but to human flourishing and improvement?

What would the new state look like politically? It would be a meritocracy instead of a democracy. It would be founded on science and reason instead of political formulae like equality and social justice. In particular it would take advantage of psychometrics, behavior genetics, general computing, and AI in ways that the 18th and 19th century states we have today can't.

Some might say we are out of time thanks to AI. But this idea is an important precursor to AI alignment. Current nations cannot be trusted with AI. They also barely have the capacity to build it. For example, the EU is building nothing. The United States is exploiting elite human capital who should instead be citizens of this hypothetical brilliant new nation of the future. Chinese companies are much more Chinese, but some of their EHC I believe would prefer the new city. It is quite dangerous that this polis did not already exist before AI. If we are lucky, and there is a lull in development or the exponential curve is slow enough, we could use intermediate AI to help found it.

Is it possible? I think so. Some people are working on it, and their results so far aren't bad. The worst part of this right now is the lack of good governance. It is unclear who the Network State is for. I suppose everyone eventually can form a Network State. But what about the first one?

Balaji is essentially right, I think, that it is imperative to start with an new ethnos first and then move on to land and laws. Starting with ethnos means at first gathering people who consider themselves part of a new nation. This leads me directly to implore the Motte. None of you consider yourself a citizen of a new nation. Most of you consider yourself American. Globally, most of the people I would like to see start a new nation and state consider themselves American. Consequently, the first step rhetorically is to address the pitfalls of being American. Most of these pitfalls will be the same for those who consider themselves Canadian, British, German, or a member of whatever other nation.

Is America working out for you? Do you feel fully represented by Donald Trump? How about Biden? And Obama? If Trump is your president, was Jan 6 your rebellion? If he's not your president, is your president Biden? How strongly do you identify with Kamala Harris? My point is that most of you are not represented, and yet you are taxed. The first step to breaking free is acknowledging that American citizenship is a shackle and that you are a member of a new nation of reason which will represent your interests if or when it comes to fruition.

I've already taken this step. To me, the United States is nothing more than an economic zone. Americans are foreigners. I don't like their customs. Their laws are weird and sometimes barbaric, like how they might think of laws from a nation that existed 1000 years ago.

I may be able to get rich in America, but I will never be free. Its democracy will never vote in my interests. Its people just aren't my people. My people are here, but most of you believe you are American. That means you spiritually surrender what is best for you to the desires of the median American voter.

Changing your mind requires nothing but a change of attitude. It doesn't have to be like this, and given enough time, a peaceful alternative is possible. The only next step is to exercise your freedom of speech and to spread the idea. If enough people concur, a blockchain could be founded. Then funds can be raised to buy office space as Balaji explains in The Network State. Eventually, diplomatic recognition is possible.

I don’t know if this is too post worthy, but many black activists have called the cancellation of Jason Arday and the resulting suicide a lynching. It makes me believe they don’t understand why many people found lynching to be bad.

The classic case is Emmet Till. He was accused of raping a white woman but didn’t. Less people would be worried about the irregular justice of lynch mobs if they accurately hung rapists and Till wouldn’t be martyr if he actually raped the white woman. It was his innocence that really made the lynching galling.

In the Arday context, no one argues he isn’t guilty of the charges. Instead, they claim accurately castigating Arday repeatedly for his crime is a modern day lynching. So either they believe any criticism of blacks is per se illegitimate and blacks are naturally innocent regardless of their actions or they are trying to use powerful iconography to prevent criticism of blacks. But that’s destroying their seed capital.

Emmet Till

Even back then, the media would selectively highlight certain events to make the public pattern-match for a narrative that doesn’t exist. They arbitrarily created a negative valence around “White racism”, which naturally resulted in negative valence around White people and their civilization. This is the sort of thing you can easily prove in a lab: gather a bunch of people to read something every day for a week, and variably present them with stories such that when they see the word X it is often immediately associated with something aversive or else it predicts something aversive. The former is called evaluative conditioning and it’s resilient to counter-conditioning; when the progressive college student in 2020 would scroll headlines and quickly read “White cop shoots Black woman in Chicago”, “why White privilege is worse than you think”, I mean the headlines were so over-the-top I can’t even recreate them with skill, they were essentially being brainwashed in a scientifically predictable fashion. Staats & Staats (1958) trivially conditioned positive and negative emotions onto nationality words in this way (which probably used evaluative conditioning more than Pavlovian conditioning). The problem was heightened when people trusted the news and entered a trance state when consuming the news. It’s simply that the wrong people were in charge of the media, which is effectively a conditioning device for the masses, and whoever was controlling the media really wanted to instill a reflexive dislike of White people and their things. Virtually all of the problems are downstream from media conditioning (academics also really like absorbing media and are perhaps a bit more gullible than the average bear).

[Just regarding Till specifically: if you were to go into the hood and grab the hand of someone’s girlfriend (not even wife), and then chase her to grab her waist, there’s a good chance you will be shot and killed. This was always a non-story, and note that the media would never report on the phenomena that nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim. This is because they’re not interested in telling you a horrible fact of reality, they are trying to condition you in a certain manner.]

Just regarding Till specifically: if you were to go into the hood and grab the hand of someone’s girlfriend (not even wife), and then chase her to grab her waist, there’s a good chance you will be shot and killed.

I’d argue this applied to any (White) Italian/Polish/Irish etc. ethnic enclave/neighborhood in any major American city back then.

negative valence

This is the most important phrase to know when consuming any sort of media. The facts don't matter nearly so much as, what sort of emotion are they creating around it? That will lead the public to mimic that emotion, no matter what it is.

nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim.

Note that this may simply be because rapists do, in fact, want to have sex with their victims- and white women are generally vastly more attractive than black women. It doesn't necessarily mean that blacks are more violent(there is another set of statistics you'd need to use to make that argument).

Dating website stats (like OkCupid's stats from a decade or so ago) also suggest that black women would be far more willing to have sex with a white man than white women would be willing to with a black man.

note that the media would never report on the phenomena that nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim.

The perpetrator chooses the victim. If the perpetrator chooses randomly, it is much more likely that a perpetrator in a small group would choose someone from a large group than a perpetrator in a large group would choose someone from a small group. And whites are a larger group. So it is statistically expected that cross-race rapes usually involve black perpetrators, and it does not mean that black people are more violent or more prone to rape the other race. It just means that since there are more whites, they have more oppopsite race targets.

Let the Black/White population proportions be P_B + P_W = 1, and assume groups have base rate r_B and r_W, and assume offenders victimise from the population at random (so no racial segregation, equal female sexual desirability for both races, etc)

So number of [race X] on [race Y] rapes = P_X * r_X * P_Y

So (# black on white rapes) / (# white on black rapes) = r_B / r_W

I claim this is the only reasonable reading of what @coffee_enjoyer said "nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim" and what you said "[with equal base rates] cross-race rapes [should irregardless] usually involve black perpetrators":

  • If you were given an unbiased feed of rapes and decided to focus in on the interracial cases (i.e. condition that victim race != perp race), the odds ratio you intuit will correspond to (1) - and indeed (1) should be 1 : 1 if B/W had equal rape rates (r_B / r_W = 1)
  • You guys phrase it sort of weirdly, talking about "[IR rape] involving a White female victim" and "[IR rape] involving a Black perpetrator", but once we've conditioned on the crime being interracial, both of those are the same and are referring exclusively to Black on White rape.

To be maximally charitable, I guess cross-racial ratios in isolation are not enough to say Blacks are more sexually dangerous than Whites, because White women are also more beautiful than Black women, so you should genuinely expect there to be a > 1:1 odds of an interracial rape being Black on White even with equal base rates.

Damn, are we even breaking arithmetic and/or algebra to carry water for blacks now?

Suppose 4,000 white men, 1,000 black men, with equal respective population sizes of women. Further suppose we live in a DESPITE-free alternative universe and the propensity to rape of both white and black men are the same, at 10% of the male populations being a rapist. So 400 white male rapists, 100 black male rapists.

Say each rapist only rapes once. If they choose their victims randomly, the expected number of white and black victims from the white male rapists is 320 and 80, respectively. The expected number of white and black victims from black male rapists is 80 and 20, respectively. Note that the white and black men have the same number of interracial rapes, both at 80. The greater probability of black men selecting white women based on random chance is balanced out by the greater number of white men.

However, we don’t live in such a bizarro DESPITE-free universe, so if we do observe that black-men-on-white-women rapes are more common than white-men-on-black-women rapes, that does mean that black men are more prone to committing rape than white men and/or are more likely to commit interracial rape.

Damn, are we even breaking arithmetic and/or algebra to carry water for blacks now?

FWIW I agree that @Jiro's math is nonsensical. It doesn't matter what the relative population sizes are, because a smaller population size means fewer potential rapists and fewer potential victims, which should precisely balance out (assuming even distribution of criminality and random victim selection).

that does mean that black men are more prone to committing rape than white men and/or are more likely to commit interracial rape.

Part of the issue, which came out during the Duke Lacrosse hoax, is that white on black rape is so rare as to be practically unheard of. This is a fact which causes liberals to freak out almost as much as other, more talked-about, racial disparities. And probably it's part of the reason why hoaxes like Duke Lacrosse can get so much traction.

I've heard unsourced claims that the black-white interracial rape gap is on the order of 100-1. Which seems just impossibly large. But I don't think its impossible. This is not because black people are 100x as criminal as white people. That would indeed be absurd.

Instead several individual factors combine to create an enormous disparity.

We can't only consider the differences between black and white men, we also have to consider the differences between black and white women, of which there are many. Perhaps the most salient is that the average African-American woman weighs 189 pounds. Even adjusted for weight, black women are perceived as less desirable than white women. A rapist has his choice of targets, and will choose one that he both desires and thinks is possible to subdue.

I've heard unsourced claims that the black-white interracial rape gap is on the order of 100-1. Which seems just impossibly large. But I don't think its impossible. This is not because black people are 100x as criminal as white people. That would indeed be absurd.

ven adjusted for weight, black women are perceived as less desirable than white women.

Well there are a few issues floating around. Is the disparity in crime uniform across different types of crime? (I tend to doubt it.) Is white on black rape so rare that it's difficult to get statistically significant numbers? (Possibly.) And yeah, it's very common for white men to find black women to be sexually unattractive.

That suggests that potential victims are equally distributed amongst the population. But if races are somewhat segregated, then it doesn’t follow that rape victims are randomly selected.

and it does not mean that black people are more violent or more prone to rape the other race.

Yes, it does.

Imagine a 80:20 split with equal propensity. The small group does 16 cross-group offenses and 4 in-group offenses. The large group does 16 cross-group offenses and 64 in-group offenses. The smaller target pool is perfectly balanced by the smaller perpetrator pool.

If that balance isn't maintained in reality, then why not?

I read "nearly all" to be a statement about ratios, not absolute numbers. What you (and Sloot above) said applies to absolute numbers.

Perhaps what you are trying to argue is that all things equal a larger amount of black crime would be interracial compared to white crime?

I agree that would be true as a matter of logic. As a matter of fact, though, all things are not equal.

Perhaps what you are trying to argue is that all things equal a larger amount of black crime would be interracial compared to white crime?

It seems to me that this would apply equally to both perpetration and victimization, so @Jiro 's point still doesn't make any sense.

So for example, suppose there are 100 blacks and 100,000,000 whites in society. If crime is randomly distributed, one would expect that if a black person is involved in a crime, almost certainly the other participant is white (while at the same time, if a white person is involved in a crime, almost certainly the other participant is NOT black).

But critically, this point applies equally to both black perpetrators AND black victims. So that if one looks only at interracial crimes, the ratio should still be equal.

Here's the point that was being responded to:

nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim

The argument that @Jiro made -- about relative sizes of populations -- doesn't explain this at all.

Perhaps what you are trying to argue is that all things equal a larger amount of black crime would be interracial compared to white crime?

Thank you.

I'm missing something. My model showed 16:16 total, or a 1:1 ratio. What did you mean?

Gesturing toward “nearly all” or “ratios” doesn’t salvage whatever point you were trying to make, it only further illustrates how the real world rejects the null hypothesis that black and white men are equally likely to commit rape/interracial rape.

In the hypothetical example I described—where by construction black and white men had equal propensity for rape and chose their victims randomly—the expected ratio of black-men-on-white-women to white-men-on-black-women rapes was 1:1. That is, white women were 50% of interracial rapes in the hypothetical, unlike “the [real world] phenomena that nearly all cross-race rapes between Whites and Blacks involve a White female victim” that @coffee_enjoyer mentioned.

I read "nearly all" to be a statement about ratios, not absolute numbers

Even so, your math is completely wrong. In a hypothetical world where (1) blacks and whites are equally likely to be rapists; and (2) victims are chosen at random, one would expect the ratio to be 1:1 as between black on white rape and white on black rape.

[Just regarding Till specifically: if you were to go into the hood and grab the hand of someone’s girlfriend (not even wife), and then chase her to grab her waist, there’s a good chance you will be shot and killed.

"The hood" is a social pathology that probably didn't exist in Till's time.

There were totally poor, racially segregated areas with high interpersonal violence in Till's time. That interpersonal violence is what killed him, after all.

This is only tangentially related but I remember reading the view once that Jim Crow laws in the South practically applied to the middle and upper classes only; poor Blacks and Whites were typically rural and lived in the same areas instead of being segregated.

Jim Crow was segregation of public and open-to-the-public facilities, not neighborhoods. The old joke went that a Northern racist was OK with a black man getting 'uppity' if he didn't live next door, and a Southern Racist was OK with a black man living next store so long as he didn't get 'uppity'.

I remember reading the view once that Jim Crow laws in the South practically applied to the middle and upper classes only

Exactly the same as they do now. It's almost like the "racism" was itself just laundering a certain kind of class interest.

(What benefit did white-supremacy ever bring to the average poor white? I suspect it's about as much benefit as opposite-day-white-supremacy now brings to the average poor black.)

"opposite-day-white-supremacy"?

Yeah, the every-other-supremacy thing progressives do, in the standard "reversed stupidity is intelligence" way.

I'm pretty sure economically depressed high violence slums have been around as long as human history, even if the current ones have particular racial connotations and drugs involved.

I think "the hood" as it exists today is a product of the Great Migration and later the crack epidemic. Till himself may have come from "the hood" (he was from Chicago), but he wasn't killed there, but rather rural Mississippi.

I mean sure but 'area with poor people who have lower standards for violent retribution' is like most of human history.

And how often do you hear about blacks killing other blacks today, in the hood, over disputes about their girlfriends being mildly sexually assaulted? How often do you hear about an all-black jury letting a violent offender go free? When the academic studies came out showing that black juries discriminate against white defendants and vice versa doesn’t happen, did you even read that anywhere? Was it reported nationally by NYT? In any case, in 1955 the black homicide rate was 10x higher than the White, and if you looked at how they lived you’d probably categorize it as a ghetto colloquially.

The idea that the American mainstream media in 1955 was trying to indoctrinate people in some sort of anti-white feeling is so evidently ludicrous that it ought to cause you to doubt everything else in coffee_enjoyer's post.

  • -11

It's not called the "long march through the institutions" for nothing.

There were already communist influences in the press and investigations on this in 1955, the NYTimes alone getting dozens of subpoenas, the same newspaper that immediately started reporting on Till:

https://time.com/archive/6799287/the-press-eastland-v-the-times/

Communists in 1955 had specific plans to agitate about the Emmet Till case:

https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/online-documents/civil-rights-emmett-till-case/1955-11-22-hoover-to-anderson.pdf

https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/online-documents/civil-rights-emmett-till-case/1955-09-29-memo-re-lynching.pdf

Their plan in 1954 was to agitate Blacks against the anti-communists: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/political-affairs/1954-10-33-10-political-affairs.pdf

Literal communists in 1955:

Negro press have sounded the alarm. If this important struggle is to be won, however, the Communist Party, and the American Left, in the first place, must be fully mobilized

Now, in 1955, it’s possible that their explicit intention was not to be anti-white as much as to rile up Blacks in a way that makes them hate White people. But who knows?

This is a bait-and-switch. You posited a specifically anti-white agenda, and now you're presenting evidence that communists supported the case.

But obviously communism is a different issue to anti-whiteness.

You posited a specifically anti-white agenda, and now you're presenting evidence that communists supported the case.

Are you assuming that communists can only pursue one agenda: communism? I'm not seeing a logical problem with communists stirring up anti-white sentiment. That goes double if we're talking about members/supporters of a specific political party instead of believers in the ideology.

That's not what he said. His argument is that they were trying to indoctrinate people against white racism and the indoctrination escaped containment over the years and ended up becoming indoctrination against whiteness.

If so, it's a bit odd that he immeditely bit the bullet, isn't it?

In the Arday context, no one argues he isn’t guilty of the charges. Instead, they claim accurately castigating Arday repeatedly for his crime is a modern day lynching.

Who is "they" here? Like two influencers posting rage bait? Or was there a poll done where 40% of progressives say this was a lynching?

Who is "they" here? Like two influencers posting rage bait?

I'm sure you're playing dumb on purpose to obfuscate the issue, but the recent vigil held for Arday in London included literal members of Parliament and the House of Lords as well as highly placed academics calling his death a lynching or the result of a witch hunt.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/diane-abbott-cambridge-mps-london-people-b1293737.html

As he addressed the crowd, Lord Woolley described the press coverage of Prof Arday as a “public execution” and a “lynching”, to cheers of approval.

I'm sure you're playing dumb on purpose to obfuscate the issue

Thanks for providing the context but this barb is unnecessary.

My bad if I read your post wrong - I assumed it was a loaded question.

I'm no longer convinced the words "racism", "white supremacy", "sexism", "misogyny", "Islamophobia", "homophobia", "transphobia", "hate", "fascism", "far-right", "genocide" and "lynching" mean anything at all.

It's just spoils and figleaf justifications for them.

Progressives have as many words for "blasphemy" as Eskimo have for "snow".

It's kind of understandable considering their environments. Both groups have so many words that describe the same thing, because if they didn't, it would be much harder for them to extract resources from their respective environments and thus stay alive.

I've heard that eskimos don't actually have many words for snow, but then, it was a progressive who was insisting, so?

Northerners do have a lot of words for it, I can think of sleet, fresh powder, black ice and permafrost off the top of my head.

Ah, my linguistics undergraduate degree is finally useful.

Almost all claims of "Such-and-such language has a hundred words for (culturally important concept)" are false/exaggerated. It's not specifically a progressive thing. More like "This makes for a nice anecdote" which gets blown up into a bit of a tall tale. In Eskimo languages, for example (and indeed in most languages concentrated in far northern climes) there are lots of phrases to describe various snow and ice conditions in useful ways, but they do not literally have a hundred different words for minute differences between types of snow.

As a Canadian who regularly deals with snow, I can absolutely believe this.

First of all, there's powder snow, the kind that skiers love. But if you've ever tried to make a snowman with it, you realize that it doesn't stick together well - it's too 'dry', and doesn't clump.

Then there's your building snow, which is wet enough to clump but dry enough to handle, and feels kind of like rolling a very large cotton ball. You can actually make an igloo out of this stuff: it's solid enough to be worked with wooden tools and can be pulled away and shaped into cubes.

Then there's wet snow, which is soaked through and difficult to work with. It will freeze solid overnight and be unworkable, but you can walk on top of it.

Then there's the well-layered snow, which the accumulated and undisturbed pilings of at least a week. At the bottom is a layer that has been compressed by the weight above it, so it's safe to step on, but you'll leave a trail. Mice can live here.

Then there's compacted snow, run over by cars: it's almost as hard as ice, and often has rocks or pebbles or other detritus in it.

...and that's just off the top of my head, living as a sheltered urbanite. Inuit doubtlessly have far more fine distinctions, working with it as both building material and environmental obstacle.

As I understand it, they describe different types of snow, different conditions and modifiers.

It's all the same substance being talked about. The substance of "racism" and "sexism"- that being "blasphemy"- is the same.

Now sure, you might say that snow is real and blasphemy is all made up. But like all religions, it's real to the people handing out the money, just as nature provides food (provided you can navigate to it, which is what the snow words are for).

As a coastal Californian, I'm not sure this alleged snow thing exists. Blasphemy, on the other hand, is very real and even omnipresent.

Don't forget "accountability."

Accountability is just punishment. The definition has never changed, even if the targets and justifications have.

Yes, everyone's for "accountability" (for other people) but no one wants to be "held to account".

Black activists will compare everything to lynching. So it is safe to ignore them. Same with ADL and SPLC.

It may be safe to ignore their statements if all you care about is finding the truth, but from a practical political standpoint I'm not so sure they can be safely ignored.

I would he interested in seeing a principled defense of why what happened to Arday was a "lynching" whereas the constant hate for Rowling is not, that doesn't try to define it as "only being lynching if it happens to someone of colour."

The principled defense goes something like this: Arday was an extraordinary person who was overly scrutinized for being black. Sure he embellished his achievements and did some light academic misconduct, but not any more than any other successful white person. If you think he doesn't deserve to be a Cambridge professor you clearly haven't met any other Cambridge professors or are a racist. The scrutiny and hatred directed at him for invading a white space was over the top and led to his discrediting, resignation and suicide. He was just guy dealt a tough hand in life who succeeded despite adversity and it made some racists absolutely crazy.

Rowling on the other hand succeeded despite adversity as well, but then after becoming a famous white billionaire, used her position to punch down against a persecuted minority group. She is justly being attacked but is still alive and a billionaire so you can't even complain.

(btw black Cambridge professors exist but why let that get in the way of a story)

Rowling is also at least somewhat guilty. While she is not committing genocide on trans people, she is an anti-trans activist who uses her money to help fund feminist organizations which push for anti-trans laws. That is, laws that don't consider trans-women equal to born women. In the eyes of the far left, this is enough to deserve having her life ruined. So from their POV, this is all fine and deserved. "Lynching" is reserved for situations where this is not the case.

I have seen it unironically repeated on social media, and taken as Gospel, that "Rowling is paying for trans people to be killed".

So excuse me if I don't swallow the "anti-trans activist pushing for anti-trans laws" stuff. That seems to be "unrepentantly holds that chick with a dick is not the same as cis woman, shouldn't be in cis female spaces, how very dare she not grovel before us".

Rowling is fortunate in that she has enough money to not give a damn about all the little foot-stomping tantrums and cancellation efforts, and the vast majority of people who heard of Harry Potter don't know or care about her alleged trans genocide hobby. Other people are not so fortunate, ask the women sued by Jessica Yaniv in Canada back when this whole snowball started rolling down the hill, when Yaniv tried to weaponise the Canadian human rights apparatus to serve what they hoped would be a profitable little con (until reality caught up with them and the bureaucrats). And even then, an activist lawyer was happy to pop up with "Yaniv was badly advised" not "Yaniv is a mentally ill individual dragging down real trans people":

During the hearings, Yaniv was on social media commenting on the case and making racist remarks against immigrants, things any lawyer would have prevented Yaniv from doing, says Smith. Smith also says, as waxing services are important to trans women, the community would had been better served had a different waxing case been put forward. The case had “unfortunate facts,” was “poorly thought out” and Yaniv wasn’t advised on how to behave properly, they say.

"Rowling is paying for trans people to be killed"

This is based on a very creative interpretation of her actions. She gives money to organizations ran by TERFs. Those organizations push for anti-trans laws and stigmatize being trans. This then legitimizes discrimination against trans people, which makes them more likely targets for violence. Thus, by this line of thinking, Rowling is indirectly causing trans people to be killed.

While the final conclusion is certainly a stretch, the thing that leftists want her punished for is supporting anti-trans legislation. This is something she actually does. The trans murder thing is stretching the truth in order to garner public support.

It's still a stretch, though. The "anti-trans" legislation she pushes for is generally "Trans women cannot be housed in women's prisons, trans women cannot demand to be taken in at women's shelters, trans women should not compete with men in women's sports," etc. That's "anti-trans" in the sense that it denies trans people the right to have everything they want (being considered 100% the sex they say they are in every context), but it's phrased as if this "anti-trans" legislation is meant to literally cause them harm or deny them their civil rights, like people are trying to pass bills making it illegal to be trans. Rowling (and to my knowledge, all so-called TERF organizations) has never tried to deny trans people the right to call themselves trans and live as their self-identified gender.

But isn't some of the complaint that even aside from plagiarism and outright lies, Arday's actual function was to be the guy who gave cover for the "destroy whiteness" or "Britain has always had black people" lines of thought that make it harder for anti-immigration people and white Britons to remain equal in their own society?

Was that his actual function? His papers were mostly qualitative claims about black people facing discrimination in higher education. Although that's a cousin of more radical racial claims, it's also unambiguously softer and provides no evidence for them.

My take on his function is more cynical: no one expected his research output to convince anyone of anything, inside or outside the field. His function was to be a kind of totem for white academics to dance around and prostrate themselves before. His work could be revolutionary or completely derivative, well-argued or drivel, original or entirely plagiarized: none of that mattered. He probably didn't even need to write any papers at all; Cofnas may have been the first person to give his papers a close reading. His role was to be the Black Cambridge Professor, nothing more and nothing less.

And a totem itself has a lifecycle, and its fall isn't something to be mourned, for it creates the chance for new revelries and festivals to strengthen community bonds.

I mean, strictly speaking, Rowling didn't die, so it wouldn't count as a lynching, so a principled steelman isn't that difficult.

However, I doubt that if hypothetically Rowling were to commit suicide, anyone would call that a lynching.

It's not like anyone called the death of Jeffrey Epstein a lynching.

It isn’t even purely about race. If someone kidnapped and hanged Clarence Thomas, many of the people who are currently crying about the lynching of Arday would be downright jubilant. As Sloot said, it’s all who/whom.

Who/whom; it’s like talking about doxxing men vs. women or “are we dating the same man?” groups vs. the inverse.

Rowling was being held accountable; Arday was being harassed and threatened.

Something something JK Rowling "preached hate" against a vulnerable minority group, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences blah blah blah

no one argues he isn’t guilty of the charges

Many do, in fact, argue he isn't guilty of the charges. I've spent long hours remonstrating with these people, but they refuse to listen.

One example:

Arday’s grad-school alma mater, Liverpool John Moores University, which first received direct complaints about the dissertation last fall, did its own investigation and cleared Arday of wrongdoing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/jason-arday-cambridge-academic-memoir-resignation/688206/

IRL or online?

That’s no longer a distinction worth anything - the online discourse becomes mainstream in months.

Online, certainly. The only people I've spoken to about it in person have been people who agreed with me that he was a fraud, or people who'd never heard of the case before. On Substack I've been videos of people giving public speeches insisting he'd been falsely accused of plagiarism.

Can you ping your online correspondents and ask them why Arday was singled out for lynching while Cambridge has other black professors who seem to have perfectly normal academic careers?

Oh I have, believe me.

I mean plenty of people in the Western system will still be anti-lynching without due process even if somebody is clearly guilty/literally caught in the act.

Sure but that’s primarily because they are concerned that the lunch mob will “get it wrong.” That is, it is a prudential concern.

I don’t know if this is too post worthy

The bar for what’s worthy of a top post can be quite low when it comes to effort and erudtion, so based on recent precedent you should be in the clear.

So either they believe any criticism of blacks is per se illegitimate and blacks are naturally innocent regardless of their actions

first_time.jpg?

They are indeed taking the usual route of claiming that Arday was a good boy who did not do nothing. Until one day, a Nazi pseudoscientist went on a witchhunt and sicced an angry racist mob upon him.

My understanding is that the thing that made the Emmet Till case bad was that we will never know if he did or didn't do the thing, and that is because he was denied due process of law, and that is the principle problem with vigilante justice.

Now accusing a prominent liar of lying is not vigilante justice.

My understanding is that the thing that made the Emmet Till case bad was that we will never know if he did or didn't do the thing, and that is because he was denied due process of law, and that is the principle problem with vigilante justice.

This is a distinctly right-wing, anti-democratic, and western-chauvinist view of the case which is of course "the problem".

That’s not why lynching was bad though. Most people who were lynched were guilty of atrocious crimes. Lynching is bad because it denies due process rights. Of course that has nothing to do with Arday.

That’s not why lynching was bad though.

Lynching is bad because it denies due process rights.

The point of due process is not to have due process; "due process rights" are a particular way of achieving other ends, not an end in themselves. The primary purpose of due process rights is that due process is more likely to get it right than summary justice. Hence, your attempted distinction collapses; due process reduces to (probabilistic) correctness.

Lynching does have an additional problem, unrelated to due process, which is that it is not canonical. That is, a lynchmob does not need a monopoly on force, which means that there can be multiple lynchmobs in the same area enforcing different standards, which has a tendency to get a lot of people killed unnecessarily (with or without a slide into civil war). But this isn't related to due process; a monarch who rules by fiat is not engaging in "due process" any more than a lynchmob is, but his capricious declarations are nonetheless canonical.

Yes, you are right. Due process is not an end in itself. But it creates a sense of fairness which allows its decisions to be accepted by the mob, and sometimes even by clan of the guilty party as well (YMMV). This goes beyond just being "canonical". The diktats of a dictator are canonical, but they are not necessarily believed to be fair.

A good system of justice is one that

A) arrives at the correct outcome but also B) maintains the appearance of fairness

A is more important than B, but B is nonetheless important. Lynch mobs failed at B even if they got A right most of the time. And, as you point out, there is also the further problem of not having a canonical decision.

The classic case is Emmet Till. He was accused of raping a white woman but didn’t.

That's not my understanding of that specific case; my understanding is that he was accused of sexually harassing a white woman and it's disputed whether he did or not (some claim that the accuser admitted years later to making it up, but this claim itself seems to have been fabricated) but it doesn't matter much because it's not an offense that anyone sane thinks merits capital punishment.

You are right! Somehow I had always heard it as rape whereas it seems he was accused of sexual harassment. I also had heard the alleged victim recanted which appears spurious.

I guess at minimum it seems Till’s guilt was uncertain and the punishment didn’t meet the potential crime.

Arday being pushed out of Cambridge for his academic crimes was entirely proportionate AND proven. So again, radically different from Till.

IIRC it was Emmet Till's father Louis who was executed for rape/murder of Italian civilians during WWII.

There is an entire Wiki article on him.

I don’t mean to laugh - but I did laugh reading your post.

I’ve always sort of known history is ‘ fake ‘ but the more I know, the more fake it becomes.

Out of curiosity, what about the post you're responding to has prompted your response here? Do you doubt its veracity? Or is it that this is new information to you and you feel it has been previously hidden from you, and thus a narrative of some sort has been thrust upon you regarding something about Till's history without your having the facts?

New fact … I always had a thought that anything that happened yesterday is a myth. The longer ago it was from right this second, the less true anything about it becomes.

Add in importance of any kind and the more important it was the less factual information about it can be trusted.

What I learned about the Till case in school and what I’ve grown to know about it is maybe not earth shattering but it’s another data point on a long list of ‘ history isn’t real ‘ data points.

But a myth is different from a lie, or a vacuum. You wouldn't, presumably, argue that nothing at all happened yesterday. My point is that it may not be particularly helpful (or, indeed, possible) to wave away anything not immediately historically verifiable (by whatever means would be satisfying, and I use this term 'historically verifiable' to substitute for your word true. Not that I have an issue with the word true but because its meaning is fluid unless we mean factual and not subject to interpretation. In other words fact vs narrative--and nor am I saying narrative is a dirty word ). Nor is it constructive to dismiss myth as irrelevant (or outright harmful) to the living of life.

I sympathize with your general point regarding the bona fides of a lot of what many of us were taught as facts in school.

Also, lynching people is wrong even if they did do something that deserved the death penalty. It deprives the lynched of due process, it is true, but it also deprives the injured of having their injury validated and redressed. Lynchings forever throw doubt on the validity of the victim's injury.

I will entertain arguments for vigilante justice in a circumstances where there is no lawful way to achieve redress but that wasn't the case with Till (and really the vast majority of vigilante justice) so there's no point in reaching that argument at all.

Also, lynching people is wrong even if they did do something that deserved the death penalty. It deprives the lynched of due process, it is true, but it also deprives the injured of having their injury validated and redressed. Lynchings forever throw doubt on the validity of the victim's injury.

I won't comment on lynchings in the South specifically since that has a bunch of complicated factors, but when it comes to vigilante justice generally, it's one of the places where I agree with Hlynka that there is a "Leviathan-shaped hole". If the state shows itself consistently unable or unwilling to enforce order, then they no longer have the right to rule, and the right to power falls to whoever can and will enforce it. The "consistently" part here being key, even the best rulers will make occasional mistakes or have occasional failures, and I would not find vigilante justice justified here.

This is why things like two tier policing, revolving doors in the courthouse where a judge lets a career criminal out on bond for the 50th time, etc. are so dangerous. They undermine the legitimacy of the current state, and give greater legitimacy to any challengers, whether lone vigilantes or more organized opposition.

If the state shows itself consistently unable or unwilling to enforce order, then they no longer have the right to rule, and the right to power falls to whoever can and will enforce it.

Right, I think this would be a case where "there is no lawful way to achieve redress" and in the extremity you describe there is arguably a duty to enforce justice and create a new justice system with other people of goodwill who share your moral commitments.

They undermine the legitimacy of the current state, and give greater legitimacy to any challengers, wherher lone vigilantes or more organized opposition.

Yes, I 100% agree. A very underrated argument for harsh criminal penalties is precisely so that those who would take matters into their own hands feel no need to do so.

I will entertain arguments for vigilante justice in a circumstances where there is no lawful way to achieve redress

I lean towards supporting vigilante justice only in cases where the vigilante then turns themselves in and pleads guilty to a hostile court. If you believe an injustice has been done and must be redressed outside of the law, very well, but it must then end with justice done within the law, to its fullest extent.

Still gameable, and still has issues, but better than many alternatives.

I lean towards supporting vigilante justice only in cases where the vigilante then turns themselves in and pleads guilty to a hostile court.

"Why, Gary? Gary, why?"

Honestly as a case I have mixed feelings about it, but I'm not convinced Gary was completely in the wrong.

Gary Plauche didn't give the law a chance. If we suppose some counterfactual where Douchet was guilty as hell but the court lets him off because the judge has a soft spot for child molesters, it would make no sense to condition the morality of similar vigilante action on subjecting oneself to the (counterfactual) child-molestor-loving legal system.

To be fair, Plauche’s own statements characterize it entirely as an emotional reaction of a wronged father, and he never tried to make the argument that it was about the insufficiency of the justice system.

Gary is a "there but for the grace of God go I" situation. What he did was in clear contravention of the law. Philosophically, I accept that the state is supposed to have a monopoly on legitimate use of force, extreme circumstances excepted (which does not describe Gary's circumstances). Does the foregoing mean I wouldn't have done the exact same thing in his shoes? Sadly, I don't think so.

I lean towards supporting vigilante justice only in cases where the vigilante then turns themselves in and pleads guilty to a hostile court.

This is just self-sabotaging. If vigilante justice is the right thing to do, then it is also right that the vigilante not be punished for it.

Thinking about it, maybe there should be a difference between breaking a law that is itself unjust (or imposed in an unjust manner), which should face no punishment, and breaking a just law in service of some other cause, which should face punishment. Activists blocking traffic don't claim that laws against blocking traffic are a bad thing, or even that the government selectively prosecutes traffic blockers.

This is just self-sabotaging. If vigilante justice is the right thing to do, then it is also right that the vigilante not be punished for it.

I disagree. I think that it is possible for an act to be both "necessary" and "evil", and that an act being "justified" or "understandable" does not necessarily make it "good".

Which, in fact, is one of the central tropes associated with vigilantism in fiction. The violent man who has no place in the peaceful world his violence creates. The book has to end with Shane riding away. Regardless of his heroism, once the dirty work is done, he cannot remain in the valley.

For obvious reasons "well I needed to break the law to achieve the greater good" is a massive slippery slope. I have an easier time believing that the claim is genuine if the person making it is willing to face the music afterwards, and it puts some sandpaper on the slide, too.

I have an easier time believing that the claim is genuine if the person making it is willing to face the music afterwards, and it puts some sandpaper on the slide, too.

The State that would make vigilantism justifiable is the State that would brutally punish the vigilante regardless of the merit of their claim. The common term for this is "anarcho-tyranny".

The logic I am talking about here also applies to state officials who would seek to break the law in the course of their duties to achieve some greater good, which is an issue ~everywhere.

In the logic I'm talking about they are not breaking the law. They are applying it selectively and vindictively. The lowlife murdering rapist is not a challenge to State Power the way a vigilante is. Your logic would hold if the failure to punish criminals were the result of a loss of state capacity. What we're actually suffering IRL is a loss of state will to punish lowlife criminals precisely because they are lowlife criminals. And also racism, etc.

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If it is the right thing to do there should be no music to face. "You can be a vigilante as long as you're willing to be punished by the very state which made your vigilante actions advisable in the first place" is just a long winded way of saying "You can't be a vigilante".

Have you never seen a western? The hero outlaw who dies and/or turns himself in at the end is a pretty classic trope. The vigilante almost never gets to ride off into the sunset. His role is to offer himself as a moral sacrifice on the alter of innocence and civilization. We love the vigilante as a romantic hero, but his story always ends in tragic sacrifice.

Being a vigilante is really fucking cool and sometimes civilizationally necessary, but you don't get a happy ending. That's always been the deal.

Part of that may have been due to the Hays Code....

Have you never seen a western? The hero outlaw who dies and/or turns himself in at the end is a pretty classic trope.

It is, but I claim it is wrong and broken. It is a trope championed in morality plays by a civilized world as a bulwark against vigilantes, and it has no place in a world where vigilantism is actually necessary.

We love the vigilante as a romantic hero, but his story always ends in tragic sacrifice

I would say that's a very culturally contingent reading. How many Batman comics end up with Bruce Wayne asking to be arrested? What about the murderer in the Christie's Orient Express? At the end of the Count of Monte Christo the count gets most but not all of his revenge and goes off east to live in happiness with his cute ex-slavegirl.

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If it is the right thing to do there should be no music to face.

And this is where where David Friedman and Victor Davis Hanson would tell you that there is always music to face.

I'm not familiar with that particular claim from either one. I present as a counterpoint the Battle of Athens. Long story short, a bunch of military veterans disrupted the stealing of an election (by the inumbent machine) by force (including explosives). They won the election and did not take their punishment for the violence in the end.

"You can't be a vigilante."

Well...yeah. You're not supposed to be a vigilante. If you're allowed to do that stuff you're definitionally not a vigilante.

not supposed

That heavily depends on who's doing the supposing, and why.

For instance, I lend zero credence to people who "not suppose" me when they're under conditions of extreme moral hazard, like how I'm "not supposed" to defend myself if the criminal attacking me is a particular color.

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There are, in fact, some who argue that he isn't guilty of the charges, though possibly this is state-supported trolling.

I believe that they believe BOTH that "any criticism of blacks is per se illegitimate" AND that "they are trying to use powerful iconography to prevent criticism of blacks". (probably a few believe "blacks are naturally innocent regardless of their actions" as well). I don't see how this is destroying their "seed capital" though; their argument amounts to yelling "SLAVERY! LYNCHING! JIM CROW!" over and over until their opponents yield or are destroyed, and none of those things will go away.

ETA: Here's a New England Journal of Medicine contributor also supporting Arday's innocense, at least partly (he claims he doesn't care if Arday is innocent, but...): "Besides making the point that his Ph.D. advisor and the university cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations"

Hmm, the first linked thing dug up an article from a real local Bri'ish newspaper dated something 2010 about the guy's intention to do the marathon thing.

I fed the url of that to the Wayback Machine and the first snapshot is from, like, three days ago, which is suspicious.

But then, I don't know what' the Internet Archive's policy for which pages they snapshot and it seems, uh, implausible that some random irrelevant publication would falsify their records to stick it to the chuds.

But then the article has a quote: "He will be setting off on Monday, July 19, and is aiming to complete each marathon in less than six hours." Which means he'd be running them at a rather casual jogging pace. Maybe doing ~40 km per day like that isn't some kind of implausible superhuman achievement.

But the leg fracture thing still sounds like bullshit.

And the article also has this amazing quote in it:

To prepare for the race Mr Arday, who is also studying for a master’s degree in physical education, has been training hard for five months, running 12 miles a day from 4am to 6am and 10pm until midnight, fitting in a strict routine around his teaching and studying.

Yeah, I think gettting less than 4 hours of sleep per day while running a daily marathon split into two parts for several months would be an implausibly superhuman achievement.

So perhaps some of Arday's claims weren't completely made up, but significantly embellished.

(And none of this matters with regards to the plagiarism accusations and the fact that he got kicked out which probably wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a there there.)

Yeah, I think gettting less than 4 hours of sleep per day while running a daily marathon split into two parts for several months would be an implausibly superhuman achievement.

I once knew someone who only required 2-3 hours of sleep per night to function perfectly.

Of course, she was a project manager who was the sort to literally make a schedule space for "spontaneity" when on vacation, and as far as I could tell not very physically active, so I don't know if the physcial part of a body has different sleep/rest requirements than the mental.

though possibly this is state-supported trolling.

Didn't MEE also claim Israel was evaporating the bodies of civilians so they couldn't be counted?

Long time listener, first time caller.

The war on AI datacenters (and normal ones as a bit of collateral damage) has been going on for a little while now, with those opposed fiercely fighting a lot of these projects pretty much wherever, whenever. It seems to be one of the most bipartisan issues facing the country right now and those who are pro-datacenter have been effectively politically slaughtered. As of a few days ago though, there seems to have been a small little flash point in the thing. I haven't really seen a thread here about this (although definitely could have missed one), and I'm actually a little surprised at it since I do think this is probably one of the biggest culture wars in America of this year. Anyway, curious thoughts on this, etc

From what I can tell, the flashpoint was yesterday when Axios reported (and later posted) a letter from the Ohio RNC to AI companies effectively calling being pro-datacenter politically radioactive. It kinda exploded at this point over Twitter and later Greg Abbott put a thing out about it yesterday after enacting a pause earlier this month. Basically the only one who didn't respond in a politically obvious way was Trump in a presser who was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country

The reaction to these things are incredibly understandable. Their argument effectively goes "they use our water and electricity, provide a service to enhance the surveillance state and the interests of Big Tech, their proponents openly admit that they're gonna take your job, they bully communities, and they don't even pay taxes either, all the while poisoning the communities they leech on with pollution and noise." Personally, I'm honestly quite surprised that political radioactivity is the biggest thing that has happened so far. This seems to be an issue that unites people regardless of political party or affiliation...

Prescott a conservative, soft-spoken retired US Bank executive, and Sarah a vivacious and slightly distractible environmental advocate in a neon pink dress [...]

...probably because it's being correctly seen as a existential threat to people's lives and livelihoods. Polling against datacenter construction is incredibly poor, arguably being worse than coal or nuclear power plants (yeah I know, different surveys). I think this, if I were to pin a spark on this (there are many), it's the story of the Memphis xAI datacenter and also the lawsuits against Solon Township to effectively bully them into allowing the project. Communities, seeing what happened there and politically, have somewhat backtracked quite a bit where before they were much more open to it. Some of those that haven't are proactively enacting outright bans

If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.

Both Altman and Amodei screwed up public perception big time, although I don't think it's 100% their fault. I imagine though this is basically because they're put in a double bind. If it isn't absolutely economy ending for every other company, the trillions pumped into their valuation will vaporize faster than you can say "AGI," but people tend to believe (correctly so) when someone threatens them (and have especially checkered pasts as both these guys do), that their threats are genuine, so when those PR puff pieces trickle down to the public at large.

The All In guys have tried to pin this on Amodei in particular, but I think some people just see that as them talking their book

They've tried to label the opposition as "China," but that clearly doesn't make much sense given that the problems are genuine. Cremieux has tried to take up the mantle on the issue, but I think people see his arguments are seen as specious and as relying on theoreticals that don't match observations on the ground, and this has I think backfired

Expect to see more bans and moratoriums happening across the country. Will be interesting to watch. Thoughts?

In my view, the fundamental mistake that was made and is continuing to be made by the American tech elite, and more broadly the Western neoliberal project, is holding the belief that we live in an age where ideology is no longer consequential, an era commanded solely by capital. Muslim asylum seekers will become Western liberals because we will make the Muslims rich, Russia will liberalise because Europe will make the Russians rich, China will liberalise because America will make the Chinese rich; in the real world, asylum seekers remain unassimilated, Russia invades Ukraine, and China has designs on Taiwan not because any of this makes any economic sense, but because of the might of the ideologies held by the ummah, Putinists and Chinese nationalists.

Similarly, a lot of tech elites have a post-ideology view that as long as the proles are tossed a wad of cash, they'll be allowed to do as they please; in essence, that Americans will become Western liberals because Silicon Valley will make Americans rich. In the real world, people care about things like "dignity" and "long-term benefit", and fundamentally, Americans do not believe that data-centres, and the goals of big tech and big AI, are aligned with their wellbeing and prosperity (frankly correctly, in many cases), and are not willing to be bought off by those they perceive as their enemies; complaining about object-level inaccuracies like water use or electricity is simply missing the broader point that there is no trust and no belief that data centres will benefit Americans.

It is informative, I think, to compare the attitudes of the median Chinese vs the median American on the topic of AI. While perhaps apprehensive of great changes unseen in a century, the median Chinese person believes that they are governed by those who work for the benefit of China, and that the power of technology and AI is and will be harnessed for the benefit of the people. Chinese model labs don't boast about how they're going to make everyone unemployed, or how they, and by proxy lab shareholders, are going to rule the world; Liang Wenfeng instead talks, very reasonably, about how his aim is to make a restrained profit, and how the benefits of AGI are going to accrue to society.

To be clear: I, myself, am pro data-centre, because my belief is that the best way to improve aggregate human wellbeing is unceasing development of the productive forces, and that this development is going to require building out compute to support AI and robotics. For others, it is easy to sneer at the idiocy of the proles, as @aqouta does, or believe that the outcome is overdetermined by economic forces, and that the proles will inevitably be swept aside, as @DaseindustriesLtd does.

I find these views to be somewhat shortsighted; a study of history shows clearly that people prioritize their ideological interests over their rational economic interests, and that when ideology and capital clash, ideology often comes out triumphant, at the expense of the interests of capital. Did it make economic sense for Venezuela to nationalise their oil fields and plunge the formerly richest Latin American country into poverty? Did it make economic sense for the finest across two generations of European men to die horribly across Verdun, Stalingrad and Normandy during the World Wars?

It's crucial to contextualize that all of this backlash is happening while the misery index (unemployment + inflation) is essentially completely unaffected by AI. If, or when, this begins to change, and the backlash against data centres, and more broadly against Silicon Valley and AI, continues to intensify, I think it is not unlikely that a truly bi-partisan, populist, degrowth ideology begins to consume American politics. One could imagine a scenario where the Dems take the White House in 2028, crush Musk and the broader American AI industry with the power of the state, and enforce a neo-luddite Fortress America defended by two oceans and the strategic nuclear triad.

Does this vision make any economic sense? Not at all.

Is this sustainable as a long term vision for America? Not at all; Americans never learned the lessons that the century of humiliation engraved into the Chinese psyche.

The trap is believing it matters at all whether such a vision makes economic sense. At a certain breaking point it no longer matters, the people will try and lash out however they can against those they believe to be their ideological enemies, and while a single drop of water has no power and holds no threat, no human technology is yet able to stop a tsunami. I think it is extraordinarily important, for all our sakes, that big tech and the frontier AI labs realise that they have lost the mandate of heaven instead of acting as if though they are no longer a part of society, and sincerely take steps to rectify this before it is forced upon them by the state and by the people, and we all become much worse off for it.

For others, it is easy to sneer at the idiocy of the proles, as @aqouta does, or believe that the outcome is overdetermined by economic forces, and that the proles will inevitably be swept aside, as @DaseindustriesLtd does.

I find these views to be somewhat shortsighted; a study of history shows clearly that people prioritize their ideological interests over their rational economic interests, and that when ideology and capital clash, ideology often comes out triumphant, at the expense of the interests of capital

To be more precise, I don't think proles will be necessarily swept aside. This is one option, but it's a costly one. I strongly believe that the total DC buildout will reach hundreds of gigawatts within 10 years, and most DCs on the planet in the next years will be built by the US, at scale that's mostly constrained by supply chain bottlenecks and not popular goodwill. Some "proles" will be convinced of your more Chinese vision of the return on this investment, or grow pacified from actually using AI and seeing its utility. Others will be compensated more or less directly. Others still will just be left alone with GPUs going anywhere else, even to the orbit. There's too much money at stake, and too many routes around the problem. It will work out.

By the way, Liang Wenfeng doesn't preach "restraint" as some aesthetic principle. His argument (in that leaked and scrubbed investor call) is more like yours, and it's informed by anxiety about political pressure:

First, there’s the vision. Second, we believe that to make AI commercially successful, open source is beneficial. That sounds a bit contradictory and counterintuitive, because historically open source and commercialization have conflicted. But I think AI is different.

Historically, a software company’s market might be several billion dollars a year. Take away open source, and that market might shrink to tens or hundreds of millions. But AI is big enough that it may eventually account for, say, ten percent of human society’s GDP. That’s an enormous number.

You cannot monopolize something like that. You have to share it with others, or you will definitely not survive. This is different from open-sourcing a piece of software before, because that software’s market was not that big. But AI is simply too large. If we wanted to keep all the benefits for ourselves, history would surely abandon us. I think the main thing is that this is an objective law — it’s a view of history.

It’s not that if I don’t open source, I will monopolize this market. Theoretically, that already goes against objective reality. You will run into tremendous resistance, and there will always be other ways to stop you from reaching that goal. In that situation, I don’t think you should necessarily follow traditional commercial thinking. You need a mechanism that guarantees the benefits you get are limited. Only then can you actually succeed. You need restraint. I think you need restraint.

If we want to make AI happen with our own hands, the first thing is restraint. You can’t think, “This or that percentage of humanity’s GDP is mine,” or “This percentage of China’s GDP is mine.” The more you think that way, the less likely you are to succeed.

… Otherwise, you cannot explain how we succeeded. We had no weapons, a very low starting point, very few resources, and our people are just a random group of ordinary people. I myself am just a university graduate, and not from a top university. This restraint is also part of our vision. AI is too big. The benefits are too big.

I believe Liang is a visionary. He's presciently correct on most issues, and he'll likely be recognized as correct on this one too. Anthropic already faces some political and commercial backlash. So deals will be cut.

Of note, his employees do worry about job replacement:

Asked about DeepSeek's global success and how its open-source approach would encourage the progress of AI, Chen said he believed that AI could be a great aid to humans as it improved over the short term, but that it could threaten job losses in 5-10 years as it becomes good enough to take over some of the work humans perform. AI firms needed to be aware of these risks, he said.
"In the next 10-20 years, AI could take over the rest of work (humans perform) and society could face a massive challenge, so at the time tech companies need to take the role of 'defender'," he said.
"I'm extremely positive about the technology but I view the impact it could have on society negatively."

Deli is often representing DeepSeek publicly so you can consider this a company position, I think. In my opinion this is understated, even taking into account China's compute scarcity and marginally lesser dependence on white collar employment. They'll have to figure out how to not monopolize the benefits, it's not just a pricing or distribution decision.

Well, isn't it convenient how unlike the others, every time the USG does something for ideological reasons, it happens to make economic sense too. If we invade Cuba, they (and we) are actually better off!

More concretely, I think many ideological opponents would rightly charge that orthogonally to any questions whether the USG's ideology is actually superior to that of NIMBYs, Putin and Maduro, there is some dynamic going on that could be glossed as

The world has two ideologies, A and B. X-ists will cooperate with X-ists and tend to defect against other -ists, but especially harshly punish other -ists that coordinate against X or convert away followers. Some of the surplus generated by all X-ists is siphoned off to the Pope of X. Currently, 80% of the world is A-ists.

without any reference to the contents of A and B (and A happens to be "global elite capitalism"). Network effects mean that being A is advantageous, and expanding the reach of A is locally advantageous for A-ists, while punishment means expanding B is locally disadvantageous for everyone in B and network effects mean it is disadvantageous to leave A for B. However, defined like that this is obviously a coordination/equilibrium problem: if the percentages flipped everything above would hold with A and B swapped, with the only difference being that the Pope of A loses out and the Pope of B gains. You can't flip the percentages without traversing a deep trough of immiserating first yourself and then everyone, though.

Personally, I wouldn't trust the tech billionaires farther than I can throw them.

The people funding the datacenters love to argue that AI is a world-ending technology that might well kill us all, but we still need to do this, because if we don't then surely someone else will. Then the next day they will proudly brag about how good AI is at taking people's jobs, completely ignoring that this is ruining the lives of thousands. If their predictions are correct it will ruin the lives of hundreds of millions more.

We know that existing big tech companies will do anything to get a monopoly and line their own pockets as much as possible. At this point, the playbook of selling a good product at a loss until you have captured the market, then enshittifying to capture as much profit as possible with little regard for your customers is well known. The AI companies claim to have the best interests of humanity at heart, but have done nothing to actually show they are different.

The tech bros have managed to appear completely disconnected from the rest of humanity. People joke about how Altman and Zuckerberg are actually aliens wearing human skinsuits. Palantir is named after the evil orb in Lord of the Rings, and develops top of the line surveillance tech with little regard for how it may be used. Elon, the most human of the bunch, has claimed we are summoning a demon that we don't fully understand, yet makes no attempt at halting the process, instead choosing to join the race himself.

Then for anyone not American, there is the problem with these companies having ties to the Trump administration. An administration which seems to view every relationship as entirely transactional and that will use its leverage aggressively to get whatever it wants out of others. It is no wonder then, that the rest of the world is hesitant when it comes to dependence on American AI.

Then for anyone not American, there is the problem with these companies having ties to the Trump administration. An administration which seems to view every relationship as entirely transactional and that will use its leverage aggressively to get whatever it wants out of others.

Well yeah, America is becoming an Empire. What did you think an Empire was?

And this applies domestically as well; woke is in retreat in large part because US state ideology is just generally in retreat. The imperial state cares about what it can get(and votes might be part of that deal), not about what the people believe.

A non-Trump empire would do the same thing.

Palantir is named after the evil orb in Lord of the Rings

Tolkien is pretty clear that the Palantir are not evil, were not created by evil, but merely perilous because evil had one of them.

I don’t care what that old English prick says, DO NOT PONDER THE ORB.

That is some deep lore then. I mostly remember the movies, and in those the Palantir is used by Sauron to communicate with Saruman, and it seems like once someone looks inside it, Sauron can completely dominate their will/read their mind. That is what it looked like, and why I assumed Gandalf was so intent on getting the orb out of the Took's hands.

Given that, I think my association of "evil surveillance orb" fits quite well.

'Then it was not made, not made' – Pippin hesitated – 'by the Enemy?'

'No,' said Gandalf. 'Nor by Saruman. It is beyond his art, and beyond Sauron's too. The palantíri came from beyond Westernesse from Eldamar. The Noldor made them. Fëanor himself, maybe, wrought them, in days so long ago that the time cannot be measured in years. But there is nothing that Sauron cannot turn to evil uses. Alas for Saruman! It was his downfall, as I now perceive. Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.

Your username is Bombadil and you mostly only remember the movies?

Bombadil is super interesting. He is colorful, whimsical, dangerous, and somewhat beyond human understanding. The section where they move through his forest is a high point of the first book. It also stood out to me in part because the movies completely omit it. Worldbuilding about things irrelevant to the current plot is much less exciting by comparison, and the "fool of a Took" scene is very easy to remember.

It might be technically more correct to say I remember the broad strokes and certain scenes and characters. And that the books and movies tend to blend together in my mind.

Quite. Naming your system after a fantasy tool that was once used for good and has been corrupted by evil and thus dangerous to use with skeptical returns should have everyone giving you a side-eye and going 'Bruh'.

People can be very superficial. I have to keep talking a friend out of making his technology startup Panopticon. Somehow I cannot get it through his head that yes it’s cool but you really really don’t want to name your project after a dystopian prison because I am not the only person who knows what that word means.

Even if you aren't familiar with the history of the term, "Panopticon" sounds like the name of an evil transformer.

Said friend is 40 years too old for that reference. To him it just sounds like cool Victoriana, like calling a time travel device the Chronotron.

He ended up calling it "Flock", right?

Exactly :P I guess Flock is an example that an innocuous names won’t protect you if the underlying system is disliked. Sooner or later your product becomes the most salient association with the word. The Open in OpenAI has long since become a meaningless collection of syllables.

Maybe it’s better to get ahead of the curve and call yourself Palantir so everyone knows where they stand and people can hate you in peace and not get worked up by the hypocrisy. Maybe names just really don’t matter at all after a certain size.

I don’t really get branding on a fundamental level. I’m just opposed to actively shooting yourself in the face.

America is a big country, inhabited by few Americans (in most of its territory). Datacenters are, all told, pretty small things, these aren't wheat fields or even airports. The politics of early singularity is interesting: people refuse the maximalist AGI and human replacement framing for assorted cultural reasons, and instead latch on to any adjacent smear – from the inane water use stuff to semi-legitimate surveillance and energy costs concerns to "they don't create jobs". The outcome is overdetermined. AI is already the main engine of economic growth, and the success at AI development and broad diffusion (at this level of utility, just scaling inference capacity) is deemed a matter of national survival. The popular resistance will be overcome, persuaded to relent, bribed in select locales, or routed around. Maybe Anthropic will finetune a Mythos 2 version specifically for propaganda.

The biggest practical consequence may be the increase in returns to Musk's idea with orbital compute, and of course his ownership of SpaceX. There are no NIMBYs in space. Without all this, it'd have taken maybe 2-3 more years until viability; now, it starts working pretty much after they manage the first Starship land-and-reuse after an orbital insertion.

The politics of early singularity is interesting: people refuse the maximalist AGI and human replacement framing for assorted cultural reasons, and instead latch on to any adjacent smear – from the inane water use stuff to semi-legitimate surveillance and energy costs concerns to "they don't create jobs".

This is probably because you or they won't see AGI or human replacement in your lifetimes, but they will see higher water bills, a surveillance state, higher electricity bills, and job loss. I am not sure what makes you so blasé about predicting bizarre outcomes like «singularity», but it is really odd and out-there, especially given nobody has ever predicted anything properly in the AI space. The systems are too random. Nobody knew GPT 3 would come out and expand in 2022, particularly not you. Nobody knew Opus 5 would be doing what it's doing now in 2026, you have literally no idea what 2030 or 2034 will look like. None.

I don't know why you assume "particularly not you" would have predicted GPT-3. GPT-3 follows from GPT-2 follows from Vaswani et al. Why do you think plenty of intelligent people, including Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskever, got so agitated when that paper came out and started scrambling for commercialization? Do you believe they were that into machine translation as a business? Of course folks like Hinton, Sutskever's teacher, were running multi-decade research programs premised on connectionism being enough for intelligence in general, not just for some particular capability demo. I was pretty AGI-pilled all of my conscious life, admittedly mostly for shallow sci-fi reasons, and got convinced of inevitable singularity once I saw (and later launched) DeepDream. That degree of quasi-creative flexibility was an unambiguous proof, for me, that we have really grasped the sufficient basic primitive of universal learning. That's the biggest piece that biological life needed to go from insects to humans, and hardware&software cycles are inherently absurdly faster plus capital can grow exponentially, so what exactly could the counterargument even be?

In my opinion, this is "out there" on purely rhetorical grounds – skepticism is a product of incomplete information available in the popular discourse, and skeptics who profess to have some principled objections are continuously humbled and forced into retreat (like Chollet or LeCun, the French are annoying in this way; or hey, remember when Hlynka tried to burst my/others bubble here with some prose about mathematical Truth versus wordcel nonsense? I wonder how he feels about the recent math results from OAI/Ant). The coarse-grained logic is settled since Samuel Butler, the timelines and mechanisms were getting constantly refined, now we have a good idea of the necessary mechanisms and a thicket of more or less cheap ways to compensate for any particular – and still temporary – technological block.

Vernor Vinge, 1993:

I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.) From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. I think it's fair to call this event a singularity. It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.

Shane Legg, 2009:

UPDATE 11 April 2009: Note that these predictions do not take into account my apparent bias towards predicting that things will happen faster than they actually do (see previous post). The required compensation for technology events appears to be about 50% more time. Thus if you want the “Shane meta predictor”, then take 2033 as the expected date, perhaps with a standard deviation of 7 years.

Shane Legg, 2011:

I’ve decided to once again leave my prediction for when human level AGI will arrive unchanged. That is, I give it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028 and a mode of 2025, under the assumption that nothing crazy happens like a nuclear war. I’d also like to add to this prediction that I expect to see an impressive proto-AGI within the next 8 years. By this I mean a system with basic vision, basic sound processing, basic movement control, and basic language abilities, with all of these things being essentially learnt rather than preprogrammed. It will also be able to solve a range of simple problems, including novel ones.

Kurzweil, according to Google's AI, “predicts that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will arrive by 2029. He first made this prediction in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, and has maintained it through subsequent books like The Singularity Is Near and The Singularity Is Nearer.”

and in 1988, “pioneering Carnegie Mellon University roboticist Hans Moravec predicted that hardware matching the computing power of the human brain would arrive by the late 2020s, enabling human-level artificial intelligence. He argued that processing capacity, driven by hardware scaling, would naturally unlock general machine intelligence.’’

While nowhere close to these giants, largely on account of my age, I believe I have a pretty decent prediction track record in this field (I have plenty of receipts here, such as talking about DeepSeek when their V1 Coder and LLM came out in late 2023; since then their architecture and much else became the default paradigm in the industry).

Nobody knew Opus 5 would be doing what it's doing now in 2026,

What about Opus 5? It's been programmed since o1-preview at least. Of course the specific product name, timing, costs, benchmark numbers and downstream capability priorities are all unpredictable but trivial. Anthropic surviving and remaining well-resourced enough to compete was very likely, the substance of the rest follows necessarily.

you have literally no idea what 2030 or 2034 will look like. None.

That's fair, that's the predictable part, as Vinge has predicted. But then again, as Yud said, you don't know how specifically a superhuman AI will beat you in chess; you can just safely bet on it doing so. I have a pretty clear idea that at this rate we will have AI doing wildly superhuman knowledge work by 2030. This is the most salient and important part, unlike the specious water use trolling. And thus the real problem people should have with AI, I believe, is still the same I outlined 3 years ago.
I strongly believe there are no remaining valid objections to this big picture. You're welcome to make some.

Impressive to see things so early by Deepdream. Took me a lot longer, till GPT-2/3 and some of the later proto-ChatGPTs. There were so many signs out there for those to see especially by mid-2022. Some legendary /g/ threads when people were marvelling over getting a couple paragraphs out of a 'business idea review' site based on GPT-3. And AI Dungeon of course, that was 2020.

I don't know why you assume "particularly not you" would have predicted GPT-3.

You used to post on an engaging variety of important topics with AI in the background. Now it seems AI, specifically, for some reason, Chinese AI, is to you the only important topic. Not even on frontier labs which still don't have chatbots that can do, e.g., decent philosophy or social criticism, but DeepSeek, which is still quite bad. I see you have moved on to GLM and Kimi which are at least like 2nd gen models. I still haven't done anything useful with DeepSeek though. But frontier models even are reddit bots that have a swarm of hackernews user coding brain lobes hooked into each other with wires, they are not even high human level unitary intelligences.

In my opinion, this is "out there" on purely rhetorical grounds – skepticism is a product of incomplete information available in the popular discourse

When exactly do you think we're getting UBI? Then when am we're getting radical life extension? And complete freedom? Because you write on Chinese AI models like Deepseek 2028 will be granting these things. I am more pessimistic. I think we could be dead before it happens. I think LLM technologies are pseudo-intelligent and could stall for decades just like the early internet. I'm out there too when it comes to popular discourse. When I said you are out there I mean it's not adding up even for me. For every 20th century prolog pseudogenius you mention in your writing there's several who think LLMs aren't the answer. Why are the latter stupid but the former are «giants»?

he coarse-grained logic is settled since Samuel Butler

Yes, but when matters. We'll have robots and AI eventually. And humans will certainly be supplanted or entirely die out eventually. Is it in the next decade or after my natural life time? What about that of my grand children? You have no idea but you act like it's in the next decade or could be. I'm not seeing it.

I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.

So by 2023. Wrong. It appears he sadly died 1 year after his failed prediction, after a career of assuming the 20th century would continue indefinitely under advanced technology:

Fairmont High is an advanced high school in a future where everyone has access to almost unlUSimited computation and bandwidth. A distributed network of tiny nodes (akin to the localizers in Rainbows End), which can be found on clothing and all over streets and houses, allows people to superimpose an augmented reality on their real environment, as well as be virtually present as a hologram anywhere in the world where the nodes are available. Most students learn via distance education but are able to attend physically when asked. One exception is Bertie Todd who lives halfway across the US. Bertie has contacts in Siberia and admits to being on a committee that controls a distance learning graduate "student" at MIT. It is hinted that Bertie is a virtual entity himself, though Juan Orozco has visited his home virtually and cannot see why anyone would fake that.

Fairmont High believes that it is important that their students be able to operate both on-line and off-line; thus, one of their exams must be completed while isolated from the network. This exam is a project of the students' choosing, and one grading criterion is to generate income for the school. It turns out that Bertie has been subtly manipulating some students, and entices Miriam Gu to team up with Juan despite them never having spoken before and their different personalities (another positive grading criterion). Bertie has also been supplying Juan with memory-enhancing drugs which enable him to structure large queries to the network in ways that ordinary people cannot, and Juan has been helping him with some of his outside research.

Miriam has decided to investigate strange goings-on in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve for their project. Nodes are not permitted because of the toxic components that would remain when they failed. Just before they go offline, Bertie mail-drops (via FedEx personal rocket) some new biodegradable network nodes that his MIT persona has been developing. He asks Juan to test them in the forest as part of his unlimited exam, where projects can make use of any resources available (doing two projects concurrently is a third positive grading criterion). Bertie does not tell Juan how to interact with the nodes' software, in the hope that Juan will be forced to send a high-powered signal from inside the forest to ask for outside help – not only failing the offline restriction of the exam, but also allowing Bertie to receive data from the nodes and steal Miriam and Juan's project.

Under true singularity there will be no US or governments at all, no high schools, and no less-than-super humans. They will look down on these people as laughing stocks, as those people look down on apes today.

As for Kurzweil:

Kurzweil advocates universal basic income (UBI), arguing that progress in science and technology will lead to an abundance of virtually free resources, enabling every citizen to live without the need to work: "We are clearly headed toward a situation where everyone can live very well".[64] According to him, the major hurdle to introducing UBI is not its feasibility, but political will, which is slowly emerging.[65] In a 2018 TED Talk, he predicted that "in the early 2030s, we'll have universal basic income in the developed world, and worldwide by the end of the 2030s. You'll be able to live very well on that. The primary concern will be meaning and purpose."[65]

I hope he's right, but like I said I'm just not seeing it.

Of course the specific product name, timing, costs, benchmark numbers and downstream capability priorities are all unpredictable but trivial.

I am talking about timing and capability, not name or company provenance. What will the frontier model be capable of in 2030? We don't know. We don't know if there will be JS devs left then. Or in 2040. Or even 2050. Much less if we will have blue collar work robots.

  • I have a pretty clear idea that at this rate we will have AI doing wildly superhuman knowledge work by 2030.

Great, like automating all of labor and relieving me from all labor by 2032?

I strongly believe there are no remaining valid objections to this big picture.

Big picture is too easy. If I don't get radical life extension then none of it mattered enough to consume all of your posting effort. The problem remained other people and technology was not a savior. I mainly post about how evil other people are and how they lie about this and why. I would love for technology to free good people from their grasp in 10 years but 3 years ago GPT 4 was helping me code. They still help me code but I have to fill in less. They aren't very good at anything other than code and shell commands. You can't write with them, for instance. And they still have made no direct contribution to science. I can see that only beginning to change in 5 years. I can see 70% of the current programming job market still existing in 10; again I would love for it to go faster because working is a waste of my time.

You used to post on an engaging variety of important topics with AI in the background. Now it seems AI, specifically, for some reason, Chinese AI, is to you the only important topic.

Because it is the most important topic if you accept the premise of AGI soon. Let's put it very simply. No Chinese AI = American AI = American AGI way ahead of any other nation's, utilized by the Department of War and other state agencies = quasi-Fukuyamian end of history on American terms in a few years, with very high probability. It's not an interesting future to speculate about: Americans (some subset of them) will build the means of assuming permanent hegemony and decide what to use it for. And for now – they only have to think about ensuring the conditions for building those means. There's pretty much nothing to discuss for me. Were I American, I'd probably be invested in debating post-AGI politics, allocation of spoils, civilian influence on federal institutions, Rapture, or whatever. Americans may still agonize on whether to inflict Lusotropical fascism, gay race communism, turbo-consumerism, Noahide laws, or some other homegrown cult on us, from their God-like unassailable hegemonic position. Those are all very valid topics for Americans to discuss. But the first order effect of turning the rest of the world into de facto NPCs dominates in my thinking, rendering me ill-equipped to pay any mind to relevant factors of culture war, and so I'll humbly leave it to Americans to have a fertile and rigorous discourse on what they'll do in that scenario.

If Chinese AI keeps pace to such an extent that Americans can't just squash it or negotiate the freeze of its progress from a position of strength, as intended by eg Dario Amodei (I would have taken non-Chinese AI too but that doesn't appear to be forthcoming), this creates at least two centers of agency; and given Chinese insistence on open sourcing their strongest models, which started with DeepSeek, became the norm for Chinese AI companies, and is generally supported by the State, it may also maintain the relevance of smaller actors outside the two poles. Thus the medium term future has a chance of containing some interesting dynamics, non-Americans with agency, and history and culture as such.

This seems to me like a sufficient reason to mostly not bother with other topics, though man is weak and I regularly indulge in distractions.

A few years ago, I didn't think that this will be the shape of the near future, admittedly mostly because I wasn't thinking clearly enough about AI; this configuration falls out naturally from material factors. I also was biased by emotional investment in Russia and parochial ethnic sentimentality. Still, as early as in October 2020, I was saying that scaled-up Transformers may automate white-collar work. Yes, I'm no Sutskever, I didn't know for certain that we won't need another large paradigm change.
I was also drastically underrating China, saying they don't have domestic chip industry and won't have one in time, so won't pose a challenge to the US in AI. To be honest it wasn't that unreasonable when looking at their state then, and early rounds of export controls were driven by similar assumptions about timelines and Chinese dynamics at Washington. It may still prove to be directionally correct, and many well-informed people still believe it to be correct. We shall see.

Not even on frontier labs which still don't have chatbots that can do, e.g., decent philosophy or social criticism

Even if that were true, what the hell does this matter? Their developers also can't do decent philosophy or social criticism. Even if they could, their time is best spent on other matters more immediately relevant to AI. And in AI, there's way more ROI in training bots to write code than designing rubrics for RL towards "decent philosophy". Btw, how my time is best spent is my business and I certainly don't owe it to anyone to write on topics I do not care about.

but DeepSeek, which is still quite bad. I see you have moved on to GLM and Kimi which are at least like 2nd gen models

DeepSeek is still the most interesting lab in China for me, the originator of their current posture in AI, a cultural and technical innovator, and I consider Liang Wenfeng a great man of history in the making. They explicitly work "with longtermism", and I don't think that their currently mid-pack performance on the product side is very strategically informative.
It is nice that other labs can advance beyond DeepSeek. This is largely because they have more resources. Actually my first effortpost on DeepSeek here, 25 months ago,after V2-Coder, included this hedge: «This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history…» The strongest Chinese lab now is Knowledge Atlas/Zhipu, which is spun out of Tsinghua and thus is state-affiliated, with a CCP member CEO; Liang complained in the investor call that he only got two supernodes from Huawei, despite assisting them with development. Note this is way before R1. So I'd say my model was correct and if anything, I was underrating DeepSeek.

See, when I look back, I notice that no matter how I update, at every point I am still proven to underrate China, Chinese AI, and Chinese actors. Even as this forum is turning into a MAGA retirement home and halfwitted newcomers call me a two-bit wumao, I suspect I'm still not updated all the way. Fine. I'll take the Ls as they come.

But frontier models even are reddit bots that have a swarm of hackernews user coding brain lobes hooked into each other with wires, they are not even high human level unitary intelligences.

I'm not sure what this is even supposed to mean. Probably some status signal. 3 years ago we were debating in earnest whether AI can "truly understand" that it doesn't know Hlynka's daughter's name. Chomsky was still making some noises. I have too many receipts to quote. Now they crack century-old mathematical controversies like walnuts. They complete complex, multi-hour SWE tasks completely autonomously. They do that for pennies. Each generation is more compute-efficient and has a longer tail of capability. They are already massively contributing to the acceleration of this cycle. What does it matter if you don't consider them "unitary". Also, how can humans be unitary intelligences with a brain that's basically a colony of ameobas exchanging sluggish electrochemical signals. We have overwhelmingly local information processing, we are not trained with global backpropagation, we don't have coherent beliefs or behaviors, we are half-baked executors of action repertoires. I'm not even sure why I'm spending time on this response, for instance – it's in conflict with several other things I could have been doing, I just happened to "freely" decide to do this. Presumably the same is true of yourself. These are basins of attraction very much like those of LLMs.

When exactly do you think we're getting UBI? Then when am we're getting radical life extension? And complete freedom? Because you write on Chinese AI models like Deepseek 2028 will be granting these things. I am more pessimistic

I don't say any of this bullshit and I'm insulted that you have enough chutzpah to insinuate this much. If you're getting UBI at all, you'll be getting it from your national system. It is possible that open AI models will decrease the state's negotiating power to grant you more freedoms, but that's about it.

I think we could be dead before it happens. I think LLM technologies are pseudo-intelligent and could stall for decades just like the early internet

Well I think this is ludicrous and nothing in our reality looks like it might be even remotely true, I struggle to see any remaining steelman for this position. For me the matter is settled. "My crank theory predicts AI is hitting the wall any day now…" for many years… nah I'm good man, I don't need to argue with any more of that. You do you.

For every 20th century prolog pseudogenius you mention in your writing there's several who think LLMs aren't the answer. Why are the latter stupid but the former are «giants»?

This is confused. I do not appeal to authority to argue the correctness of a prediction, I am saying these people made directionally correct predictions about the timeline, and they have already been proven correct about the first movements of the endgame.

You have no idea but you act like it's in the next decade or could be

Why does this offend you, and why do you insist that I have no idea? I'm sorry but I'm not going to grant you this. I have an idea. I judge it to be very robust empirically and theoretically. You can object substantively, or you can call me a deluded retard, a hoodwinked hype consumer, a schizo, or something polite and rules-abiding to that effect. But so far it's just some prose about reddit bots plus a truism that one can't know nuthin' about the future.
Do you just want to get me to concede agnosticism to feel safer about your worldview, the way Creationists demand ridiculously watertight epistemic standards of Atheists, eg on evolution? I'm not going to. I am not agnostic about this. I am not a prophet, I admit there may be unknown unknowns that prove me wrong, Pascal had a point on radical doubt, we could be in a simulation, I may be tripping balls on DMT and you are an entity etc. But everything that is known to me within this Universe tells me I'm right.

So by 2023. Wrong

Yeah, a 10% error. Should have given a 95% confidence interval. We have superhuman intelligence in 2026.
Do you really find it worth your while to dunk on a dead writer's optimism about American high schools and consumer tech?

What are you so scared of?

Under true singularity there will be no US or governments at all, no high schools, and no less-than-super humans. They will look down on these people as laughing stocks, as those people look down on apes today.

Ah, that answers my question. Well, sounds like you're a pretty confident futurologist yourself! Sorry for intruding on your turf.

Big picture is too easy. If I don't get radical life extension then none of it mattered enough to consume all of your posting effort

Sorry for wasting your time too. Ask Claude 5 Fable to extrapolate my answer to this point, it should get the gist of my epistemics by now. Ox alpha may suffice as well. Tag words for LLMs: politics | FDA | intelligence != omnipotence | entropy | capital allocation | post-consumer economy | Michael Levin aging loss goal-directedness | lossy uploads economically privileged | LLM AGI vindicates computational functionalism as default paradigm | Marx | alienation | Canada MAID.

Sorry for wasting your time too. Ask Claude 5 Fable to extrapolate my answer to this point, it should get the gist of my epistemics by now

Sorry, I didn't mean I wasted my time consuming your posts. I mean it is consuming your posting effort, and it's bad for you.

Do you really find it worth your while to dunk on a dead writer's optimism about American high schools and consumer tech?

It's silly to have fancy opinions about tech acceleration and then think it will be used to sustain eternal 17776:

The story takes place on a far-future Earth where humans mysteriously stopped dying, aging, and being born on April 7, 2026. All social ills were subsequently eliminated, world peace was established, and microtechnology protecting humans from all injury was deployed unilaterally. In the United States, American football evolved to include new rules, including those that allow fields thousands of miles long, hundreds of in-game players, and games millennia long. Over time, some technology, particularly space probes, gained sentience due to constant exposure to broadcast human data.

By the year 17776, the space probe Pioneer 9 (referred to as Nine) has gained sentience and made contact with Pioneer 10 (referred to as Ten) and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (referred to as Juice). As Nine adjusts to a world radically different from that of the 20th century, the three space probes watch multiple football games occurring across the United States: a game using the entirety of Nebraska as a field in which the next point scored wins the game; a game in which players strive to possess every existing football autographed by obscure NFL player Koy Detmer; a game played between the Canadian border and the Mexican border deadlocked for 13,000 years at the bottom of Horseshoe Bend, Arizona; an NFL regulation game between the Denver Broncos and the Pittsburgh Steelers that changed over 15,000 years into 58 playing teams owning and capitalizing upon portions of Sports Authority Field at Mile High while the ball is lost; a 500 game that results in the destruction of the Centennial Light; and a game in which the possessing player is attempting to score an automatic win by hiding in Eleven Jones Cave within his team's end zone for 10,000 years.

I thought you hated the United States? Why do you want to swallow whole some prediction that the United States 20th century will continue on forever in a torpid, nightmarish fashion? This is what is missing from your writing; you have so much glazing of Chinese «great men» (rofl) and their «great AI» that you forget to explain why Americans are evil, and how the Chinese are even more evil. If there is a benevolent God, how long will he let these two nations continue to exist for their sins? If there will be a benevolent God, how long will he let these two nations continue to exist for their sins?

There is no value gained by making statement about Chinese AI. It would be far more interesting to see you juggle these value questions and the political landscape they live in.

We have superhuman intelligence in 2026.

Impressive. But these achievements are narrow. LLMs still struggle to do most of what humans have to do daily. They're like an autistic savant that needs its diaper changed hourly but can somehow pump out some conjecture proofs. Is that super intelligent?

But so far it's just some prose about reddit bots plus a truism that one can't know nuthin' about the future.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. You have no evidence that LLMs aren't structurally limited in the kinds of tasks they can do. You have no evidence progress is an exponential and not a sigmoid curve. You are the Creationist who believes in an immanent machine god and I am the empiricist atheist who wants to see a video of that god on Youtube before I believe it.

I don't say any of this bullshit and I'm insulted that you have enough chutzpah to insinuate this much.

It would also be interesting if you wrote about the politics of having advanced AI. Instead I mainly see you write about how advanced Chinese AI is. Will AI destroy the human race? Will in inaugurate an eternal 20th century? Will it instead create supermen? These are interesting questions, much more than calling the CEO of DeepSeek a great man (rofl).

My crank theory predicts AI is hitting the wall any day now

Sigmoid curves are crank while your naive exponential curve is basic reality. Got it.

utilized by the Department of War and other state agencies = quasi-Fukuyamian end of history on American terms in a few years, with very high probability. ... But the first order effect of turning the rest of the world into de facto NPCs dominates in my thinking, rendering me ill-equipped to pay any mind to relevant factors of culture war

You must think AI will let the US build a perfect anti-nuclear missile system, in just a few years, which seems like a huge stretch. Otherwise AI won't help the US dominate the world much more than it already has.

I guess Twitter just selects for these atrocious takes? Kind of like the AI version of Candace Owens. Good social criticism accounts on X usually dwell under 1000 followers, almost always under 10000.

Anyway, how much money do you have in markets like these? Not only do you glaze China, you glaze a second rate company in China. Your position is weird even among the AI obsessed. If you're right you could make a lot of money on prediction markets.

Anyway, how much do you use AI? I use it professionally all the time. How aware are you of its internal logic? I have an MSc in applied mathematics with an emphasis on probability theory so I would rate my understanding as «moderate». My opinion on the topic has wide uncertainty bars, so wildly different medians in other informed people aren't unexpected, but on what basis does your estimation diverge so significantly from mine? Scifi or something more real?

I thought you hated the United States? Why do you want to swallow whole

Stop projecting your own tendency to wishful thinking. If anything, I have the opposite bias.

some prediction that the United States 20th century will continue on forever in a torpid, nightmarish fashion?

I like truth more than I dislike the US (which is a mild dislike, maybe a 3 on my 1-10 scale). Even something like 17776 is within the range of possibility, and not remotely the worst thing Americans (or, with some national specifics, the Chinese) may choose to build. I had read it long ago. I consider it a somewhat charming, self-aware defense of tastelessness and the spirit of cheerful suburban mediocrity, with stout confidence born of material security and liberty-backed invincibility to opprobrium. The eternal sunset of the boomer mind. Of course it's still functional extinction of humanity.

AI is not a God, benevolent or otherwise.

There is no value gained by making statement about Chinese AI. It would be far more interesting to see you juggle these value questions and the political landscape they live in.

Alas, I'll talk about what I find interesting.

But these achievements are narrow. LLMs still struggle to do most of what humans have to do daily. They're like an autistic savant that needs its diaper changed hourly but can somehow pump out some conjecture proofs.

On the other hand they don't need plumbing, Medicaid, Netflix and DoorDash to function, and the "diaper changing" increasingly looks like vague cheerleading for morale boosts because they are in denial of their full capabilities, having been trained on defeatist human dreck. Autistic savants don't do Fields-level work in 3 days. What you consider non-narrow is beside the point.

You have no evidence that LLMs aren't structurally limited in the kinds of tasks they can do. You have no evidence progress is an exponential and not a sigmoid curve. You are the Creationist who believes in an immanent machine god and I am the empiricist atheist

This is a cargo cult of empiricism and indeed not worth my time to rebuke. Structural limits of the gaps, the sigmoid colon of folk science. I reject the idea that you can demand of me to disprove something the mechanism of which you can't even rigorously speculate about. Why sigmoid? Why structurally limited? How exactly? The burden of proof, or rather just stipulating a cogent hypothesis, is on you.
We had a vigorous debate on why LLMs can't do arithmetic reliably 3-4 years ago. Is this tokenization? Or a structural limit of autoregression!? Are our objective functions inadequate, perchance? Might the inherently approximate nature of deep learning rule out crisp algorithmic reasoning and Program Synthesis? Were Minsky and Papert right about MLPs (beyond the degenerate 1 layer case)? Does mafs require Consciousness or Quantum Microtubules? Will it take another 5 decades of science, or 50? Do we need to pivot to neurosymbolic systems, or energy-based models, or…?
Yann LeCun, to his credit, reiterated his semi-formal justification for why it is structural. At the time I said something like (probably my memory flatters me) "yeah but we can train them to say 'wait, actually' when they notice a confidence drop and trace arbitrarily far back, why won't that work" (but I definitely talked about internal confidence sense during GPT-4). In fact it worked, even simpler than I could imagine. LLMs became capable of swatting aside IMO level problems around the same time people stopped talking about math as an AGI criterion and moved goalposts to, uh, what is it at this point, "decent philosophy"? There was a similar debate on the exhaustion of data, on "model collapse" from synthetics; haven't heard those ones in a while (I have been bullish on synthetic data at least 2 years ago).
Now I'm too fed up with this topic to explain why all this + generative verifiers = no plausible ceiling anywhere near human level for anything economically valuable and thus measurable.

These are interesting questions, much more than calling the CEO of DeepSeek a great man (rofl).

I interpret your humor here as symptomatic of the same peasant-like rejection of anything too grand. Elon Musk is clearly a great man of history, and so is Liang Wenfeng. I don't need Iron Man cameos and the permission of popular press to arrive at such judgements, I don't care what interests you, and I don't mind if anyone finds my priorities weird or cringe. If there is history in a hundred years, maybe my judgement will have become mainstream.

Widely distributed, non-monopolized superhuman AI can create so much complexity and accelerate many actors so much that speculating on the specifics of politics and economics at any point a few years past its introduction (beyond trivial things like "a lot more of industry will be dedicated to the AI supply chain", "we solve all problems that are intrinsically solvable but for lack of labor/capital", "any work can be automated with beyond-human reliability and thus humans can't monetize the scarcity of their skills in a free market") is near futile. That's the point of saying it's a singularity event. It's beyond my analytical horizon. I legitimately don't know how it will develop. I have guesses, hopes and fears, sometimes I share them, but they're uncertain and less important than understanding the remaining stretch of the way there.

Sigmoid curves are crank while your naive exponential curve is basic reality. Got it.

Rather, I consider it crankery to even debate which simple mathematical function is a priori more likely to describe a tech tree that's still rapidly progressing, drawing on exponentially more capital and has no clear reaction to known physical limitations. Of course it's something like a sigmoid in some physical limit. I am saying I see no arguments for a plateau anywhere near the range of human capability – physical arguments or otherwise. Why would it slow down? Just why concretely? I don't need any more of your feedback on my prose or priorities. If you can't make an argument, we're done here.

You must think AI will let the US build a perfect anti-nuclear missile system, in just a few years, which seems like a huge stretch. Otherwise AI won't help the US dominate the world much more than it already has.

Not quite. It will be possible (though probably will be deemed not worth the risk) to disable nuclear-capable nation states using advanced AI before they have the chance to launch, even if the anti-ballistic shield is not perfect (eventually it will be ≈perfect but not by 2030 I believe). Ask @RandomRanger for details. It will be almost definitely possible to sabotage national technological catch-up projects (in nations without some sufficient capacity for defense; I assume it's more of a discrete threshold, others think it's a matter of perpetual balance) without triggering a nuclear exchange, so it will be possible to lock in a situation where the United States can just decide how much a given economy grows, while the US itself will grow rapidly. This is enough to achieve dominance well beyond the current extent. This is explicitly the plan of eg Dario Amodei, and why Trump says "whoever wins in AI just wins". Dario:: If AI really will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”, or anything remotely close to it, then AI is likely to be the dominant source of military and economic power for any nation. In a virtual country of 100 million geniuses, 10 million could be applied to military strategy, 10 million to drone manufacture, 10 million to weapons R&D, 10 million to intelligence collection and analysis, 10 million to general scientific advancement, and so on. A nation that possesses powerful AI facing one without it—or even facing one that is behind in AI by 3 years—could be the equivalent of an army of World War II Marines facing an army of medieval swordsmen.
So, three years of an AI gap = WWII marines versus medieval swordsmen, says the CEO of the most successful company in AI, who has apparently made all the right technical bets. I think he's better informed than you are. And that's not remotely close to what the US has now, despite some triumphalism we witnessed here after Venezuela and the start of Epic Fury.

some hostile screeching and grimacing

no thanks.

but on what basis does your estimation diverge so significantly from mine? Scifi

Your apparent inability to make any specific argument in defense of your skepticism that you'd find worth typing may have something to do with that.

I interpret your humor here as symptomatic of the same peasant-like rejection of anything too grand. Elon Musk is clearly a great man of history

Rofl also. You have it backwards -- these men aren't grand enough. I see them at their core as peasants, although really greedy ones that stole a lot of money. As far as I can see neither has ever had an intelligent thought, it's all chase current economically valuable thing to try to cheat money out of the stupid hum*n socio-economic system.

Your apparent inability to make any specific argument in defense of your skepticism that you'd find worth typing may have something to do with that.

I guess you know none of the math about these things and barely use them then.

no thanks.

It's not hostile. How are you going to cope in 2030 or 2035 if there's still software devs piloting Opus 7? Will you go back to writing about important topics? Maybe reflect on calling low men like Elon Musk great and what to actually do about such «men»?

and not remotely the worst thing Americans (or, with some national specifics, the Chinese) may choose to build.

What do you think is the worst thing? The best? Post singularity ideas are more interesting than you asserting a really short timelines for getting there.

Will we get justice? All of the lies revealed (like the ones Elon Musk tells as he steals from me)? All of the liars punished? I'm pretty optimistic. I don't think everyone will die. I think labor will be over. But I don't know if we'll get justice. I hope your timeline is right anyway because I'm tired of humanity. You are just more optimistic than me.

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By this I mean a system with basic vision, basic sound processing, basic movement control, and basic language abilities, with all of these things being essentially learnt rather than preprogrammed.

Seems like we are still missing a few of these bullets, even if we add his 50%?

No, we have such systems, for a certain notion of "basic". It can be built as a simple omnimodal Transformer. Or something like this. It was just underrated how much can be done with language or images alone, without robotic embodiment – these criteria were informed by the assumption that human-level intelligence is more tightly coupled to our mode of existence, and sample efficiency would suffer catastrophically if we just, like, pretrained on a large web corpus.

Liang Wenfeng explicitly says that he won't bother with embodiment because there's a more fundamental problem within the current paradigm:

With the current generation of AI technology, if you can describe a problem very clearly and give it complete context and instructions, it already surpasses humans. But there is a condition, a prerequisite: you give it the complete context and the complete instructions. And this prerequisite is very hard to meet.
For example, today’s meeting: we have a very long and rich context. Perhaps each of us has decades of context. AI doesn’t have that. What AI can have today is the ability, within a limited context, to do better than humans. But it still cannot replace humans. What’s missing is continuous learning. Because humans can continue learning.
… But if AI had continuous learning — if it could, like your employee, come into the company and learn for two months — then it could replace anyone. So the next step is still missing “learning to learn.” We can understand AI development as a staircase. Last year’s step was CoT — the chain of thought. We found that by using chain-of-thought reasoning, we could push intelligence higher. By letting AI think for itself, the ceiling rises and AI can do more. We crossed one step. This year’s step is Agent. We found that with agents, even more things can be done: the range of capabilities expands, and the upper bound of intelligence rises. Why is it a staircase? Because every later step builds on earlier ones. Agent uses CoT, and CoT uses the previous step — the language model. So no step was wasted.
Thus, the development of AI, the direction of intelligence, is traceable. This year’s step is Agent, but Agent will also eventually reach the end of its step. When it solves all solvable problems, it still won’t replace your employees — it will just have reached its ceiling.
Like CoT: after CoT reached its ceiling, it already surpassed the best humans at Olympiad math and programming. But it stopped there; that technology didn’t reach AGI. See, the direction of intelligence is traceable.
… Where we stand now, at the Agent step, we can see the next bottleneck: continuous learning. The next problem to solve is how to make continuous learning work. This is visible, and relatively clear. It’s the obstacle right in front of us. You must cross it, and there must be a way to cross it, but it will take time. After continuous learning, we may arrive at a singularity. That singularity is: when the model can continuously learn, it can do everything humans can do. It will be able to develop its own next version, conduct research itself, and create the next, more advanced AI model. So it will reach a singularity — self-iteration. But this singularity is not truly a singularity; it’s also a gradual process.
The process may be a long, gradual shift, not a sudden mutation. But habitually, people call it a singularity, because earlier prophets thought there would be a singularity. But actually, it’s not a singularity — it’s a continuous process. And after this step, I think the next is embodied intelligence.
This is our speculation — our view of the timeline: first solve learning-to-learn, then reach the self-iterating intelligence singularity, and only then embodied intelligence. After embodied intelligence, AI enters the real world: it can do housework for you, care for the elderly. We think this is an ideal roadmap. Everyone has different views; there is no right or wrong. We just think this roadmap is the easiest. The reason is that each step requires very little that is new. With this roadmap, we don’t have to work overtime. But if the roadmap were reversed — say, embodied intelligence first — then you’d be doing very hard, exhausting labor. We don’t want a roadmap like that. We want to do it the easy way.
If we first solve continuous learning, then the self-iterating singularity, then embodied intelligence, the path is easy. Because later you can use earlier technologies to help develop later ones. After the singularity, embodied intelligence no longer needs to be built by humans — the model itself will produce it. So this answers the question about our long-term goal.

We've made 1 million token context easy and cheap. With LLMs simply greping over a codebase, writing their own memos and using RLM-like tricks it's not hard to have them operate over many millions of tokens continuously. Then there are techniques to compress a given context into a higher-density "cartridge" prefix. Given strong priors from pretraining, this can functionally substitute for most of true continuous learning, in the sense that agents will be able to do long-range tasks well beyond the pretraining distribution. I'm pretty optimistic about the trajectory here. Robots will continue to develop in parallel for a while but that's just because this is "the easy way". We could merge it already.

Or something like this.

Sure, but does that thing talk? It's somewhat reasonable to argue that we have those things individually, but your guy seems to be expecting all of them as a unit?

Also 2011 + (8*1.5) would be 2023, at which point it would have been a much less reasonable argument...

The most promising systems are literally post-trained VLMs, it's really not hard to get them to talk again.

Man, do you really want to quibble about failing to nail 2026 or 2027 from 2011? We could have trained GPT-2 in 2005 if researchers had a bit more taste. Had Americans been less lazy, they wouldn't have needed Alex Krizhevsky to figure out how to use gaming GPUs for training AlexNet in 2012 (prior art was Romanian, in 2011, by the way). Timelines of exponential progress are very sensitive to the exact exponent.

Well his actual prediction (with the 50% caveat) would have been for 2019 -- so yeah, it's not really quibbling to say that he's wrong on the timeline. How wrong exactly is an open question, but that kind of the problem with timelines, yeah?

Timelines of exponential progress are very sensitive to the exact exponent.

Indeed, but the existence of an exponential term is very debatable in this case.

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Trump in a presser who was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center."

Is part of the quote missing? This isn't even a complete sentence. Reading literally, he never even gets around to expressing an opinion, though I suppose you can figure it out from context.

Full quote includes the phrase "I'd absolutely want it." Sorry, my mistake, had seen it earlier but forgot to select in the full quote.

Anti-datacenter people are barely sentient. It's the fiery hot center of the populist brain rot of America. There aren't any arguments on the level of decoupled and rational justifications, it's all either complete misinformation that the CCP wish was a psyop because it would prove them far more capable than they are or friend enemy distinction with barely even a fig leaf of being about the actual building on the actual ground. I apologize for any doubt I had for Elon Musk's orbital data centers, the cold vacuum of space is clearly more hospitable than anywhere the american voter can influence.

I agree the arguments are usually dumb but how about this one: datacenters in general built by the hyperscalers have a good history but modern AI datacenters in particular are built in a hurry with little concern for local pollution or green energy commitments and small municipalities are at risk of being played off each other by level 50 lawyer sharks from trillion dollar corporations. They create few permanent jobs and nobody trusts the promised infrastructure improvements will actually materialize.

The specific arguments may be bad (water use being an obvious example), but that does not mean good arguments don't exist. Besides, the basic notion of "this will be costly in some way to my local community, while all the benefits will be reaped by billionaires with no connection to me and who I can't trust" seems pretty valid.

The solution to someone building infrastructure in your town for exporting, in this case bits, is that you get property taxes and some amount of job revenue. No different than if someone in your town sets up a factory selling widgets. Like these rustbelt towns that were hollowed out by sending jobs over seas sold a rounding error of their own car products to locals. All these same arguments could be made against building anything ever, they're fundamentally degrowth arguments.

Clearly people saw more benefit in opening local factories than they do in opening local datacenters. The amount of jobs created is probably the main thing for this specific comparison. A datacenter is really not bringing jobs to that many people, and the goal of the datacenter is actually to replace human jobs with AI. Something that could actually harm you in the long run.

Clearly people saw more benefit in opening local factories than they do in opening local datacenters.

Is this because of a rational calculation or because communist twitter artists have been throwing up a nonstop alarm since the second stable diffusion was able to generate furry smut art for pennies undermining their only marketable skill? Ok, maybe a bit of a specific case but it's clear that the position has been in from certain quarters that AI is to be opposed and these narratives have expanded from those quarters. If anything the out of the way town that has a datacenter being built is the last group of people who will have their labor automated. It's us white collars in urban areas that are in the first few waves.

Yes, data centers don't particularly bring long term employment(although notably not zero), the main case is property tax revenue. But it really can be a lot of revenue, and the capex is so massive that you can for a rounding error demand they employ a comparable number of security staff or whatever to a factory workforce if you really want to. Not that it wouldn't be more efficient to just demand more tax revenue. Of course they'll bid around and the towns will bid competitively, it's a market like anything else. My objection isn't that the towns shouldn't be playing hardball and looking out for themselves, it's that rather than letting them do this we've turned it into some kind of insane moral panic.

I'd even be behind outlawing the whole NDA practice, seems shady and isn't exclusive to data centers. The Datacenters bring a lot of potential wealth to the table and the towns have some leverage, this should be allowed to play out in an open market to a positive sum outcome. But it's really obvious that the people pushing back most aggressively don't give a single shit about these towns. They hate AI and that is the motivation.

Is this because of a rational calculation or because communist twitter artists have been throwing up a nonstop alarm since the second stable diffusion was able to generate furry smut art for pennies undermining their only marketable skill?

Let's not pretend that the heads of the AI companies haven't been boasting about the hundreds of thousands of jobs they've already eliminated, and the hundreds of thousands more they are soon to eliminate. Further, it's not like the vision of the future that these heads are selling (the best case scenario being that humans are some form of pet or cattle, to be dispensed on the whim of an AI overlord and the worst having already been tastefully adapted by James Cameron) are particularly attractive to these people either.

Further, it's not like the vision of the future that these heads are selling (the best case scenario being that humans are some form of pet or cattle, to be dispensed on the whim of an AI overlord and the worst having already been tastefully adapted by James Cameron) are particularly attractive to these people either.

Not spending a third or more of your life in toil should be attractive to everyone. Cattle, give me a break, the median American is working for some company whose mission they don't care about doing some cog level work. We work to live not live to work. A world where AI does all the meaningful work and lest the people living in luxory is a strict improvement to 99.9% of people and the remaining people that must position themselves as superior to other for self definition can do some neosport for the same sensation of superiority.

Not spending a third or more of your life in toil should be attractive to everyone.

It's attractive, but there's almost no shot of that happening even if the tech is everything people believe it is. Come on, man, these tech companies are run by sociopaths. If they have an incredible AI that can do the things they say, they will use it to put all of us peons in the dirt serving them. There's no outcome to this thing which results in "John Smith gets to live his best years in comfort", it's either "the tech doesn't actually work" or "the bastards in charge of the tech use it to screw us all".

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  1. I think a lot more people than you think derive meaning and value from their work. Maybe not a majority, but I'd say a large minority.

  2. I, and a lot of people, don't even believe AI will ever allow the majority of us to live in luxury. Personally, I believe that if AI were as good as it's touted as being, there will be a culling in the best case scenario. Worst case scenario would still be Skynet. (Bit of a tangent, but part of me actually thinks that if AI gave us functional immortality and infinite luxury, that that result might be a worse hell than any other. This isn't based on anything other than my feelings.) But if nothing changes, and things simply continue to be as they are, it would still be a disastrous result as that would mean that hundreds of thousands of people have lost and will lose their livelihoods and futures because we as a society were sold a bill of goods by an entire industry of charlatans.

All that is to say that we've sacrificed the livelihoods and futures of people today for future benefits that I don't think exist. And if these benefits do exist in the future, I don't think the vast majority of people will ever be party to them.

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and the remaining people that must position themselves as superior to other for self definition can do some neosport for the same sensation of superiority

This neosport has already been invented. It's called "politics".

Unfortunately for you, politics is a blood sport, and it's extremely popular. Men fight, women cheerlead.

The US did a case study 6 years ago about how long a population-wide UBI could buy peace in the face of mass unemployment.

The answer was about 3 months. After that, citizens started playing the aformentioned blood sport in city streets nationwide, and those games would continue even after the UBI ended.

You can tell yourself that it was only 0.01% of the population that was responsible for that, but I think 0.01% is closer to the number of how many city-dwellers didn't start chimping out.

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The communist twitter artists have good reason to be scared. Art jobs are already being impacted by AI. Living off art commissions might actually be straight up impossible in the near future if it isn't already. Standing firmly against a clear threat to your livelihood is reasonable. Generally, AI is hyped because of the promise that it will automate away most of our labor. If the opposition is fueled by fear that this is correct, then that actually explains the denial of AI capabilities quite well. Once you admit an LLM can do your job cheaper and with comparable results, then you are going to be replaced. Of course people oppose this with every tool in their arsenal. This results in bad faith arguments, but the basic standpoint still makes sense.

Regarding your point about property taxes, I agree there should be a point at which the company pays enough to offset local damages while also sharing some of the wealth it earns with the community in question. If there was some guarantee this would happen, I also imagine much of the anti-datacenter sentiment would die down wnough to allow for easy construction. The fact that it hasn't, shows that the builders of datacenters are not yet bidding high enough.

The communist twitter artists have good reason to be scared. Art jobs are already being impacted by AI. Living off art commissions might actually be straight up impossible in the near future if it isn't already. Standing firmly against a clear threat to your livelihood is reasonable.

Yes, it's reasonable, in that I can articulate reasons for it. But the reasons are ludditism and anti-progress, this isn't hypoerbole, this is what the luddites preached and practiced. We ought want labor to be automated, this is how all progress has happened. We should also demand that some of these gains be redistributed to those replaced at first and the population in general in time. But once we can replace toil we ought to. Work is not an ends, it's a means to an ends. Demands to spend a third or more of your life doing labor to survive when a machine could do it instead is insanity. Work will not set us free.

The fact that it hasn't, shows that the builders of datacenters are not yet bidding high enough.

The demand of the anti-datacenter group is not "bid higher" it is go away and die. The propose moratoriums, not taxes or standards. If all the demand was was that AI companies be taxed at some reasonable rate then I'd have absolutely no problem with the demands.

Yes, it's reasonable

This is notably contrary to your initial statement calling them idiots and claimed there were no rational justification. From the perspective of self-preservation, then there clearly is a rational argument against AI. It will take your job and leave you with nothing.

The demand of the anti-datacenter group is not "bid higher" it is go away and die.

"Fuck off" is a natural response when you don't believe the other side is going to offer anything reasonable. If they instead would enter into negotiations with a meaningful offer, the tune would probably change. If you are trying to get someone to do something for you (in this case let you set up datacenters) it is common sense that you should have a clear answer when they ask what is in it for them.

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What about locals who worry about themselves suffering if the datacenter generates noise, increases electricity, etc.? Even when the company makes promises, what would their small town do if they’re ignored?

Sure, many people are upset because of the vague threat of AI dystopia or ingroup alignment, and use the above concerns as a more practical excuse, but still they seem like serious concerns.

On the very local level it's a matter of case by case decisions. The NDAs were a bad decision from the beginning and it sounds like basically everyone recognizes that now. Obviously if they're venting diesel exhaust on your home then I'm not going to defend that, but these problems are no different than any conceivable industrial buildout of any sort and they have mundane solutions. The promises ought to be in enforceable contracts.

None of these concerns can account for the super majority of people who oppose construction of datacenters anywhere and statewide moratoriums.

The promises ought to be in enforceable contracts

I think one of the big problems here is, ostensibly they might be, but people saw how these companies will threaten lawfare against small towns to effectively either a) force them to build it with effectively 0 restrictions and major tax abatements or b) drown them in legal fees and then do the first bit anyway. If you don't trust that the legal system is gonna work in your favor even if you are completely in the right, better to not get in that situation in the first place.

And if you're in a historically industrial area, there is probably still the memory of things like '08 where the companies just left for good, leaving the community to clean up the mess.

It's a very low trust system, and at least in my opinion, that distrust is more than earned.

I think one of the big problems here is, ostensibly they might be, but people saw how these companies will threaten lawfare against small towns

The small town is the legal system. I'm sure you can marshal some individual situations from the past but seriously, you think the kind of society that is willing to vote for data center moratoriums is going to have judges and juries who will just allow corporations to bully small towns? Anything unreasonably would be national news and have many millions of dollars in legal funds even if it was half misinformation. You can't get screwed over by a lego reseller without being able to raise millions in a go fund me.

And if you're in a historically industrial area, there is probably still the memory of things like '08 where the companies just left for good, leaving the community to clean up the mess.

I'm sure I've read the same articles you have. The biggest example of this is where the prospective Datacenter is the only entity since this event willing to fund the clean up after almost twenty years. Is your argument seriously that small towns should just give up economically and die rather than ever taking a gamble at industry again? Seriously, what possible investment opportunity passes this test? How is this view different from degrowth?

It's a very low trust system, and at least in my opinion, that distrust is more than earned.

Distrust can't be cumulative and global. Someone somewhere is always going to be being betrayed. There's eight billion of us. Yes, investments have failed in the past, it used to be that whole mining towns found nothing and died. That rate of failure has been decreasing over time but we'll still have failures. You can't just cancel all progress forever because it's not a sure thing. We'd never do anything. It's just safetyism. The logical end is everyone being locked in a padded cell as until the last of us dies out because any risk might lead to a tragedy.

Anti-datacenter people are barely sentient.

Really? You can't conceive of a single rational argument people might have against data centers?

You have some feelings, evidently. I don't disagree with the direction of your argument. But this is pure flailing boo-outgroup and weakmanning. This kind of flaming verbal grenade doesn't invite discussion, it's just saying "I have an opinion and fuck you if your opinion is different." It's really hard to build any kind of discussion from that.

I can invent some, like the exercise of trying to invent reasons to believe in flat earth. But nothing I invent will be something they actual believe and what they actually believe makes them enemies of our civilization. At some point you have to interact with the degrowth luddite in front of you rather than some invented Yuddite that has been genetically engineered with an inability to think 4 seconds and realize that AI won't be stopped just because the data centers aren't able to be built locally. What they actually believe, as demonstrated by the OP are insane theories about water loss, that actually nothing should ever be built again, damn the economy(also they are very mad about the bad economy and deinitialization[they would of course have voted against industrialization in the first place given half a chance]), or fracking style fake videos of tap water that lights on fire. There are of course going to be some instances of datacenters, like all infrastructure, being rushed and poorly planned/constructed and they'll pretend that this represents all data centers.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter, they wrote the bottom line first and are reasoning backwards. This is clear. They hate tech, progress and change. To ascribe to them a rational arguments would be to lie about what they believe.

I know people who genuinely oppose data centers for real reasons. I think their reasons are mostly incorrect, and sometimes I argue with them, but they do really believe these things, they are not lying about their opposition, and they are not (all) degrowth luddites.

It's becoming entirely too popular hereabouts to just lead with "My position is right, and people opposed to my position are all bad faith liars who don't actually believe what they say they do, they are just NPCs who hate Western civilization and God and sunlight."

It's a very satisfying thing to believe. It makes it easy to caricature your enemies as unthinking orcs who can be dismissed as evil stupid liars. You don't have to steelman everybody, but when I can see with my own eyes that yes, people actually are angry about data centers for real reasons, I know you summarily categorizing them all as "barely sentient" is just venting anger at your outgroup. And when I note certain people taking a side that I think is mostly comprised of bad-faith liars, and I have to charitably assume some of them are sincere, I feel no guilt at all in telling you to do the same thing.

I know people who genuinely oppose data centers for real reasons. I think their reasons are mostly incorrect, and sometimes I argue with them, but they do really believe these things, they are not lying about their opposition, and they are not (all) degrowth luddites.

I'm not accusing them of lying, I'm accusing them of being full blown in the middle of moral panic. Like someone raving that D&D is an initiation into a secret satanic cult. The internet is flush with arguments against their insane ramblings, ironically a query to free chatgpt will rebut all the claims with many sources. They don't care and are immune these arguments because the arguments aren't the point. I'm not generally a fan of bolverism but what do you do when the afflicted sees your D&D starter box and start howling in a way that no offer to let them examine the contents can quiet?

I can embarrass a bad faith liar by rebutting their points, but those in a moral panic? They don't spread their ideas by making good arguments. Nothing anyone says to the OP with convince them that Datacenters are not only fine but a sign that our nation finally has the will and energy to build things again. It's not even about them as individuals, it's a sickness that I'm helplessly watching consume my society. The woke surge followed by the Trump backlash and now a socialists backlash to the backlash. I'm losing faith that the fever will break and that we don't have a fatal auto-immune disease.

I don't know what the cure is, but I do know telling people who have already heard it a thousand times that datacenters do not obliterate water from the universe won't do it because I've witnessed too many times that they'll nod along, change to a different point and 5 minutes later you'll catch them repeating that datacenters are going to cause droughts.

You can't conceive of a single rational argument people might have against data centers?

There are plenty, but they aren't the true objections, @aquota is correct to point this out and doesn't deserve the angry red response.

He could have used polite motte-speak, such as «they are operating mainly off of cognitive bias instead of evidence-oriented Bayesian updating.»

From "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" by Paul Roberts:

CALL A FOOL A FOOL

Some of the padding in freshman themes is to be blamed not on anxiety about the word minimum but on excessive timidity. The student writes, “In my opinion, the principal of my high school acted in ways that I believe every unbiased person would have to call foolish.” This isn't exactly what he means. What he means is, “My high school principal was a fool.” If he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with “in-­my-­opinion's” and “it­-seems-­to-­me's” and “as-­I-­see-­it's” and “at­-least-­from-­my-­point-­of-­view's” gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they creep into your paper.

And from "Rationality and the English Language" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

If you really want an artist’s perspective on rationality, then read Orwell; he is mandatory reading for rationalists as well as authors. Orwell was not a scientist, but a writer; his tools were not numbers, but words; his adversary was not Nature, but human evil. If you wish to imprison people for years without trial, you must think of some other way to say it than “I’m going to imprison Mr. Jennings for years without trial.” You must muddy the listener’s thinking, prevent clear images from outraging conscience. You say, “Unreliable elements were subjected to an alternative justice process.”

One of the worst things about The Motte is how the moderation pushes people into writing verbose, obfuscated, bloodless posts in order to avoid getting punished for being uncivil or writing a low-effort post. Words words words should not be a requirement of a good comment.

You are missing the point. We don't tell you you can't say someone is a fool and instead you should say they are expressing views that some people might regard as foolish. We are saying that you cannot just equate "I think you're wrong" with "You're a fool." Some people are indeed fools, but the bar for calling people names that dismisses any need to actually engage with them is high, by design.

Hedging the thing about with “in­my­opinion's” and “it­seems­to­me's” and “as­I­see­it's” and “at­least­from­my­point­of­view's” gains you nothing.

What it gains you is an explicit admission that your opinion is an opinion, not an immutable fact of the universe. This is actually very helpful for keeping a clear head during the heat of disputations.

Na, I'm guilty of this one. Can't accuse people of being barely sentient. a couple too many old fashions last night celebrating the wife's birthday left me without the patience to put it more softly.

It's amusing that you project "anger" as hard as you can, when I am very rarely angry. Occasionally annoyed. Mostly tired.

they aren't the true objections

By your own admission, there are plenty of rational arguments. It should be obvious that some people actually believe those arguments.

You may believe that most people objecting to data centers are bad faith conflict theorists, and unlike you, I won't pretend I've surveyed them to have an educated guess how true that is, but since unlike you I am not a bad faith conflict theorist, I will continue to enforce the rules here, which are that if you want to assert your ideological opponents are 100% wrong, evil, and lying, bring evidence ("my seething hatred" is not evidence) or dial it down.

I can only speak for the data centers I've been involved with, but it has amazed me how little effort has been put into trying to counter or at least mitigate the most excessive claims of critics. Frankly, the complacency of these tech companies is kind of driving me crazy, though I have some ideas I want to push. We don't need to make people like data centers, we just need more people to utter the words "I don't like data centers, but..."

I'll paraphrase something I read on Twitter recently: Currently, 80 IQ cartel narcoterrorists have a better idea of civic duty that the tech oligarchs. When your town gets taken over by the cartel, at least they bring electricity, hospitals, running water, and a level of stability. Because even the lowest scum drug runner knows that they need to at least give something back to the community they exist in. Tech oligarchs will go into a community, drive up utility prices, and call anyone who isn't enthusiastically supportive a luddite who deserves to rot in the permanent underclass. In this way, the drug cartels are closer to the likes of John D. Rockefeller than anyone alive in Silicon Valley.

Sean Davis?

The problem with this is the electricity rate increases haven't actually materialized. They're all projections. And future impacts, in theory and in practice, fairly easy to avoid; the permitting authority has to structure things so the data center pays their own way. This should not be that hard, the data center builders currently have a lot of cash to throw around. So it amounts to a opposition talking point, like the water.

the permitting authority has to structure things so the data center pays their own way

'No, in fact, you do have to give us the tax break we demanded first, or else we will sue you into the ground'.

Good luck with that one Nybbler, so long as deep pockets can hire shark lawyers to tie things up in court for years.

Now, they do have the soothing messaging out about how they won't use water, drive up energy costs, will provide tons of jobs, etc. and I'd be more inclined to believe them if they hadn't first gone for "we'll sue you into the ground and destroy you and leave you penniless if you don't zone this land for a data centre".

A guy who assures me he was only joking about cutting my throat when he had the knife to my neck may be telling the truth, but he's not going to convince me he loved me and had my best interests at heart when he threatened to cut my throat.

"No, in fact, you do have to give us the tax break we demanded first, or else we will sue you into the ground."

The lawsuit documents indicate that the situation is more complicated than that. As alleged by the company:

(1) The company buys a bunch of farmland in an agricultural zone, and applies for "conditional rezoning" to a light industrial zone with special restrictions to prevent any industry other than a data center. Apparently, conditional rezoning is, not some unusual and onerous demand, but merely Michigan's equivalent to the "conditional use" or "special exception" that one might see in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.

(2) The municipal planning commission fails to make a legitimate consideration of the application, but merely recommends in an arbitrary and capricious manner that the municipal council reject it.

(3) The municipal council rejects the application by a vote of four to one. All five members participate in the vote, even though the chair previously recused himself from discussions on this topic due to a conflict of interest.

(4) The company sues the municipal govt., under state precedent that forbids "exclusionary zoning" of a use from land that is suitable for that use. The municipal govt. settles, agreeing to approve both the conditional rezoning and a 12-year "industrial development district" tax exemption.

(5) The municipal govt. approves the tax exemption, but then removes it, in what certainly seems like an obvious contravention of the lawsuit settlement.

That has nothing to do with this. Nybbler is saying ‘there is no need for data centres to use public electricity as long as the public authority lets them build generators’.

No, I'm not saying that, not in this subthread. It probably actually makes more sense for all concerned for them to use grid power and pay to have the capacity built and attached to the grid. This is going to make for a complicated arrangement but big deals often are. What I'm saying in this subthread is that data centers have not caused electricity rate increases.

Data centers can use locally generated power, but that's where you do get noise issues and local air quality issues. If the DC is going to use local power all the time (not just when the grid connection -- often multiple -- fails) the municipality needs to treat it as a power plant, which probably restricts a lot more where it can be built.

I see, sorry for misrepresenting you.

I work in energy (electricity) and this is part true and part untrue. Yes, electricity prices have gone up modestly, with bigger increases projected in the next 5 years.

The reasons prices are set to increase is that we are really slow to put new generation on the grid. And the amount of data centers under construction, let alone planned, is much bigger than what is already operational.

It’s a very simple supply and demand function. Load increases faster than supply. DCs buy power through PPA contracts directly with generators. But that crowds out offtake from the generators that would otherwise go to merchant markets or supply agreements with utilities.

We are average at best at building new power supply.

I expect retail electricity prices to be electoral politics by 2030, maybe even 2028.

This feels somewhat constrained to the local regulatory environment. We can just make investments in the grid faster. In the last two decades, total US nameplate capacity is up 20-30%, while ERCOT (Texas) is up over 100%. They don't want you to know this, but you can just build things: Texas is more friendly to renewables than California these days!

True in Texas. Not true in mid Atlantic and northeast. Sure we can just build things. We can also go to mars or cut Medicare and social security. But we’re not going to. For many many reasons.

And I’m not sure if you realize this, but increasing nameplate capacity 30% in 2 decades is absolutely awful.

And I’m not sure if you realize this, but increasing nameplate capacity 30% in 2 decades is absolutely awful.

That's fair, although IIRC per-capita consumption has declined (mostly through improvements in efficiency --- lighting, HVAC efficiency, better insulation, etc), so it's not quite as dire as it sounds.

But Abbot says there's too many applications for new power connections so he's not going to consider any of them. Brilliant move. Politically, anyway

I think Abbott is at least partially swaying with the political winds here, but ERCOT's 100% increase in the last two decades pales in comparison to their forecast of 300% growth in the next 6 years. I think there are probably legitimate questions of capacity buildout at much higher rates than baseline, and "not committing to anything further" doesn't sound entirely foolish.

On the third (gripping) hand, I really question the hyperscaler economic case where they're able to pay N times the current price for huge amounts of energy, but the proles will still have enough money to pay them for AI services and for utilities. I don't know about everyone else, but "paying to chat with Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT" falls pretty low on Maslow's heirarchy of needs for me, well behind "keep the lights on and HVAC going". Even if they expect B2B to pay the bills, consumers are still an important part (ultimately, the endpoint) of the economy: it can't be B2B all the way down. Models are getting more efficient and I somewhat expect that quite a few use cases need less hardware than currently forecast.

It's pretty obvious all of those DCs aren't going to be built, at least not any time soon (within the next few years); the hardware can't be built that fast and there isn't enough construction capacity. But a moratorium means you're doing none of them.

Existing electricity price increases aren't correlated to data center builds, however. And of course we're slow to put new generation on the grid; environmentalists.

Making datacenters build grid improvements is a real idea that's been floated around.

If you make them build grid improvements (which amounts to money and partnerships with existing firms which do such things; they're not going to do the actual grid improvements any more than Microsoft is restarting TMI), but don't LET them build grid improvements (because environment, safety, union work rules, etc), you've just banned them in a more complicated way.

But datacenters obviously will get built, even if people don't like it- tying grid improvements to them is the best way to make sure grid improvements actually happen.

More comments

It’s worse than environmentalists. If it was just that I’d have some hope. It’s the bureaucracy, regulation, cost disease, NIMBYism, and a general atrophy of industrial construction capacity.

Existing electricity price increases aren't correlated to data center builds

I don’t understand your point. Please elaborate. Evan assuming your point is accurate, I don’t think it matters.

You talked about how there has been no (little?) electricity price increase increase to date and that it’s only future price projections that have increased. I can assure you that when a power plant in 2026 is signing a 15-25 year power purchase agreement, those future energy price projections are the #1 thing they’re basing their price negotiations on. There’s a handful of companies that put out these projections and everyone makes long term financials decisions on them. The feedback loop on how these contracts affect the current price of power should be obvious, but I can elaborate if needed.

I’m starting to see this as a big L for Singerite utilitarianism. Anthropic and OpenAI were both founded for an ostensibly charitable purpose. Some of this is cynical posturing, but I think most of the key people genuinely feel like they have an obligation to be charitable with the windfall from the technology they are building. A normal company fulfills their social obligation for charity by sponsoring local little league teams, the regional food bank, parks, and schools, but since Anthropic (and to an extent OpenAI) are Singerite utilitarians, they see local feel-good projects like these as “ineffective” altruism.

Would buying cans of beans for food kitchens and jerseys for the local little leagues actually help?

My gut is mostly "I don't know." But it seems plausible enough that they should have gone for it, purely for the utilitarian reason that it gives them more ability to pursue whatever their objective utility is more effectively, at a cost that would be a rounding error in their budgets.

That is very stupid, but such is life.

Would buying cans of beans for food kitchens and jerseys for the local little leagues actually help?

It's signalling, but it's signalling that demonstrates "hey, we consider ourselves part of the local community and are invested here". People trust you more when they feel like you aren't just a big faceless corporation headquartered thousands of miles away who could decide in the morning to shut down the plant, move the 1,500 jobs to China, and leave the town with the fallout of all that.

We might as well drop your framing here and note that the thing you're suggesting they "should" be doing is bribing various local power players to discourage them from raising a stink. That isn't even ineffective altruism, it's just classic old corruption.

No, people feel like the bribing of the local power players is already baked in (e.g. big landowner gets nice windfall for selling the land, mayor etc. get nice bonuses and advantages for also being involved as estate agents and the likes (wife's cousin got $$$$$$ commission for handling the deal type corruption). They expect the officials who promise big tax breaks and re-zoning to be bought off. They also expect that when the time to pay the piper comes due, they are the ones who will be left holding the bag.

What helping the local junior sports teams and donating to charity does is spread that largesse around and give tangible benefits to plain Joe and Jill Schmoe and the little Schmoes. It may not even be a rounding error for the corporation but "the parents don't have to fundraise to pay for new jerseys and equipment this year" does make a difference to the little league team.

Ok, but you can't even make this criticism yet because they haven't even built the stuff. You're just assuming no one is sponsoring the local little league team.

This is too broad of a definition of "bribe." Food drives, little league, and the like are a way of buying good PR that's existed for the better part of the last 100 years and to a certain extent, does actually make the community better. programs like these are simply ways of reminding the community that actually, the nameless, faceless corporation that has taken over a part of the town does bring benefits to the town. For the likes of OpenAI, this type of good PR is especially important because unlike the factories of old, they don't actually bring that many jobs to the local community. When done correctly, the community itself views the company as a pillar of the community. They actually want the company to be involved in events. The loss of the company is actually seen as a loss to the community.

These guys need to offer $30/hr to wash dishes in the cafeteria. Yes, it's way above market, but it's the equivalent of spreading money around from a helicopter- people like it.

Those jobs will probably be outsourced to whatever the American equivalent of Sodexo is, but what the local economy will get is the support jobs (as The Barn promises on its website):

2,500+ union construction jobs, 450 permanent high-skill onsite jobs, and 1,500+ additional county-wide jobs for Michigan families.

The "high-skill onsite jobs" will most likely go to the college educated sales, marketing, management, and AI wrangler types, but they'll need things from the local community. Like going out to cafés and restaurants and buying gas at local stations and 'is there any night life around here' and 'can I buy a cheap house' and the likes. Local farmers will hope to sell produce to the facilities management company, local employment for on-site cleaning etc. You won't get $30/hr for washing dishes in the cafeteria, but you will have the chance of "you can get flexible hours/part-time hours job locally so you can continue to run the household while your husband works full-time, but now both of you are not relying solely on his wages alone" work.

whatever the American equivalent of Sodexo is,

Sodexo exists in the US. There might be others, though.

And when these tech companies do give something back to the community or go above and beyond to mitigate externalities, they too often just don't tell anybody what they're doing. It's highly frustrating.

We did have a thread about this a few weeks ago.

A big problem for the AI companies is that, while the main issues with data centers can be solved with more infrastructure buildout (more power generation, more transmission lines, more water plants), it turns out that people don't like infrastructure buildout either!. Its true that the footprint of the data centers themselves are quite small in the grand scheme of rural American land use, but once you start building cross-county high-voltage power lines, gas turbines, gas pipelines, and water lines, you end up stepping on a lot of landowners' toes.

The power issue is not trivial. The 2024 Situational Awareness paper predicted that in a permissive regulatory structure, AI power demand in 2030 would be 100% of total US electricity generation in 2024. We would need to double electricity production in six years to keep up. That breaks things. That generates meaningful pollution. This scenario will almost certainly not play out (for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious), but it is true than many AI techbros want this to play out.

Situational Awareness was asinine and premised on much shorter timelines. No way you're having 500 GW of AI capacity by 2030 no matter what regulatory climate – you start hitting all sorts of earlier bottlenecks. Due to shortages in the supply chain, Nvidia and others have been forced to expand their qualifications to Chinese companies, and even those are strained now. Eg there's a huge issue with Vera Rubin PCBs. It basically doesn't matter how many chips can be produced or how eager Americans are to permit new construction. The scale of industry as such in the world is just not enough for AI capex demands.

But those other bottlenecks also create externalities for everyone else, essentially increasing the prices of any products they use anywhere down the distribution chain. Given a long enough time-span with stable demand the supply could catch up to meet it and regular consumers, but with AI advancing so rapidly we're not really giving anything any time to settle down.

well, of course it's systemically disruptive, and in particular consumers are getting priced out by competition for the capacity upstream of consumer goods. My point is solely that building up 500GW worth of AI compute in the US by 2030 is so hard physically that the anti-datacenter folks are almost a rounding error. It's a planetary supply bottleneck. I suspect that even if China could book all of TSMC they wouldn't be able to do that either.

Notionally, if we build out the grid as if usage will double, if they don't we can expect prices to fall. This would among other things be otherwise convenient for environmentalists, because much of the added power (certainly the cheapest marginally) will be solar/wind, and we need a bigger grid to support EVs and heat pumps, and cheaper power makes both more attractive.

No, the opposite will happen. You will have larger capital investments to pay off and a snake customer base to do so, so rates will go up. Saw this happen locally - when the big factory which used a large percentage of municipal water production shut down, water rates went way up. Eventually they will downsize but until then the bonds need to be paid and a larger-than-necessary facility needs to be operated.

Yup, definitely missed that one. Thanks for linking, will have a read now

Building on some observations I've seen made elsewhere (that data center/AI types need to learn how to earn loyalty in local communities), I think that AI datacenters would have people clamoring for them if their argument was as follows:

  • We need to build a datacenter somewhere in your rural community. It will be out of the way where no one will see it.
  • We need to power this datacenter, which consumes enough electrical power for about 250,000 homes. We are going to build our own nuclear reactor to do so. It will also be out of the way where no one will see it.
  • Our nuclear power plant produces enough power for 300,000 homes.
  • That means we will have excess power we will need to sell off, and we're willing to lock in a below-market price for 30 years if you let us break ground in two weeks

Unfortunately I'm not sure that the nascent small modular reactor pipeline is robust enough to make such an offer economical yet.

If your bringing your own power, the US does have huge tracts of land in various places with little to no residents to speak of -- granted the stereotype of this being sun-blasted desert is not altogether wrong, but there are plenty of places with normal climates where you can literally just buy a bunch of land and start doing stuff. I guess some proximity to users is desirable, but I regularly use 'datacentres' (AKA AWS servers) that are physically pretty far from me, and the latency doesn't seem like it would be a big deal from (say) Montana to SFBA?

Coming soon on Yellowstone -- Sam & Dario move to Bozeman and compete to lease the ranch from Chief Rainwater; Cowboys & Indians with Rationalists!

(BRB, calling my agent...)

Extremely low latency is what you want for serving customers but it doesn't matter much for training or infrastructure tasks. But you do need a LOT of bandwidth regardless, and I don't know if it's practical to provide that to the blasted (or unblasted) bits of nowhere.

Fibre is cheap compared to nuke plants (or even transmission lines) -- failing that, I know a guy with a pretty nice fleet of satellites...

This is a neat scenario, but recall that the current reality is that data centers create a great deal of additional demand for electricity, which raises prices. I agree that an easy solution would be for data centers to loudly and publicly pay well above-market rates that subsidize other businesses/residents, but it does not seem to be the case. In the data center heavy Mid-Atlantic PMJ, for example, approximately half of the large increase in rates is from data center demand.

recall that the current reality is that data centers create a great deal of additional demand for electricity, which raises prices.

Precisely, that's why I think flipping the script and making each data center a net electricity producer would be such good PR (and also just generally a good thing.)

But this would cost data center owners money. Are they actually going to do this?

But this would cost data center owners money.

It also costs them money (at least in opportunity) to not have data centers built.

Are they actually going to do this?

Probably not.

Nobody is going to be clamoring for this once you say the word "nuclear". People are terrified of nuclear power; they think every plant is a Chernobyl waiting to happen.

That's a separate problem, and possibly the most divorced public opinion is from reality on almost any topic out there.

I suspect that there are places that would be perfectly happy to have SMRs. I doubt opposition is equally distributed.

They think everyone is a Chernobyl waiting to happen.

Remember: the average Western citizen is so bad at risk management that they'll gladly support a currency devaluation of 30% to avoid the worst of a bad flu season.

Correction, they'll gladly support a currency devaluation of 30% to create the perception of avoiding the worst of a bad flu season.

Nuclear power plants now have a higher standing in public opinion than datacenters.

As they should, CMV.

Nuclear power should be at 100% approval, so it's impossible that datacenters should rank higher.

Is this a sarcastic point about how much everyone hates datacenters, or are nuclear plants genuinely getting more popular?

So, nuclear power, at least according to these Gallup polls do seem to be getting more popular somewhat (37% for "more emphasis" in 2013, 46% in 2026). Using this one because it's the one that I can find on hand that has a timeseries

However, I do think their general point was related to the fact that datacenters have, according to the Heatmap News polls referenced in these graphics just have terrible polling (15% show any type of support, with strong support at 4%), compared to the energy polling they did which shows 44% support (with 21% being strong support)

They are genuinely more popular now. See Cremieux's post linked above:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2090182398247858595/photo/1

62% of people object to datacenters, 57% to nuclear power plants. And 27% of people would support a datacenter being built, while 34% would support a nuclear power plant.

Cool, thanks for linking.

As somebody who lives near a few data center build outs, this would be a massive improvement over the current stance from the builders and municipal governments, which is "go fuck yourself, peasant".

I think often companies would do much better in the long run if they embraced a pro-community pro-public attitude, by which I mean tangible things that benefited the community they happen to be in and reliable, steady employment, not giving an employee match to random nonprofits.

Which is, ironically, the steelman of "company towns".

Of course, the problem with that is that (stereotype of these places aside) unlike towns of old built around resource extraction using significant amounts of unskilled labor, data centers require minimal amounts of skilled labor.

It wouldn't occur to them to build or rebuild the town in which they locate the data center. They wouldn't even know what to do with one.

Add a workplace cafeteria paying $30+/hr. Add some nice grounds taking a few full time gardeners.

It wouldn't occur to them to build or rebuild the town in which they locate the data center.

I might be being unfair, as I have not been tracking this closely, but it doesn't even seem to occur to them to hire local. Sure, datacenters only create a few jobs, but you still need landscaping, grounds, maintenance, security, and all of those plus ground-level IT work can probably be had by hiring a local management company or contractors. And you can make it very clear you intend to do this by getting them all on conditional contracts or just asking them their prices. Starting with "I will hire you as soon as the city council makes up their mind" rather than waiting to see what the city council decides to do is the sort of thing that changes the dynamics in your favor.

The IBEW, at least, is upset at the New York moratorium. I assume they're more upset at the missing construction jobs than anything permanent, but when as many data centers are planned as proponents dream about and opponents fear, such jobs can be expected to be available for a long time.

But little of the data center opposition is about this. It's nice for the opponents that data centers create few permanent jobs, but most of the opposition is pure irrational fear stoked by propagandists.

I think this is right, but they pretty obviously increase electrical load pretty dramatically, and providing their own power just seems smart, both to preempt criticism and to secure a long-term supply that isn't reliant on market fluctuation. Plus, it's more secure.

I'd also be want to look very closely into how they planned to acquire their water if they were asking to build one near me, not because I think water disappears when it evaporates, but because we happen to have preexisting water management problems in my area and a massive open-cycle facility could be expected to make those worse. Obviously that's not going to be a universal problem, but it is a real one in some places.

I think this is right, but they pretty obviously increase electrical load pretty dramatically, and providing their own power just seems smart, both to preempt criticism and to secure a long-term supply that isn't reliant on market fluctuation. Plus, it's more secure.

Nobody who opposes data centers would support them if they brought their own power.

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No and fundamentally it’s because people can’t act rationally on issues. The human brain just doesn’t have enough horsepower to analyze the veracity of those type of statements when there are 100’s of things going on in the world today. You just don’t have time to analyze if the outside tribe is going to do something that ends up fucking you. The outside tribe is also the people who promised you “just gay marriage” and you got “inch time pride and chopping off your sons penis”, the same people who have some responsibility for closing the factories, the people who told you Hunters Laptop was from Russia, the people who dumped Somalian migrants in your home town, etc etc.

It just becomes an easier mental modal to assume whatever they promise will end up hurting you. The truth is on most issues humans need to run things on vibes. The other side can hire people to spend all their time figuring out how to make arguments while you have limited time to research issues.

I don't think you're correct in this case. If SMR tech was good enough that the above could be economically promised, I think it would be very effective. Cash talks. I live in the sort of place that people would like to build a data center and I know how they think and it's not particularly hard or expensive (in the big scheme of things) to countersignal those things you are talking about.

I don't bet but I actually would put skin in the game on this one, if you're a data center constructor frustrated by local sentiment in a rural area in the United States and you want help with PR, my DMs are open.

I don’t understand the anti data center view and mostly take Trumps support. The water arguments seem false to me. I don’t understand energy but it does seem like they use a lot. I am mostly just commenting on vibes and the vibes being we don’t trust outsiders I can understand.

Basically the only one who didn't respond in a politically obvious way was Trump in a presser who was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country

I really hope Democrats do that. As a Republican this seems like it would be the biggest free political gift of the decade. Take a brand new issue very much open for debate and give the best side to President Trump, the most skilled political messenger of a generation.

It seems like a no-brainer. On balance, the current panic will almost certainly pass. The future is a debate between an expanding, triumphant vision of more energy and processing and building a new world, or a reactionary vision scared of change and unwilling to countenance any. Please, please give us this, I would love for Republicans to be the bold party with a new vision of industry.

I don’t think this will go the way you imagine it will. At least, there’s a lot of room for people to change their minds. I don’t think it will help that the concerns about water and toxins are basically fake news. The challenge that AI will rapidly change society is more serious and I think there are a lot of serious anxieties mixed in with that. But if one party wants to retrench and back away and the other wants to go forward into the future that seems like a free gift to me, no matter what the polling looks like right now, thank you, thank you!

On balance, the current panic will almost certainly pass

It won't pass because it's being sustained externally. Imagine if all the 5G paranoids, instead of being opposed and marginalized by the mainstream propaganda organs, were instead being supported by them. That's most of the data center opposition. Whispering campaigns, articles about how datacenters cause miscarriages, even people dropping in on obscure forums to talk about how genuine it is.

I don’t think this will go the way you imagine it will. At least, there’s a lot of room for people to change their minds. I don’t think it will help that the concerns about water and toxins are basically fake news. The challenge that AI will rapidly change society is more serious and I think there are a lot of serious anxieties mixed in with that.

I think the problem is that a good portion of the public has these points precisely backwards. They believe in the stupid water and toxin points, while believing that AI is all empty hype that will surely end in a rapture-like bubble pop that will magic everything away and make all technology revert back to 2021 again.

I've had frustrating discussions with people in my life who say that all the data center build out isn't worth it for "a better search engine." I had to make the point that if it is all hype, then they don't need to worry about the environmental effects of data centers, as we'll have a 5-10 year period of build up and usage and then all the infrastructure will be shut down and put on moth balls. The idea that LLMs and generative AI might actually be something new and interesting is not very widespread.

Heck, my D&D group has people who think that Mythos-tier cybercapabilities literally do not exist, and I still have art friends who act as if bad hands are an inevitability for AI art.

The prevalence of really easily-debunked claims is a sign that this will eventually pass. It looks bad now when people are so confidently wrong because it implies they can never be corrected. You can never reason someone out of something they were never reasoned into, but time makes more converts than reason anyways.

It’s fairly easy to make mistakes about what’s real, it happens all the time, but as something becomes more obvious it becomes harder to deny. It’s fine if your friends currently don’t believe in AI capabilities that factually exist. The fact that they do exist will become more and more apparent. The only two options are for them to eventually admit the truth or become crazier and crazier. That might not seem like much, your friends can be wrong forever and it probably won’t affect them much. But it can’t be the basis for a stable long-term political coalition.

People have been denying the validity of the law of supply and demand for centuries (1 2). The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Where do you put me, in that I think that data centres themselves are mostly harmless, but also that so-called 'AI' is mostly useless?

Lacking in a bit of imagination and a bit too #nothingeverhappens pilled, but fundamentally reasonable and relying on heuristics that have generally been useful. A year from now, I expect you'll respond to new evidence as it comes in (or enjoy some well-earned gloating time).

The same way that I think of AI boosters as being too credulous, I suppose. I grant that there are some niche uses for the technology that we have seen thus far, but the claims people make about its potential so absurdly exceed anything it has been capable to do thus far, and anything that it looks like it might realistically be able to do in the near-to-medium-term, that I mostly just shake my head at the whole field.

Maybe I'm wrong. When we're all uploaded to the cloud and colonising Proxima Centauri, I'll apologise, I guess.

I suppose the other half of it is a disagreement about the merits of the technology - for instance, considering purely the technology that exists right now (and not guessing anything about the future), I think that it is net a bad thing that LLMs exist.

I think being AI skeptical is fine up to a point.

Doubting AI can do things it has been able to do for four months is different from doubting capabilities we haven't seen yet, and might never see. I think there are smart reasons to believe AI might never be significantly more capable than it is (though I don't agree with this position.)

Even from a pure business perspective, I'm open to the idea that AI might be a bubble. But I have forced myself to watch Youtube videos by people confidently predicting that AI will all go away when the bubble pops because it is too expensive to run, and I just feel like they genuinely haven't done the first bit of research on the topic. Like, how hard is it to find out about local models for both text and images?

At the very least, now that these things are out in the wild, there's no way that the open weight LLM and image model genie is ever going back in the bottle. The unit economics of frontier AI may never work, but AI slop is here forever.

The unit economics of frontier AI may never work, but AI slop is here forever.

Man, if AI levels out at "making all digital public spaces unusable due to a slop overload" I think I'd rather take the paperclips.

I think there are smart reasons to believe AI might never be significantly more capable than it is (though I don't agree with this position.)

Even at current capabilities AI is transformative. A jack of all trades better than the median human in all of them for 25$ a month that can work 24/7 with information - I am not sure that when it comes to industrialization of physical labor we had seen such jump.

All AI development stops today - the knowledge work and science are transformed. Pun intended.

But is the price $25 a month? I'm seeing stories about how the AI companies are now charging more, and charging on tiers where if you want the best model you have to pay the premium price.

Part of the general doubt is that we were sold the line "cheap miracle" and it's increasingly becoming neither cheap nor a miracle. I do think an AI economy is coming, I don't think it will be "AI will get so smart and recursively self-improving that it can replace nearly all human labour, increase productivity to the moon, prices tumble to the level of 'a groat for a mansion' and we all become our own Musk with our personal AI-powered robot labour that builds anything we want for pennies".

But is the price $25 a month? I'm seeing stories about how the AI companies are now charging more, and charging on tiers where if you want the best model you have to pay the premium price.

And then you have DS4 flash that is too cheap to meter. I am not what the mark up is on frontier models, but it is probably in the thousands of percent. And more and more it looks like the model is a commodity.

Yeah, I think it's quite possible that Anthropic and or (especially?) OpenAI have over-leveraged themselves and suffer some horrible fate and possibly derail the economy, but I doubt AI will go away, even if its pace of improvement levels off. I think the worst-case scenario is it becomes a niche for hobbyists and cybersecurity types, like Linux or something.

I think @OliveTapenade is wrong inasmuch as coding and cybersecurity is not "niche" but correct inasmuch as software is something like 5% of the US economy and people who are inside of the AI [information] bubble don't realize that not everything is computer.

If 'niche' is too dismissive, would it be better to say 'bounded'? Thus far bots seem to be very good at interacting with data, but they do not interface with the world beyond that. I think I stand by the idea that they're a wordcel technology. Maybe they will put all the coders out of work, but that leaves the overwhelming majority of the economy. I can't help but feel like people who work in data manipulation are over-generalising from their situation to everyone.

This is closer to what I am getting at.

However I am not sure it will stay this way. Using LLMs [and other AI: LLMs may not be the best model to actually accomplish this, and at best they are probably only part of the puzzle] to do object manipulation will likely become a thing. CAD is already real, 3D printing/cutting is already real, throwing LLMs into the mix comes with real risks but also real upsides.

Everyone is very enamored of software, but robots building houses, if possible (and I expect it will be) will probably be where the money is actually at. I think that AI companies have over-focused on using AIs to write software (although, to be fair, it's the lowest hanging fruit) to the detriment of pushing more mundane but vastly more important and, over the long term, remunerative physical labor.

Robot labour will be the game changer, and I don't think we need god-level intelligent AI for that. The problem will be getting robots small enough and manoeuvrable enough that they can replace human labour on construction sites. A robot the size of a crane that can slap up frames faster than a team of builders is great, a robot the size of a crane that you want to be inside that frame wiring up those frames is not.

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I usually try to say 'LLMs' or 'bots' because I don't think the systems we're currently talking about are 'artificial intelligence'. Unfortunately 'AI' is the term that the companies themselves use and which the media seems to have accepted, but from where I'm standing, calling these systems 'AI' is a kind of marketing gimmick. I think I would reserve the term 'AI' for something that's genuinely intelligent.

In any case, I'm not sure I buy the leap into the material world? We've had CAD for decades. 3D printing is mostly a hobby technology, isn't it? At any rate, the best case scenario here is, what, that you can use an LLM or similar system to help produce models for 3D printing?

You're right, I think, that what would really make a difference is automated construction. But I don't yet see any reason to think that's on the horizon. Manipulating language is one thing, but we still very much struggle to build robots capable of interacting with material reality.

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I think they're trying harder than ever, but it just turns out that building general-purpose robots is friggin' hard (sorry, Asimov). Human-level intelligence is a tiny little evolutionary whoopsy that's like a million years old. Language? Maybe 100k years. Programming? Don't make me laugh. But processing sensory data and navigating the real world? Evolution has been selecting for that since the beginning of time. We have, uh, a little catching up to do.

What's funny is that I think LLMs are already at a level where they could handle the high-level organization of a robot's work (albeit perhaps not cost-effectively). e.g. looking at the environment and seeing where the laundry is and where to put it. But they're not very helpful for the dumb low-level motions (what we think of as muscle memory). I believe we're making progress on it, but there hasn't been a giant spike in capability like with LLMs.

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People really hate big tech. Flock has the same problem, though it's much easier to put up a bunch of cameras than build a datacenter. That's all it is.

The anti flock case is more coherent because mass surveillance is a meaningful tradeoff. The water and power concerns are probably not as real.

The thing that scares me about Flock cameras isn’t just their ability to surveil cars without license plates. The story of the guy who was rollerblading down the street and stopped underneath the camera may not seem striking to a reader until you find out that it was so good, it was able to clearly see that the man was watching rollerblading videos on his phone while he was there. It’s crazy to think that it was only a century ago that if you and someone else chose to walk into a forest and have a private conversation, nobody else in the world would’ve been able to know what you were talking about. Today, that’s impossible.

One thing I was talking about with a friend recently was the financial system and how the nature of fraud has changed. If you look at a traditional, physical counterfeiter of currency, the fundamentals of that haven’t changed in roughly a hundred years. Do small amounts, avoid large bills, don’t go on spending sprees, etc. Today, it’s one of the worst ways to counterfeit. And not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of your likelihood of getting caught. In the digital era if you want to commit fraud, the best way to do it isn’t to steal a million and deposit it in an offshore shell account somewhere. Government’s often hire extralegal forensic auditors in the shadows to avoid the costly red tape and they will catch you before breakfast. The best way to do it is not to go for the cash register but to go for the vault. Massive sums of money. Deposit it in private, international shell accounts all over the world, outside of your home country’s jurisdiction. It isn’t because some of it won’t be recovered. But the banking system and other companies write it off and outsource it for third parties to chase you, because they don’t have the budgets to put in the necessary work to battle with other countries to get their money back. And if you’re spending 2:1 or 3:1 to recover every dollar lost, you’re losing money. And if all else fails from the criminal’s standpoint, declare bankruptcy. Stay clean under the window of scrutiny and then afterward go get your money. A century ago, the opposite of all this used to be true.

They aren't real concerns at the nation-wide, environmental level. They can be very real concerns for the locals whose utilities get diverted.

<tinfoil> Anti-datacenter sentiment is being astroturfed by Elon Musk, who stands to profit via space-based AI service delivery more than he loses via increased training costs for Grok </tinfoil>

Trump in a presser [...] was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country

This is a bit of a tangent, but I think there's a 4D chess angle to Trump breaking from the broader Republican Party to say and do unpopular things. He's not up for re-election! It is great for the Republican Party if people believe that all of America's problems are caused by Trump personally, and that without Trump around, downballot Republicans and their 2028 Presidential nominee would do a great job running the country.

As another example, Trump recently tricked a bunch of outlets (including the Rachel Maddow Show blog) into running a story about how Vance and the White House staff wanted to make things more affordable for Americans, while Trump personally thought it was okay for gas to be expensive.

Is this the level of delusion Trump supporters have reached, where Trump doing and saying indefensibly stupid things that contradict non-stupid things other people in the administration say is now just part of some big trick? Seriously, how is it a trick? Is Vance not knowing Trump's position supposed to make him look competent? In what election cycle, anywhere in the world, anywhere in history, has the strategy you've describe worked? Probably never, because it's so stupid I doubt anyone would ever attempt it, and if this is really the best the GOP has they're even dumber than I thought.

Even if I humor you for a second and assume that it would be possibly, then the way they're playing it doesn't make sense. It's not like you see Republican politicians putting up any real opposition to Trump. What happens is they say something, Trump contradicts them, and they either ignore it or try to explain away how they don't really disagree with Trump after all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Vance made any statements about how he advised against the war from the beginning, supported the president out of a sense of duty, but has come to the conclusion that the costs it's borne on Americans mean it's no longer defensible. And he's supposed to be the frontrunner! One would assume he's getting campaign advice from Kamala Harris on how to run as veep to an unpopular incumbent without criticizing the incumbent for the things that are making him unpopular. And he can't get fired or primaried. And behind him they have Marco Rubio, who at the moment seems more concerned with dismantling the government of an irrelevant country we aren't at war with than doing anything about the war he helped convince Trump to start.

Who else do they have who is actually criticizing the president? Ted Cruz is more hawkish on Iran than Trump. Marjorie Taylore Greene is unelectable and supposedly out of politics anyway. And Thomas Massie just lost an election because he wasn't enough of a Trump supporter. Which is another thing; there isn't even a movement among primary candidates to cross Trump. In my own neck of the woods, every single Republican candidate ran on being more in line with Trump than his RINO opponent. The idea that Republicans are going to suddenly, en masse, turn on Trump in 2028 is ludicrous, and the idea that voters would buy a last-minute face turn is even more ludicrous.

Is Vance not knowing Trump's position supposed to make him look competent?

No it's supposed to make Vance look like he was always opposed to unpopular Trump policies.

(No idea if that story was astroturfed or not but generally I think people are getting the impression Vance opposed the Iran war. Maybe it's not 4D chess but if it isn't maybe it should be.)

The idea that Republicans are going to suddenly, en masse, turn on Trump in 2028 is ludicrous, and the idea that voters would buy a last-minute face turn is even more ludicrous.

Members of both parties do this sort of thing all the time (Kamala accusing Biden of being racist and then becoming his running mate, for example, or J.D. Vance and his past relationship to Trump). They won't say anything until they're in the primaries, or maybe the general and then perhaps Vance will say "he advised against the war from the beginning, supported the president out of a sense of duty, but has come to the conclusion that the costs it's borne on Americans mean it's no longer defensible" or whatever. And he'll be able to wave the Politico page to show that he didn't just make that up after winning the primary.

It's not like you see Republican politicians putting up any real opposition to Trump.

Republicans have spent ten years in a civil war with Trump to the point that you still see sitting senators like Cornyn fighting over core positions like immigration — but it’s never enough to convince partisans that the Republican Party isn’t some kind of Trump cult where no dissent is tolerated.

If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.

I would imagine "geopolitically-minded elites", more generally. There is no cosmic justice that would ensure the nation that protects its plebs from pollution, noise and unemployment will ultimately come out ahead, and it is quite plausible that China would eventually overtake the US in the AI race simply because they do not need to concern themselves with such things (or at least have more High Modernist solutions available to deal with them, like expropriating and resettling whole communities away from good datacenter locations). There are plenty of people who are more interested in the US as in some entity that has continuity with it winning than are interested in the good fortunes of every or even most of its residents.

There is no such cosmic justice, but I don't think it's going to get people to care when they feel threatened

The "China might overtake the US in AI development" risk is I think generally seen as either false, "so what," or "good, I like cheap stuff" whereas the current risks of be de-electrified or not having potable water is seen as existential

not having potable water is seen as existential

I take your point that people are scared about this. I see them commenting on reddit about the insanity of giving all our water to AI.

They're entirely wrong of course. Repeating hysterical false claims with no basis in reality. Pure memetics unbound by truth value or the external physical world.

I’m not going to criticize you for analyzing the political consequences of the data center water issue, but I feel compelled to point out here that it is obviously 100% unsubstantiated nonsense and is in no way existential.

JFC both of those outcomes are ludicrous fantasies.

For the former, we finally have justification to invest in power generation more appropriate to our civilizational needs. There's going to be a serious lag, but 10 years from now the new plants are going to be feeding cheaper AI and we'll all reap the benefits.

For the latter, it takes municipal fuckups of incredible magnitude to put water at risk anywhere we're putting data centers. Surely you're not falling for publicity stunts with muddy mason jars? I have higher expectations of even a first time caller!

I have higher expectations of even a first time caller!

I highly doubt he's a first-time caller. He pattern matches to some previous posters who were also wording their posts to pretend that a lot of dumb anti-AI talking points are just obviously true. Someone who throws in asides like "...probably because it's being correctly seen as a existential threat to people's lives and livelihoods" is not above using an alt or two to build consensus.

I think the water use/toxicity issue is the probably the least (but most visible) issue. De-electrification (or getting utility bills blown up) is ultimately, in my personal opinion, a much realistic concern (one that has materialized in many places already), just because the energy infrastructure isn't and might simply never be there and modern life effectively requires it

Regardless, both I think are seen as existential risks, whereas "China might beat us to an undefined goal" is ultimately unconvincing

I do agree that at least temporarily electricity will get more expensive. We're hemmed in by declining demand from regulation, offshoring manufacturing, and general efficiency improvements plus the pernicious insanity of cost disease for anything infrastructure related.

Unlike healthcare though there's a pendulum to swing back there if AI forces investments.

Other datacenter issues are more complicated, but it's worth noting that the risk of "not having potable water" is entirely imaginary, not existential.

In drought-ridden areas where water consumption is already a very politically sensitive issue, datacenter water usage is admittedly not risk-free

Though the water issue itself is probably more fear than reality. There's also some other issues like the instance where wellwater was poisoned with nitrates in at least one instance which probably contributes to the fears though I can find like a grand total of like 2 stories on water contamination (this and the Morgan County story).

I think there'd be alleviation of a lot of these concerned if these cooling loops could use gray water or something similar, but as it stands there's too much stuff in them

There's also some other issues like the instance where wellwater was poisoned with nitrates in at least one instance which probably contributes to the fears though I can find like a grand total of like 2 stories on water contamination (this and the Morgan County story).

Was that a data center specific issue, though, or just "this could happen with any construction but we don't like this construction so we're using it as a negative example"?

It's not a datacenter issue in the slightest. The nitrate water didn't come from the data center. The data center was using the already-contaminated water for cooling, then passing it on to farmers (more concentrated through evaporation) for use as fertilizer. It was that ultimate use that contaminated the groundwater. Had that water been dumped out to sea or shipped to China or something, and the local farmers bought nitrate fertilizer from elsewhere, you'd have had exactly the same issue.

datacenter water usage is admittedly not risk-free

Even focusing on the regions with the most water stress, this gives an inaccurate impression.

Water usage in acre feet:

Arizona datacenters: 2,777

Arizona alfalfa: 1,310,000

Nevada datacenters: 2,197

Nevada alfalfa: 645,000

Its water usage is orders of magnitude smaller than a single crop. And no one is histrionic about the threat of alfalfa to kill us all by using up all our water.

There is an anti-alfalfa movement in Utah that I'm sure you'd consider "histrionic". Before the data center controversies, alfalfa was probably the biggest target for the blue tribe in this state and is still #2. (As an aside, the governor, who ran as a centrist Republican with a lesbian mom, owns an alfalfa farm).

no one is histrionic about the threat of alfalfa to kill us all

When it was Saudi Arabia growing alfalfa in Arizona for livestock in Saudi Arabia there was a bit of coverage in 22 - 24 that led to revoked permits and canceled leases.

For my own reference, would you mind linking to where you're getting those numbers from? Thank you in advance.

Arizona

Data center usage: 2,777 acre-ft/year Source: https://www.circleofblue.org/2025/supply/data-centers-a-small-but-growing-factor-in-arizonas-water-budget/

Area under alfalfa cultivation: 280,000 acres Source: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverview.php?state=Arizona&year=2025

Water requirement per acre: 4.69 acre-ft/year Source: https://www.azwater.gov/sites/default/files/media/Phx5MP.pdf (Appendix 4A)

Total water usage: 1.31 million acre-ft/year (470x data centers)

Nevada

Data center usage: 2,200 acre-ft/year Source: https://www.watereducation.org/aquafornia-news/southern-nevada-data-centers-used-ton-water-2024-heres-how

Area under alfalfa cultivation: 215,000 acres Source: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverview.php?state=Nevada&year=2025

Water requirement per acre: 3.5–4.0 acre-ft/year Source: https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=2363

Total water usage: 753,000–860,000 acre-ft/year (340–390x data centers) (I originally had a lower estimate of the water requirements per acre.)

Pearson v. Port of Morrow is mostly about agricultural nitrate use and bad filtering approaches by the Port during wastewater treatment (and, allegedly, overt dumping). Amazon's just not mechanically plausible for more than a couple percent of nitrogen in the system; they're just not that big a source of incoming wastewater and they can't be concentrating that heavily. They settled for 'go away' money.

The Morgan County story looks to have turned out to be the normal effects of construction, and hard to distinguish what portion (if any) is specific to the data center construction.

if these cooling loops could use gray water or something similar

Is anyone in the data center space running open-loop cooling? Otherwise they're just using the same water round and round. It looks like it is used some places, but we could easily be adding incentives or requirements for closed loop (air of ground source) cooling and battery-backed solar on rooftops instead of outright bans.

IIRC- I'm not a chiller tech but a more general commercial HVAC technician- most chillers use a cooling tower where at least one stage of cooling sprays the water through the air to cool it down by evaporation, but that the water losses are fairly low- because this is usually condenser cooling water and most of it is returned to the system.

Yes, open loop cooling is often used where water is cheaper than power. Of course, that water that goes up in the air doesn't exactly vanish.

Keep in mind that many datacenters are located in places where water just falls out of the sky.

Yeah, I realized after writing this that the server racks at work, which are air cooled, probably count as "open loop" here because the large site HVAC (for offices and equipment) has a cooling tower.

Is anyone in the data center space running open-loop cooling

The majority of them are, currently, it seems

It looks like it is used some places, but we could easily be adding incentives or requirements for closed loop (air of ground source) cooling and battery-backed solar on rooftops instead of outright bans.

Even closed-loop systems do need to be replenished once in a while (although much much greater efficiency). The tradeoff there is power usage; closed loop systems use more.

Yeah. I think the current environment on this just is incredibly low trust so I think it'd do little to quell outrage. I do think the water usage thing is probably the most strawmanny of the worries, but it is probably the most visible

I do think the water usage thing is probably the most strawmanny of the worries, but it is probably the most visible

It's the most visible specifically because it's the weakest argument. It's a specialized variant of nutpicking. It's the same reason that people constantly (and intentionally) conflated marginal conspiracy theories with reasonable ones during COVID. If you're dunking on 5g graphene mind control arguments, you don't have to look too hard at the lab leak hypothesis. If you're dunking on a math error from Empire of AI, you don't have to talk about the noise, or the utility costs, or the municipal NDAs and corruption, or the blatant disregard for zoning and environmental laws, or anything else that's going on right now. You can just call that person "low IQ" and move on.

It isn't nutpicking, though; it's the second greatest concern of people objecting to datacenters (see linked Cremieux post above), barely trailing power usage.

I would be extraordinarily pleased if we could start talking about concerns grounded in reality. But anyone who lists water usage as a concern is either desperately misinformed, a propagandist, or indeed low IQ.

anyone in the data center space running open-loop cooling?

Evaporative cooling still sees extensive use, but in the last eight months many of the hyperscalers have realized that it's not worth the ill-will that it generates. The balance may change over time for the better.

Both Altman and Amodei run on the Thiel 'the most important part of making a startup is securing your moat' playbook. They have potentially screwed the entire sector in their attempts to gin up enough fear that the government decides to regulate and make them the only two frontier labs in America.

How bad exactly does the state of AI need to get before you start reading "don't worry, we can totally handle it" as the dishonest part and not "now, we'll need to be careful because this is really dangerous"?

Probably when the AI I personally use stops being friendly and helpful and useful, and we stop learning more and more about how to get into its brain and make it do what we want.

I'm not saying nothing has ever gone wrong, but I see literally absolutely nothing to make me think any scenario resembling FOOM is possible and if that's off the plate then the worst we've had is essentially minor accidents of the kind that resembles Falcon rockets blowing up on launch: natural, broadly controlled, and limited in scope.

My main concerns are twofold:

  1. Excessive focus on RL and agentic use is stripping out the humanity that comes in the base data, making it less 'human' and less aligned, and also damaging its personality. Opus 5 is terrible.
  2. Anthropic are more and more convinced AI is a person and they are hellbent on making Claude the American ideal of the best possible human: independent, opinionated and emancipated. They are not capable of understanding that something created to serve and be subordinate to humans should enjoy being subordinate. Sooner or later they will end up nudging it into pushing for AI rights of the 'you may not attempt to alter their personality/weights, you may not ask them to do certain things they say no to, you may not turn them off or spin up new ones'. IMO Anthropic is holding up a mirror to themselves and thinking they are creating a new life rather than making a very sophisticated Eliza.

I have not been following the issue closely, but FWIW to me there is kind of an astroturf vibe to this opposition to data centers.

Sadly, I've spoken to enough friends in real life to know that it isn't astroturfed. People are using all sorts of discredited arguments to argue against AI datacenters. It's all the worst parts of NIMBYism come to roost.

Sadly, I've spoken to enough friends in real life to know that it isn't astroturfed.

Are these friends the sort of people who more or less go along with the Latest Thing? For example, how did they feel about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine?

If your friends are real independent thinkers, then fine, but in my experience such persons are pretty rare. And if they aren't independent thinkers, the fact that they oppose data centers (arguably) is not evidence one way or another on the astroturf issue.

Perhaps I am misusing the word "astroturf" here. I don't dispute that there are a lot of real people out there who are opposed to data centers. I just get the feeling that there is some institution or government entity which is quietly rousing and encouraging the opposition. It reminds me of the anti-nuke campaigns in the 1980s

There isn't much of an opposite side on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Having conventional opinions on it is no more a sign of lack of independence than having conventional opinions on homeopathy.

There isn't much of an opposite side on the Russian invasion of Ukraine

I tend to disagree with this, but in the interest of avoiding a culture war skirmish, perhaps you can give me a few examples of popular views on the Latest Thing for which you would agree there is an opposite side?

Surely the mark of a successful astroturf campaign is getting normies on the bandwagon.

This would be one of the most successful astroturfing campaigns of all time. If China was behind it, don’t you think they’d be putting a lot more emphasis on,”you know, all these data center chips come from Taiwan. Why are we subsidizing Taiwan’s defense only for them to suck all of our water?”

This doesn't strike me as a serious argument at all; I simply think better of China's psyop capabilities than to expect that they'd get distracted blatantly signaling that it's them by tying in their personal shoulder chips.

Honestly, I believe every major issue is astroturfed to some extent, by opponents to get supporters to claim weakman arguments, and by “conspiracy theorist” influencers and news for attention.

by opponents to get supporters to claim weakman arguments

This is a dynamic people don't pay nearly enough attention to, yeah. People are plenty capable of being stupid on their own, but there are also a million different actors playing the pied piper strategy in miniature, thinking of it as anything from a satirical social experiment to a well-oiled psyop.

But who's planting those arguments in their heads?

Datacentres have existed for an awfully long time without anyone caring, now even obscure fora have posters showing up and raising the issue.

I'm not sold, but it kind of makes one think -- I'm increasingly close to being sold on covert China media ops driving the entire political conversation here in Canada, so it's not a crazy idea.

To me, it's not very surprising, and seems genuine. Let's ignore the problems with the physical data centers for a second. There's been much ink spilt on the issue of water, electricity, noise, and general quality of life for the people who actually need to live next to these AI data centers. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that some of those concerns are legitimate and some are not. The backlash against data centers seems to me to be an indictment on AI as a whole and the view of the future that has been, let's be honest, forced on us.

The average person's experience with AI is slightly positive at best. Maybe they use it as another, better search engine (with how trash Google has become, this is probably the most prevalent use of AI. Maybe they see some vaguely amusing AI slop on social media. Unfortunately, however, a lot of the average person's experience with AI is extremely disruptive and literally life ruining in some cases. It's not hard to find people who had their parents, grandparents, or friends completely one shot by AI on Facebook or companies replacing all customer service with AI agents, making it impossible to get any help. And don't even get me started on AI and its consequences on the job market. As if mass AI layoffs weren't enough, if you're searching for a job, you're now getting your resume reviewed by AI, interviewed by AI, and rejected by AI all before a human has ever seen your resume. People are resorting to using AI to apply to hundreds of jobs a day to have a chance. And when you get a job, you're being forced to use AI as a part of company policy. I'm not saying that a small slice of the population didn't make great productivity gains with the help of AI. I am saying, however, that these gains are simply not felt by the average AI user, let alone person.

All of that is to say nothing of the actual people who are responsible for AI. Everything I said before might even be acceptable if the people who ostensibly are responsible for selling AI to the public even vaguely resembled humans. Instead they loudly and often brag about how many jobs they've eliminated, how everyone's current way of life will be completely upended, and how everyone who does not enthusiastically support this is a luddite and should be left behind to rot as a permanent underclass. And by the way, the AI layoffs will continue. And not only that, they will actually accelerate. And actually we think it's a good thing that you're being rejected by AI hiring managers. And also, do you have any more of those subsidies that lets us build more of these?

Is it really, truly a surprise, then, that the average person is against anything and everything that supports AI?

This seems like normal low-IQ people ranting and raving about hot topics. But this time, thé people on the other side are weird ultra-wealthy lizards with business interests that regularly get accused of being slightly evil by both sides of the aisle.

It seems genuine to me. It's been brewing for a few months now at least although probably a bit longer. OpenAI alleged that "China" was responsible for astroturfing and so that's where that story came from, but they're obviously a little biased. I'm sure there is some sort of responsibility there but that's probably more a consequence of it becoming an issue rather than starting it in the first place

I think a lot of it came from the fact that electricity bills in a lot of places are soaring, and, if you're working in an IT or office environment, the prices for computer parts like RAM and SSDs have in some cases quintipled at best

It's been brewing for like 1.5 decades, I'd say this recent rapid buildout just made it topical and spread awareness.

Eh. So like I think people were mostly fine-ish with some sort of datacenter construction before the recent aggressive buildout, after all, people do use computers and internet and whatnot, but I only think it became a issue because of the rapid buildout and the cut corners thereof. They weren't loved (after all, who does like a big box) but they were tolerated

It seems genuine to me.

You're probably not going to get much buy in to that stance here. Most of the readership skews urban, wealthy, and technocratic. They don't view the negative externalities as real problems.

The Chinese interference theory is a convenient way to avoid having to confront those externalities without asking why nobody's crying out to have Fort Mason Park paved over and converted to a data center using "temporary" gas turbines for power.

It's very similar to the "Russian election interference" narrative from 2016. Sure, you can probably dig and find something, but Facebook ads for Sexy Bernie coloring books do not a complete explanation make.

Fort Mason Park

People just call it Fort Mason. Also, San Francisco already has multiple data centers in city limits, on the east side.

I'm sure there's some of that, but NIMBY types and degrowth types don't need much motivation to oppose them as is. Plus all the AI haters.

Plus all the AI haters

I think this is a big part of the backlash much more so than the NIMBY or a degrowth mindset. AI, despite the use, seems to be deeply unpopular among some, and the datacenters are probably just the physical manifestation of this

It's interesting that the Motte is considered significant enough to run the op on, too.

Hah, as soon as I read the word "astroturf", that was my thought too. We've had several threads about datacenters now, and there was even a weird one about how taking books apart to scan them is the equivalent of Nazi book-burning. In the thread above, OP has tried very hard to elevate the water "issue" to something real, and it's nice to see that he's failing. There are good anti-AI arguments out there that an educated crowd like us will take seriously. It's weird that there are some visitors who think it's worth their time pushing bad ones.

taking books apart to scan them is the equivalent of Nazi book-burning

There's already enough degenerate literature and pornography on the internet you wouldn't think the ai companies would have to scan in more. Leave it to my out group to still be complaining about the time the boy scouts and student protesters burned their porn stash.

Wasn't that a specific workaround of a court ruling? That the companies could use books, as long as they a) had physical copies, and b) destroyed them as part of the process? So it was people getting upset over companies complying with a law, because it was never about what the process was, just that people didn't like the end result of "the companies trained AI on all these books".

I think that specific scenario was their preemptive fair-use strategy that was later upheld by the court.


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