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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
If you think the tech is inherently going to cause existential crisis or dystopias then the correct policy prescription is an international bilateral treaty to halt scaling a la Yud. Opposing data center construction is like trying to protect your sand castle from the coming high tides by digging a foot deep moat. If we're not going to do something that works I'll take Dario over Xi getting to make the pivotal action. And in the mundane worlds I definitely want the US to be ahead on this critical technology.
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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.
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.
I think this is a lot of cope. If we didn't have washing machines I think a lot of people might derive a sense of personal definition from being responsible for keeping people's clothing clean. Now that this labor isn't necesary it is a trivial thing. People will find a way to self define and fine meaning without the need to do labor.
Why? If it can do our work trivially why would there be a culing? We don't cull people currently who can't or won't do value added labor. Many of these people live lifes of relatively luxury to those in the distant past and that's with few voters feeling direct kinship with them. The idea that people who are themselves threatened with unemployment are going to vote to cull unemployed people beggars belief.
If you're taking this seriously then data center moratoriums are trivially not sufficient and you should absolutely be advocating for bilateral treaties with china to cease frontier development. If you're not advocating for that then I don't want to hear about random data center blocks which will not and cannot prevent this.
I'm sorry, are they delivering the goods or not? Because if they are delivering the labor replacement then they are not charlatans. Your lot have this weird way of accusing them of being hype artists while your premises buy entirely into what they're selling. If they can indeed substitute all labor then that is incredible and they are fully vindicated for the rhetoric. If they aren't then we don't have to worry about any of this. It's a very clear sign that what you're actually concerned about is hurting them because you hate them and are not thinking clearly at all.
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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.
When all the other entertainment venues are closed, what else are you going to do in a city but riot?
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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.
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 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.
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.
"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.
I called them barely sentient, not non-sentient. There is a vague and difficult to clean up cloud of noise behind the eyes that still marks them as among the living. The noise is basically ludditism in a pure form that they're too embarrassed to or historically illiterate to own.
We're not even talking about the perspective own talking to the perspective data center, we're talking about some third party declaring that the town should be disallowed by gunpoint from even negotiating.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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'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.
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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:
And from "Rationality and the English Language" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
One of the worse 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.
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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.
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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.
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It's amusing that you project "anger" as hard as you can, when I am very rarely angry. Occasionally annoyed. Mostly tired.
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.
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