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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.
Do you think they are against that option?
I think they've not advanced it an have instead advanced idiotic data center bans.
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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.
A vote is just representation of leverage that a citizen has. The actual leverage is mostly the useful work a citizen can provide to society (An average citizen, given that the franchise does not differentiate). Maybe the guns, for the few Americans who can actually muster an organized militia.
Without any of that leverage, how much weight do you think the vote will have?
When you and those who agree with you say things like relieving people of the need to labor, what it sounds like is that people will be "relieved" of one of two ways of getting vital resources from people who control those resources through precedent or force. The other way is more force, and it doesn't look good, not when the enemy has drones and superhuman security AIs.
(There is a third way, claiming resources that no one got to yet, but we'll need mass cheap far space travel to make that viable again).
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I think the question whoever in charge of AI would ask is if AI can do our work trivially, what's the point of having so many people around at all?
Keep in mind that is scenario would be that AI eliminates 99.9% of jobs, as you described. In this hypothetical future, I don't even believe there will be any voting. Society will essentially be controlled by the AI and the few who actually still work to maintain or guide the AI. That's what I mean by turn people into pets or cattle.
I do, and I would support a politician that made this a part of their platform. I'm only a private citizen, however, without a platform. So I can only reach as far as my immediate circle.
We're getting points mixed up because I've described multiple potential scenarios and did a poor job of separating them. Here are what I see as likely futures under three different scenarios:
AI is everything the marketing says it will be.
Under this scenario we have three likely futures.
AI is benevolent and everything works out like you appear to believe it will. This is probably the best result. It's also the least likely, in my opinion.
AI is benevolent but only for a select few. This is the culling scenario I describe. The AI heads or AI itself eliminate 99.9% of all jobs and look around and start wondering why they bother keeping all these people around. This is the second most likely scenario if AI is all it's cracked up to be, in my opinion.
AI is malevolent. This is the scenario covered by James Cameron. Obviously this is probably the worst result. If you ask me, this is the most likely out of the three described so far.
AI is pretty good, but not the paradigm changing technology we were sold as.
I'd say this is where we currently are. Productivity is slightly up, but we've also created an increasing underclass. Productivity is not up enough, however, for us to implement UBI or similar policy, meaning these people will just have to suffer as a permanent underclass. In this scenario, The AI heads would still have oversold and underdelivered. Maybe we haven't been sold a complete bill of goods, but we'd still have greatly expanded the permanent underclass for what? A 20% increase in GDP?
AI is not and will never be as good as the marketing.
Under this scenario, we've done like I said. We've ruined hundreds of thousands of lives and been sold a complete bill of goods. In this scenario, I'd be advocating for public executions of the major AI executives.
Edit: I didn't address one of your points
Do people do this right now? If you took someone off the street and told them that they don't have to work in the future and everything they need will be paid for, do they find a way to self define and find meaning? Do lottery winners self define and find meaning? If people don't do this right now, what will have changed between now and the omniscient AI that will cause them to self define and find meaning in the future?
It is already the case that half of all people are not net tax payers. Where is the culling?exist
Organizing against local datacenters, or worse American data centers in general, will do less than nothing against xrisk. It's acting frantically impotently to discharge your anxiety. We don't e on a sprectum where relative resistance to American data center buildout moves any levers on chance unaligned ASI is reached.
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There is a difference between less tedious busywork and having no contribution to your own upkeep. There is a reason there is a death spike shortly after retirement. It's hardly crazy to suspect we have relevant instincts here. The survival advantage is obvious.
We evolved from creatures that hunted in bands and were probably murdered by our kin shortly after we could not longer provide for ourselves. I'm confident in a post work society we can conjure up meaningful games to substitute for the drudgery of what is currently required to upkeep society. Tons of people today make their living in some way derivative of professional sports and many people generate a great deal of their identity from sports teams. Same for celebrities or entertainers. A lot of the economy has already been separated from what is required to survive.
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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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