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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.
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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