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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.
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.
But those people still have value. They might be a net negative to you but they still have value. They use EBT funds to buy products that circulate the economy. They buy crack and fentanyl that funds the CIA. They can be whipped up by demagogues to riot in support of current thing. In extremis, you can draft them and use them as meat waves on the European steppe. Two percent of the entire male population of America is in prison, Burgerland would have penal battalions coming out their asses.
That’s a totally different scenario to them literally having no economic or military or political value at all.
The idea that we're sending disabled and elderly people enough money to live on every month merely so that some shadowy elite might be able to use them for violence is a monument to the insanity caused by populism. There is a much simpler explanation for why we don't cull people who are net fiscal drains. Our nation is actually meaningfully a democracy and we do meaningfully, to the degree it's possible, usually get what we vote for. Now of course politicians lie about what's possible or promise multiple mutually exclusive things so we don't always get exactly what we're promised on the campaign trail, but we don't usually get exactly the opposite, at least not durably.
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