It sure seems like the data centers fundamentally would exist to take your attention, take your money, and take your job so that someone who already has more money than god can have even more. And in the process as an added bonus they accelerate the destruction of the environment and blow up the energy demand/supply curve. What's not to love?

They have pretty significant negative externalities in the communities they are built in, which would be reason enough.

They have historically tended to get approved through means verging-on “graft/corruption/lies” - the promised benefits don’t materialize, the costs are worse than initially claimed, the politicians who approve it seem to profit when their constituents don’t - this would also be reason enough.

And they’re the physical reification and arguably the Achilles heel of the otherwise nebulous and impossible-to-defy yet hugely disliked phenomenon of AI everywhere all of the time, which yet again would be reason enough (multiple times over - ethical concerns, environmental concerns, etc).

Compounding these many good reasons to dislike them, there also aren’t many (or any?) good reasons to actively like them.

This quote stood out to me:

“Everyone else, I would say, was more of a ChatGPT person, and again, using it for small secretarial tasks or consumer fun use cases. But I didn’t meet a lot of people who suggested to me that AI was essential or important to their work.”

Personally, apart from the environmental impact and fresh water demands, I want to own my software and hardware and not "subscribe" it from some corporate.

it's a very good psyop by non western aligned government actors.

Convincing people that it slurps up infinite water and contains the world's stolen information like some bad National Treasure script is genius.

cause they got our stuff in them, and we didn't put it there

I am not a number, I am a free man.

Am I out of touch? No! It's the population who are wrong.

The CPP is funding the anti-AI data center movement.

See https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5920573-openai-chinese...