Yet another Hacker News

38 points _delirium 1 hour ago 36 comments

silverFork 58 minutes ago | parent

It is obvious that is about fight for resources and supremacy between humans and the machine where the machine is also the capital that seeks the discount for human labor. How can the competition between capital and labor be resolved when capital has found a replacement for labor and competing for resources to serve its own needs? Will capitalists and technocrats give up? zero chance of that. Will labor and humans accept the machine and capital supremacy? zero chance of that.

So the conflict of interest will just escalate more and more.

sneilan1 40 minutes ago | parent

I think people would like AI technologies a lot more if they were the ones making money off of it.

Chris2048 34 minutes ago | parent

https://isaiprofitable.com/

outside1234 32 minutes ago | parent

You are forgetting about the grifting part where they dump all of this crap on our 401ks

ZnerflBerp 3 minutes ago | parent

Well yeah. But the profits are privatised while the costs are shared.

dzink 37 minutes ago | parent

A lot of capital was looking for a place to get parked. AI and hardware seems like it has the best prospects going forward - especially with baby-boomers retiring and the new generation getting less opportunity to climb the economic ladder (aka catering to them is not attractive to investors).

AI is attractive to governments similar to any tech capable of war, so the race for offer capacity would give tech giants massive capital from lucrative government contracts that then gets into the flywheel of model training and selling to the masses.

The problem was they built data centers in a sloppy, dirty, loud way. Imagine if the first cars were like that? Or the first electric distribution methods? Do it right if you want to grow it.

ion_trapper 34 minutes ago | parent

The hysteria around datacenters will be to the US/Western world what the burning of its fleet was to China, or (more recently) what the banning of nuclear power was to Germany. Bravo to whoever coordinated this generational psyop.

outside1234 32 minutes ago | parent

The increase in the cost of power per kWh is a real problem for a lot of people.

noosphr 27 minutes ago | parent

It's a real problem because we were sold a post industrial dream which could only happen if the hardest computation anyone would ever have to do is sending an http packet.

Electricity is destiny, if you can't produce it you will be a puppet of those who can. See Germany.

muhfuhkuh 24 minutes ago | parent

Not only that, but this is basically the sales pitch of AI:

Voter: So, tell me about this AI stuff. You wanna build one in my backyard right?

AI CEO: That's right! It'll increase the cost of your water, electricity, and likely lower your property values due to people leaving because of the 24/7 daytime lighting and noise pollution!

Voter: Well I kinda don't like that at all!

AI CEO: Great! Because that's not all! Once we really improve on our AI, it will eat your job for now and forever! And, wait till we embody them in robots. Whoo-boy! You won't even be able to drive a truck or plumb pipes for a living! Ain't that great?

Voter: What? No! That sounds terrible!

AI CEO (thinking): Why can't I get to these schmucks?

It's the economy stupid. If you don't offer material improvement with UBI instead of selfishly flexing your utopian visions of Star Trek robes and replicators and you and only you living for a thousand years, don't be surprised if voters don't give you what you want politically.

JumpCrisscross 6 minutes ago | parent

Also it’s going to end the world every time Sam or Dario has to fundraiser.

Nifty3929 17 minutes ago | parent

Right - so instead of getting mad at datacenters, how about getting out of the way of building more powerplants?

Electricity is the ultimate fungible resource. You can convert electricity into food, housing, medicine, video games, football games (either sort), transportation, etc.

The more electricity we produce, the more broadly prosperous we will be.

It's not a question of needing more electricity - we don't need any electricity at all. We got by without it for 100k years until just the last few. But still, the more we have, the better all our lives will be.

srejk 15 minutes ago | parent

You know, except for that whole climate change thing. The fastest power to spool back online is older coal, oil, and gas plants.

harimau777 11 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't seem like the people most opposed to AI are the people opposing more energy. Wasn't it MAGA that was fighting solar and off shore wind?

bdangubic 12 minutes ago | parent

amazing a comment like this gets downvoted, must be nice looking down from the ivory tower :)

layer8 26 minutes ago | parent

The protests are a good counterweight to the big tech AI propaganda. The former is a consequence of the latter. It’d be better if everyone was moderate and reasonable, measured and considerate, but that’s not the world we live in.

Analemma_ 22 minutes ago | parent

Yes, keep saying "hysteria" and calling opinions other than yours "a psyop". That will definitely win over hearts and minds instead of catalyzing even more ferocious opposition.

ion_trapper 14 minutes ago | parent

People’s opinions are valid, and I wish tech CEOs were better at addressing them, but ultimately it is hysteria and it is a psyop, and the US will regret it.

harimau777 5 minutes ago | parent

Maybe the people building the data centers should actually do a decent job of winning people over to their side then. They could start by rejecting MAGA and using their money to help make its victims whole. Then maybe they could figure out a way to make AI actually good for your average person.

harimau777 18 minutes ago | parent

People's hatred of AI is no psyop. People just hate AI.

bdangubic 10 minutes ago | parent

People do not hate AI. I know a lot of people, through work and social life and there isn’t a single person not hating AI but even disliking it slightly. Confusing not wanting a fucking Data Center where you live with “hating AI” is a real thing though

harimau777 8 minutes ago | parent

Personally almost everyone I know absolutely despises AI. That's to say nothing of all the people who had their work stolen to make AI or who have had their careers destroyed by AI.

jltsiren 17 minutes ago | parent

Calling it a psyop is a non-explanation. Water is wet and your opponents will oppose you. That much is given. The interesting question is why the side supporting data centers failed to get their message through.

Did they not know how to argue for their case convincingly? Were they unwilling to do what was needed to get people on their side? Were their ideas against the interests of most people? Or was the issue mostly about the people in charge?

Republics have historically fared well against more authoritarian societies. In no small part because they are not stuck with the leaders they happen to have. If a leader becomes a liability, a republic can easily replace them. Companies can also do that, except when the leader also happens to be a major shareholder.

thrance 17 minutes ago | parent

You're part of the problem. This insufferable contempt and disdain you're displaying toward the views and concerns of the population is what riled them up against tech and AI.

ion_trapper 7 minutes ago | parent

I feel for the people and their concerns, but until about 6 months ago the average person neither knew nor cared what a datacenter was, and probably still would not, were it not for some well-edited TikToks.

dumberquestions 16 minutes ago | parent

Big tech has been actively burning bridges for a decade and you find it easier to believe China brainwashed 7 out of 10 Americans overnight.

JuniperMesos 14 minutes ago | parent

American anti-datacenter sentiment is not a Chinese psyop; that doesn't mean that sentiment is well-founded or a good thing for US interests.

JumpCrisscross 7 minutes ago | parent

Maybe. If the AI folks dig in their heels, that will happen.

If we build datacenters in a way that benefits everyone, i.e. not solely as the corrupt, private enterprises they’ve been so far, one that leans into our political economy’s strengths, I suspect we could do it more sustainably.

Grombobulous 30 minutes ago | parent

I think something that isn’t talked about enough is how the tech industry burned its bridges in the last era before AI.

For example, Facebook was a site you trusted for enjoyable socializing and it morphed into a horrifically evil platform.

Amazon.com is a massive rug pull where it used to be an amazing place to buy good products at good prices, now it’s a hellhole of dark patterns, sponsored listings, and upsells.

Try to find one popular Internet company from ~2010 that hasn’t been massively enshittified or turned into dystopian surveillance/algorithm/addiction capitalism.

The tech industry trained its own customers to believe that any product they launch will eventually get way worse than it is now.

Gonxa6282 25 minutes ago | parent

I mean, it should surprise no one that the sheer dislike of the billionaires making AI is ruining the perception of the technology they are building. If we should go and blame someone, it's certainly them. I agree 100% with OPs article.

aaron_m04 17 minutes ago | parent

That's one thing ruining the perception. I wouldn't even say it's the most important one.

pnathan 14 minutes ago | parent

1. "ai will take your jobs" 2. "We need data centers for AI" 3. "How could you vote against data centers"

Idk maybe step 1 wasn't popular.

JumpCrisscross 8 minutes ago | parent

The political lesson is being missed in Silicon Valley. We want it to be about Iran [1].

Instead it’s about cost of living, corruption and the perception of horrible people doing well. These are less easy to one off with policies. But the public has found those options nevertheless, one of which is blocking data centers (which seem to feature all three).

[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/2118041310699352558