https://archive.ph/2026.11.05-224738/https://www.ft.com/content/32fd4450-5880-437d-9bd9-df13289ada24
The US midterm elections — in which voters elected anti-data centre governors in Texas, Georgia and Ohio and passed 38 local votes in favour of restrictions on their development — have forced the tech industry to reflect on its failure to connect with the public.
“The reason is not that people are Luddites . . . it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid. It has become a political symbol,” said Vik Bajaj, co-chief executive of the Jeff Bezos-backed AI start-up Prometheus.
. . . “As a profession, we have spent two years pretty dangerously telling people that AI will change the future of work for the worse — that they will be out of jobs, that their children will be out of jobs, their grandchildren will live in a world that’s unrecognisable. And then for the last year or so, we’ve also been flirting with the idea that it’s an existential crisis.”
“I think this election was a big wake-up call . . . to take a pause and think about what’s happening and approach this in a way that’s maybe a little more thoughtful,” said John Hanke, founder of Niantic Spatial, the AI world model company and gaming group that made Pokémon Go. “It’s been go, go, go, build, build, build, and some of that has been . . . with head buried in sand.”
I read the whole thing, and all I got was "oh shit, we might be fucked because of the non-billionaires, let’s start making them believe we care about them“.
“The reason is not that people are Luddites . . . it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid. It has become a political symbol,” ~ Vik Bajaj, co-chief executive of the Jeff Bezos-backed AI start-up Prometheus.
Fuck off Vik, take bezos with you.
Yeah you got to love it. Says that people aren’t luddites then proceeds to describe how they are complete luddites in his eyes.
These fuck weeds have absolutely no fucking clue why people hate AI.
it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid
‘ai’ is not the masks in this scenario, it is the fucking virus.
Trillion dollars of their money. Not ours. We never wanted this shit. They wanted this shit in order to surveil us and make billions more.
Yeah, AI backlash threatens us with a good time!
Comparing ai datacenter backlash to masking backlash during covid is insane.
If anything, being pro-mask is being anti-ai. Its just fucking logical.
Or, you know, the more likely approach is datacenters just make everyones lives worse in multiple unique ways. Maybe they dont want that if its a willing choice, unlike a pandemic.
The attempt to frame anti-ai sentiment as similar to anti-vax is a deliberate attempt to paint protesters as ‘emotional’, ‘illogical’ or just plain stupid. Fuck it, I don’t think it’s even worth arguing with people who say stuff like that.
Maybe we should just run with it and get the anti-vaxxers on board with opposing data centers too. Just tell them after they chip us they’re going to use the data centers to control us all.
Indeed, when refuting bad faith digs like this, you give them credibility in the eyes of the uniformed.
The trick is to counterattack on your own points, not answer their baseless talking points. I.e.:LM models are not AI, and never will be, they will never pay for these data centers, and our tax dollars will bail them out in exchange for bending us over for the government and their pals.
The comparison is also stupid because being “anti-mask”, was literally a political symbol.
Also, people are not protesting data centers as a “political symbol”. They are protesting them because it’s a huge waste of energy and effort that provides mostly trash results that will never be efit most people in a meaningful way that is accelerating the already shitty climate problem.
Not to mention tech companies have spent a decade now obliterating trust in tech they spent the previous decades building. No fucking privacy, no choice to just use a product. It’s all 10,000 ads or subscriptions that just go up and up and up for more features and improvements no one fucking needs or wants because everything has to “move fast.” Then they just start forcibly hoovering up all the data, and even if you take a LOT of pain in the ass steps to avoid letting your data get sucked up they do it anyway by pulling your friends and relative’s data about you and making it harder and harder to do anything with data protections in place line blockers and VPNs.
People are just tired of these shit fuck tech companies, in general.
Being anti mask was/is a Darwin award symbol
God I wish pro-mask had the support of anti-AI. COVID would have died out before it got out of control with 90% people taking it seriously.
Time to deflate this imaginary bubble.
… Then maybe goy shouldn’t have invested trillions in that
Also, fuck you. You made me jobless, I have no empathy for any of you
Let’s just fix that headline to make it a bit more accurate:
AI backlash threatens make-believe trillion-dollar data centre boom before they have a chance to cash out, say tech leaders
GOOD.
Shut up booster.
Meanwhile, back in reality, it’s AI’s shitty unit economics doing this. A ton of laws have also been broken trying to build these data centers as fast as possible.
No no no, it’s not “breaking the law” it’s “being disruptive!”
/s
am i completely crazy or does the data center obsession only make sense if these companies are operating under the assumption that they’ll be used for cyberwarfare?
like the economics fully do not make sense unless you assume you’ll have a blank check for maximum utilization in the near future and the only money faucet big enough to meet that demand is in the defense budget. it explains the outright hostility to residents, the secrecy, and the maximalism of it all. but it doesn’t seem to be part of the conversation. why?
The silicon valley mentality involves selling a product before it’s useful and sometimes even before it exists. They believe that it will become profitable they just don’t know how yet. But if it turns out not to be that profitable then they will try to pass the buck on to the public one way or another.
I think it’s simpler, and perhaps even more perverse.
Lemmy often talks about AI as if it’s a monolith, but these companies are in competition. No one wants left behind in not having enough compute to keep training and advancing their own models. Also, if they’re not building, investors are going to get antsy, thinking that company isn’t a serious competitor.
They all know damned well this is a bubble, but they’re banking on being the winner that crawls out the blast crater. They’re deliberately fucking our economy on the gamble that they alone prevail.
I can see two potential explanations:
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Hubris on the part of the tech giants. We already know they’re hubristic, it’s possible that they thought they could actually make it intelligent. (This seems even more likely when you understand the “spiritual” beliefs of the people building the datacenters. The “T” in TESCREAL tells us a lot about how these dumbasses think).
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Surveillance apparatus of the state. Would the state want to do this? Yes, 100%. Can the state afford to use and maintain this? Absolutely not.
So, I’m personally leaning towards Option 1 with a small side of option 2
Point two often comes up, here and on Bluesky. Far as I can tell, there’s more than enough compute as it stands today for any sort of surveillance tooling we can imagine.
Basically, yeah
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Hacking sort of depends on there being a bug in the targeted infrastructure, a so called exploit, which you can, well, exploit. If you don’t have one, all you can do is brute force attacks, which are impractical, no matter how much you’re willing to invest. You may want a high end llm looking for vulnerabilities, but the enemy probably doesn’t have enough stuff to justify using more than a handful of those. And you’d want those computers running in underground bunkers, not in exposed data centers on the surface.
The whole data center build out only serves to excite investors. It’s a waste of resources in every other regard. A symptom of late-stage capitalism.
Data center boomData center bubbleOh my god, not the data centers!
