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.”

  • h0tbeef@lemmy.zip
    5·
    11 hours ago

    I can see two potential explanations:

    1. 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).

    2. 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

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      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.