Do we agree that moving towards a future that's somehow "more advanced" as compared to the present (i.e. isn't going back to the past) would likely require giving up some land, water, and energy? That is, that progress is always a trade-off?

We don't have to agree that an AI-powered future specifically is "more advanced". For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is IMO a future that looks "good and fair for regular people". But building solar panels requires energy and water, placing them requires lots of land, building batteries requires mining lithium which is bad for the local environment, building hydro power destroys ecosystems, etc.

I imagine you don't oppose this because it's overall better for humans and the planet. I'm just making the point that there are nontrivial trade-offs, and building anything requires the use of resources such as land, water, and energy.

If we're in agreement so far, then I think the main thing we're in disagreement about is whether AI is actually worth the cost. ("What does this 'future' do for us besides take our jobs?")

And to this I'd ask, how should we handle such disagreements in a free society? I may think that Mr. Beast recreating Squid Game was a profligate waste of human and non-human capital, just to make a buck. Or more seriously, I'm a vegetarian. Worldwide, meat and dairy production accounts for (very roughly) 80% of agricultural land use [1], 30% of agriculture's water use [2], and 15% of total human GHG emissions [3]. I don't think the benefit is worth the extreme cost.

People disagree with me about Mr. Beast and beef, though. They think that these are worth the cost to land, water, energy, and the planet overall.

My question is, how should we resolve disagreements of this kind, where one person thinks another person's actions are spending resources in a way that is not worth the return? It seems much larger than AI.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 [3] https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1634679

The Luddites were also guilty of violent acts and they were afraid to threaten or use violence to protect their interests. It wasn't a simple disagreement of evil capitalists versus saintly laborers. They cared more about protectionism for their personal businesses.

They were also very clearly on the wrong side of history. We would not be better off if the Luddites had won and forced us all to be doing manual labor all day without the help of those evil machines they were destroying.

Datacenters process data, but they do it in a particular location, and therefore are subject to local and national laws.

It would be folly for a government to decide that some other country's laws and enforcement standards should be applied in absentia. Whether you love the singularity or hate it, you should whole-heartedly be advocating to have whatever datacenter your country will use be built on shore.

In fact, you should also be whole-heartedly advocating for local frontier models / or at least locally managed open weights models for the same reason. But the datacenter is easy. Just build them. Your fellow citizens will use them. Why send all their data to some other country that might be a strategic adversary?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You can also take a look at North Korea as an example of a nation that decided the industrial revolution was one to sit out.

The more our definition of "Luddite" becomes historically accurage, the more it is true that yes, the HN audience is composed of people like that.

The core tenet of totalitarianism is pretending any opposing view is terrorism. You are either supporters of the system, or dangerous anti-social criminals who must be eradicated.

But it's not AI related, it's true every time the eich and powerful privatize benefits while making the costs and risks to society.

It's a more global and important problem.