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Losing your job means losing your livelihood and often your life for the vast majority of people.
That's not even getting into any loss of purpose or identity it might cause people. For better or for worse, working and jobs are a major part of the social fabric of society, and it would take a non-insignificant amount of time for that to change. Trying to abruptly shift that would not go well.
If you are trying to take on the hyperscalers why not push for UBI vs trying to stop the buildout? Is the former really that much more difficult than the latter? Is it even good policy beyond not wanting something in your own backyard?
I don't see why you think that. Its something that:
1) These CEOs and people with power want
2) The populace has some degree of control over, since its local politics vs national.
That makes it an attractive way to push back against powerful people that they see as operating in bad faith. It seems like their chances here are much better than trying to go directly to congress and advocating for UBI.
You have control over who you vote for. Congress is not elected nationally. Sorry I just don't see how your points make sense. You might have better success of pushing the data centers off to your neighbor. But this doesn't stop the buildout, it only gives certain neighborhoods temporary protection while economic conditions for most continue to deteriorate. Aka a false sense of security and therefore a bad idea.
> This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people.
Its much easier to put someone who is aligned with your values into a local political position than congress. And its much more likely that your neighbors will vote in a way that aligns with your interests. And you won't get overridden by a congressman from several states away that has different incentives.
Yes, people building data centers can just shop for a new location. But resistance to data centers appears to be pretty correlated with living in communities that are good places to data center, at least anecdotally.
The world I'm looking in is one where citizens pushing back locally has seemed to get at least some measure of success, albeit spotty, whereas attempts to lobby Congress about AI has been screaming into the void. Frankly, I think your position here is completely divorced from what is actually happening in reality.
It's a bad idea. The few communities that succeed are still going to suffer the macro consequences of data centers being built in the next town over.
If there were serious macro consequences then maybe it would be an issue but from the point of view of the communities -- there aren't. Data centers don't bring a lot of permanent employment and tend to be given tax breaks. They are skeptical that data centers are the boon that these people claim they are -- and they are right to be so since people pushing these data centers have been wildly untrustworthy at best.
Saying "You can't stop it so you might as well get on board and hope that in the future you can convince shareholders/billionaires/US Congress to give you a pittance of UBI" is going to go over like a lead brick. There's no reason to trust that UBI will come if you give up any leverage you have, even if it is a minuscule amount of leverage.
I think I'm more curious why more serious advocacy of UBI itself isn't a major platform vs the things I hear often about data centers.
I think in some ways you have touched on that but also as your comment indicates perhaps as part of negotiations as things develop UBI will come more into the forefront. I just see a lot of national politics also around data centers but relatively few on UBI. Again, if you agree that at best this is an "inconvenience" to the status quo then I would think you would also share my surprise or maybe hope that stronger voices should emerge promoting a more sustainable solution - aka UBI.
Sometimes it feels like data centers are just a distraction from that more far reaching and yet necessary conversation. Perhaps it is simply a prelude. Thanks for the discussion.
And then the same court creates the "conservatives win you loose" set of made up bogus rules.
I'm really not trying to be rude, but have you followed US politics or history at all? Is this a serious question? Yes, it is incomprehensibly harder to fundamentally change the fabric and structure of society, especially in a way that involves giving "free" money to people, than it is to prevent something from being built.
Trying to control something by merely protecting your own backyard never works. America has reinvented its own social contract many times, it's why we are still here 250 years later. What side would you have been on in the lead up to the civil war? The nothing ever happens side? Or civil rights? Or the New Deal? The world wars?
America has changed profoundly since the founding. Yes change is hard. So is a nation surviving for 250 years. The point is why politically agitate for a mid outcome. American politics is frequently defined by its aspirational nature. Have you read the founding documents? I mean I don't mean to be rude.
Like dude, 250 years is not exactly impressive amount of time.
Also AI side is not civil rights side. Nor new deal side. And it is dubious which side it would take in WWII. (We know grok side - nazi, but others)
The United States is actually quite remarkable for 250 years of government under the same constitution. Please give some counter examples I'll wait.
> American politics is frequently defined by its aspirational nature.
That part I agree with, though I would say maybe 'fantasy-based' may be better descriptor than 'aspirational' at present. Democrats for example think making a few billionaire sell their yachts would pay for universal healthcare forever (when current Medicare just for old people alone costs 1,118,000,000,000 a year), and Republicans think we can ban abortion and then no one will have anymore abortions.
[1] 45% support for a measly $1000 UBI in 2020 - a time that arguably was the best shot at people considering it! https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-amer...
Maybe a Democrat President who actually pitched UBI with the same gusto as the current president talked about "they're eating the cats and dogs" would do well. Polls are really useless when it comes to predictive power. If the last 10 years haven't taught you that I guess nothing ever well.
At least in the US, the public simply does not trust that the United States government will consider such a thing. They won't even consider universal healthcare. No-one is going to go "OK we trust you, you can build your data-centers now and we'll talk about UBI once you've 'disrupted' our jobs."
Yes, a bunch of CEOs are making the rounds talking about it, but talk is cheap. Even if that talk is directed at congress. Have any of them even cleared the flow bar of funding research into how it'd work and what the policy would look like?
Step 1: tax the living bejeebers out of the companies, executives, and boards talking about replacing people with AI
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Utter utopia
That's how they get paid.
> What's up with the data center hate?
Data centers are where AI comes from.
> Why worry about marginal data center costs if there is UBI?
There is not.
> Like who wants to have to work at a desk anyway?
Better working at a desk than sleeping under a bridge. A desk is probably one of the most comfortable working environments you can hope for.
> Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us?
Yes, there is not.
The biggest danger of UBI is that, since every seller knows now that every buyer has at minimum $XXXX/month to work with, anything that sounds like a great deal to someone at that income level will be repriced so that it's out of reach. e.g.
Your job income was $4000 a month, rent was $2000, childcare $1000, food, $500, car expenses $500. Now UBI comes around. All these things go up. Why do they go up? Some people say greed. This is wrong! There are still, say, 1000 2-bedroom apartments in your city, but now people have more money. Many people have been wanting to move up and now they can afford the $2000 rent. Maybe all the landlords are good Democrats and refuse to have would-be tenants bid, so they simply rent out all 1000 at the same $2000 rent (using a lottery to award them).
But now there are 200 more people who want apartments, and no apartments for them. Everyone knows there is this shortage. They're even willing to pay $2500 or $2700. New units are built that would not have been worth building at $2000 rent but which pencil out great at $2700 or $3000.
>Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us?
Prices are indeed just a label of whether we have a surplus, just right, or a shortage, but they're coded in psychology. We instinctively know what feels like an okay price for most things, and anything above that is a nearly 100% reliable indicator that we in fact have a shortage of that thing. And of course, the inverse too, which is why you see clearance racks with great deals on phone cases for 5-year-old cell phones.
You asked if we have more than enough excess. I'd say, no, we have for instance, way too few houses, and also not enough energy. Also not nearly enough semiconductors. Those are just a small sample, but those things are obviously pretty dang important. And we also of course have shortages of labor in actually useful fields like doctors, nurses, tax attorneys, auto mechanics, but way too much labor in other college-educated fields with less obvious applicability to life.
Not everything is Venezuela or the Soviet Union.
Is that what you’re also looking at? Or objecting to the rewards rightly earned for bringing such advances to so many people’s lives?
The wealthy always skew the rules to favor themselves, e.g. US capital gains being taxed at a lower rate than labor. The global standard of living has been going up but could be even higher if wealth was distributed more justly.
If you have complaints against rent seekers, that’s fine, but that’s not against “labor saving innovations” and it would probably serve you well to not confuse them, so you don’t inadvertently object to life-improving inventions.
Are not getting rich. They get lower and middle class salaries.
Unfalsifiable claim since we can't predict what could have been if things had been done completely differently. But, Cuba distributes wealth more justly, so where are all the innovators coming out of Cuba? Where is the quality of life?
In fact, there are undoubtedly more Cubans building things, inventing things, and performing valuable services in the US than there are in Cuba, because in the US we allow you to be rewarded for providing something valuable to society.
If you turn the country into a wealth-redistribution paradise, the smartest people will all go somewhere else, because people don't want to work purely "For the Motherland." They want to help their country and provide for their own family's wellbeing too.
History has provided examples of this, but to top off their failure to deliver higher quality of life, most nations that established themselves explicitly to ensure fair distribution of wealth couldn't even restrain their elites from gorging at the "communal" trough to the point the commoners suffered great deprivation.
Instead of Cuba, why not point to the sovereign wealth funds of Norway or Alaska? Or farmers' co-ops in the American midwest? Or just the generally successful democratic socialist countries in Europe where standard of living is better by many measures than in the US?
None of those are perfect, but they show that commerce and wealth distribution don't have to be purely "it takes money to make money".
Most of those countries have had 80 straight years of paying almost 0 for their defense. Who was paying for their defense?
If we had some other country guaranteeing our security so we could pay almost nothing for it, we could indeed double our spending on healthcare!
And no, that defense spending isn't a waste of money. We don't live in a safe, secure world; much of the world merely appeared safe and secure for a few decades because it was too hard to challenge a dominant US military. Unfortunately, new technologies of asymmetry, such as cheap drone weapons, are reworking that math.
It doesn't have to be. Social cohesion and not having to work are already major benefits.
UBI is already premised on the fact that top earners will have to give something up if UBI is going to make sense. I've been relatively blessed, but I know no one's future is guaranteed. Thinking one has to only best accrue their own pile in a world of disruption doesn't make sense. Eventually the Bastille gets stormed. Why not get ahead of it and avoid the terror? Why burn the data center?