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Comment by jurschreuder | Hacker News Reader

The biggest change is that the left have become the conservatives

This is not a left versus right issue. Maybe more of a NIMBY thing. Co-locating natural gas power plants along with the servers near residential neighborhoods has not helped. The stories of electricity rates rising because of data center demand also has not helped.

People are understandably concerned by changes that promise private profits and public risks.

The groundswell of opposition and anger amongst ordinary people runs more broadly than many in the tech industry understand.

Here is famed activist Erin Brockovich railing against data centers: https://youtu.be/XpQo1yQCP34

I don't know how solid her arguments are. But this is the sort of content that is helping inform the opposition that is brewing across America and abroad.

Your point is more about which side is right and which side is wrong.

My point is more about a cultural shift in who's on which side.

The traditional left has become conservative in that they don't want new technology.

While the traditional capitalists want basic income so they can keep building all this cool stuff and keep playing their game of building AI and robots.

What does more harm? Going back to the middle ages having another one of these dark ages where technology is shunned? Will China and Russia then grab power?

Or will we really have a dictator AI?

Possibly both where China is ruling over less advanced countries with AI. They are clearly not stopping developing technology no matter what the west decides.

Anti-AI sentiment isn’t a leftist specific thing. Tech workers are predominantly liberal in my experience, and many like AI (or at least don’t despise it) but also have progressive views on other things.

I’m also not aware of any republicans or conservatives advocating for UBI.

Corporations are kind of a 3rd party here. They’ll do literally anything for profit, celebrate pride month for the liberals, give Trump some considerations at inauguration for the conservatives. So yeah, tech AI CEOs opine that their companies will usher in a new era of prosperity, but this is probably 90% PR speak

Yes, as a libertarian I was certainly quite frustrated with bureaucratic authoritarianism. But with autocratic authoritarianism now looming over us, and a bunch of people cheering it on because it seems new and exciting, I most certainly have become much more conservative!

As for data centers, I'm not against them in principle - I'm sitting ten feet away from my own rack [0]. But with the way the legal environment is set up - once something is built it becomes basically impossible to regulate - combined with the vice signalling federal executive that is likely to focus one of its two minute hates on your community if you do manage to succeed at regulating operations, it's simply best to just not give this industry a foothold in your own community. And while this is most certainly a selfish position (I'm happy to use data centers hosted elsewhere), it's all we have until we restore the equitable rule of law.

[0] I am against the centralized software that necessitates so many data centers in the first place though

Guess who organized these protests?

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