Is it any wonder people hear that and go "hmm, no thanks" when the prospect of a massive whirring data centre next to their house is raised?
The SV LLM crowd know a lot about LLM psychology but seemingly very little about human psychology
I doubt that it's ignorance on their part. I think their target audience with those comments is the US government, basically setting up OpenAI/Anthropic as "too big to fail" in the sense that "if AI is _inevitably_ going to take away everyone's jobs, then we'd better make sure that it's US AI and not Chinese AI or some "rogue AI" that's doing it, and the government should 1) be in bed with us, 2) provide a financial backstop, and 3) not regulate us or put on the brakes so that we can stay ahead of the Chinese.
They don't care what the "normal" American thinks.
The question should be, do you prefer to have them also built in the US or do you agree to have China (or another country) controlling AI in the future?
If AI is really gonna make everyone unemployable, then it seems to me like you would want them to be built in your country, not in another country, especially not one you disagree with.
Of course they're still the question of where exactly there are built and how to compensate for the nuisances they may bring.
They're detached from the great unwashed masses. It's not that they don't know anything about human psychology. They don't care about those people or their concerns, historically. And that's what is coming out in this interfacing with the broader public.
And what exactly is the benefit to you to having a data centre specifically in the area you live? Seems to me that far from “irrational hordes”, the protestors are standing up for their interests above the interests of the AI companies.