Hacker News Reader

Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

Besides the data center itself, many people in the US are against what the data center is bringing: more AI.

Most regular people have not been sold on the idea that more AI will be good for them or their families or communities personally. Instead all they hear is AI taking away jobs, and AI preventing high schoolers and college kids from learning how to read a book and write an essay. Most people think a world with more AI seems bleaker.

So people wonder why communities don't want this hulking, loud, energy-expensive data center whose main benefit is to hasten the arrival of this world they don't want?

View on HN

There’s no need to mince words, they’ve been aggressively told that AI will eliminate nearly every job.

If you need your job to feed your family then what Sam or Dario is saying is quite literally a threat to kill your children.

Of course they’re full of shit, it’s more like a very useful business automation project but if you say stuff like that you can’t be surprised when people hear it and form highly rational opinions about it.

How is this any different to the invention of the cotton mill?

You don't get to pick and choose what productive technologies to adopt. You either adopt them, or you'll be paying the countries that do and you'll still lose your domestic industry to competition.

It's not about whether it makes rational economic sense, it's whether people are happy about it.

It could make economic sense to be the world leaders in the next drug that turns everyone into mindless worker drones ("if we're not making the factories that make the drugs the Chinese will!") but people still won't be happy about what it means for their futures.

A country who drugged their citizens into mindless robots would be shunned, sanctioned and perhaps attacked. Their economy would be isolated and not pose a threat from competition. It's an obvious attack on our collective humanity and is treated as such.

Until AI proves a systemic risk to humanity there would be no similar consensus on shunning its use, and the economic spoils go to the countries that adopt it.

The cotton mill proved its value long time ago. The current AI tools didn't. And a similar build up failed just a few years ago (crypto).

I don't understand why it's being fought by left-leaning, many self-proclaimed communists that have been fighting for a world where we just hang out and make shitty art all day.

Isn't AI the only way we get to that? Who is gonna do actual important work otherwise?

Because (a) that vision of utopia is not party of any "self-proclaimed communist" philosophy that I've ever heard of, and (b) no one believes that's what's going to happen.

Instead the evidence of our own eyes tells us that AI seems to be worsening the K-shaped economy: a handful of Elon Musks will become trillionaires, a slightly larger number of engineers will become billionaires, and the rest of us will have fewer jobs and fewer prospects of upward mobility in a world where AI can do most entry-level work.

The productivity gains would need to be shared by all to get that world, not owned by a couple for-profit entities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com