I get that SWE get far higher benefit than maybe everyone else, but who is it actively reducing QoL for?
Massive price increases for any electronics that contains RAM, SSDs, etc. has hurt everyone. The GPU supply crunch has hurt a smaller swath but hardly zero.
As a software engineer I don't think my quality of life has been improved - I now get gigantic patches to review (and I know the people writing them haven't reviewed or tested their own patches so even worse) and my tester is now drowning in big garbage patches that are taking longer to test, so my work isn't progressing either.
Yikes. Sounds like your workflow needs a ton of work if your SWE QoL hasnt improved. that's pretty wild that youd not be optimizing
additional to the great examples already given, anyone in residential proximity to a compute centre is recieving noise + environment pollution. resultant destruction of sleep and air/water quality is massively detrimental to qol. the joes who net benefit from ai detriments seem to live far away from the consequences. I shall ask another way, how do the average joe's ai benefits outweigh his ai detriments?
Data center complaints existed long before AI. The stories you read about neighborhood issues are by and large for pre-existing data centers. This is not an AI issue
I specifically mentioned the other arguments because I didn't want to repeat them, I'm not going to repeat them