Comment by 10111001 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 10111001 | Hacker News Reader

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> Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:

That's nice list, but it doesn't go far enough. It only addresses problems with the data centers themselves, but they are also a point of leverage against the entire AI industry. It's that industry that makes them so controversial and hated. If they were just power-hungry factories making bolts or solar panels or something, no one would care.

The rules should include something about preserving interesting, meaningful work for people; and making sure the economic benefits are genuinely dispersed and not concentrated. I don't want a repeat of "You lost your respectable, stable factory job, but here's some cheap flimsy shit from Walmart to make up for it. Why aren't you happy with the deal!?"

The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this. What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.

> The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this.

Under certain dogmatic economic assumptions. I'm fucking sick of TINA.

> What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.

The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs.

Take action early, when you still have power to, instead of the last minute when you're bound and gagged, just before you're led off the edge of a cliff.

The alternative is eventually having either yourself or your kids reduced to the level of pets. Sure, pets (often) get fed and lead easy lives, but they're almost totally deprived of agency. Do you want to be a pet? Would you even accept a nonzero chance of becoming a pet?

Not sure what you suggest to do. Plenty of countries will love to have datacenters. And these datacenters do compute, they don't need fast data transfer, they can be anywhere, pings don't matter. Plenty of countries actually love AI.

I'd argue, the biggest problem with AI is that it makes totalitarianism a lot more attractive, because it is an infinitely big state that controls all resources: so if AI becomes everything and deprives people of agency, it's no problem: government marshals all resources anyway and people have no agency even without AI if country is totalitarian - but it can also make quick decisions with no political bullshit.

> The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs

I believe you could not be more correct but it seems extremely difficult to get people to take any meaningful action, or even talk about this openly

I have stopped even saying anything like this aloud to people because the reaction I get is anywhere from "it won't be that bad you're exaggerating" to "you're a conspiracy theorist nutjob"

Well, you know, we all want to change the world.

Like I said, if you watch the video I linked it's him going over his ideas for regulating the AI industry in general. I only typed up the parts regarding datacenters because it was what's most relevant to the article and the discussion.

Yes. It’s a nice list, is the point.

I would like the Overton window to be where you are. Till it gets there, when people are still accusing opposition of being clueless, this is a good counterpoint and resting place for agreement.

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