Less Popular Than Coal

The anti-AI sentiment has more to do with tech than AI. Big Tech's actions speak to how little they care about people, and people have picked up on it loud and clear.

Tech companies could build data centers in ways which are more palatable to local residents, but using less water or straining local electricity grid less costs more. And they care about costs more than communities. Even though a coal plant is objectively worse than a data center, that is (understandably) what local residents' sentiment is.

Big Tech is going to face ever growing opposition until they start catering to the needs of the communities they want to operate in. They aren't entitled to operate like this in any of our communities.

I think something that isn’t talked about enough is how the tech industry burned its bridges in the last era before AI.

For example, Facebook was a site you trusted for enjoyable socializing and it morphed into a horrifically evil platform.

Amazon.com is a massive rug pull where it used to be an amazing place to buy good products at good prices, now it’s a hellhole of dark patterns, sponsored listings, and upsells.

Try to find one popular Internet company from ~2010 that hasn’t been massively enshittified or turned into dystopian surveillance/algorithm/addiction capitalism.

The tech industry trained its own customers to believe that any product they launch will eventually get way worse than it is now.

I think people would like AI technologies a lot more if they were the ones making money off of it.

Maybe if more people used AI to make fun non-ai products like https://santawho.com there would be less aversion to it.

A lot of capital was looking for a place to get parked. AI and hardware seems like it has the best prospects going forward - especially with baby-boomers retiring and the new generation getting less opportunity to climb the economic ladder (aka catering to them is not attractive to investors).

AI is attractive to governments similar to any tech capable of war, so the race for offer capacity would give tech giants massive capital from lucrative government contracts that then gets into the flywheel of model training and selling to the masses.

The problem was they built data centers in a sloppy, dirty, loud way. Imagine if the first cars were like that? Or the first electric distribution methods? Do it right if you want to grow it.

The political lesson is being missed in Silicon Valley. We want it to be about Iran [1].

Instead it’s about cost of living, corruption and the perception of horrible people doing well. These are less easy to one off with policies. But the public has found those options nevertheless, one of which is blocking data centers (which seem to feature all three).

[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/2118041310699352558

It is obvious that is about fight for resources and supremacy between humans and the machine where the machine is also the capital that seeks the discount for human labor. How can the competition between capital and labor be resolved when capital has found a replacement for labor and competing for resources to serve its own needs? Will capitalists and technocrats give up? zero chance of that. Will labor and humans accept the machine and capital supremacy? zero chance of that.

So the conflict of interest will just escalate more and more.

> At some point, we techy folks have to reckon with how much people hate what we build.

Only the techy folks building the stuff people hate have to reckon with that. There are plenty of techy folks building perfectly likeable products; I'd hazard to guess that only a minority of programmers are involved in the creation and development of LLMs and LLM accessories. I will grant that the ones that are building all the things that folks hate so much are a very very noisy minority, though, near-deafening really.

Big Coal doesn't think that heating homes is an inefficient use of furnaces.

You'd think silicon valley would be more sympathetic towards people who don't want their communities turned into data centers given how people in the bay area think it's an affront against them personally for affordable housing to be built anywhere in their general vicinity.

1. "ai will take your jobs" 2. "We need data centers for AI" 3. "How could you vote against data centers"

Idk maybe step 1 wasn't popular.

I mean, it should surprise no one that the sheer dislike of the billionaires making AI is ruining the perception of the technology they are building. If we should go and blame someone, it's certainly them. I agree 100% with OPs article.

The problem is the technology. I get very well paid in my tech job and can live forever on my FAANG salary, it’s not about the money:

There are 2 types of tasks people do throughout their life.

1. Creative tasks that provide self fulfillment

2. Uncreative monotonous menial tasks that degrade life.

AI takes 1 and ruins it to 2. The jury is out if it will fully take your job, I don’t know if that’ll happen but no one asked for automation of these creative tasks.

When you point these AI bros talk nonsense like cure cancer, Dyson sphere, China bla bla bla.

At the very least, models need to be post trained to stop outputting art, this will never happen though, meanwhile I will enjoy my half a mil a year, while all these AI bros lose their mind over graphs, loops or whatever nonsense they’re concocting up.

Nothing about this is inevitable, AI is as inevitable as nuclear, it seems to require even more capex than nuclear.