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Comment by t1234s | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to believe that dems are the Luddite anti-tech party now.

It’s ridiculous. There’s a thread on Reddit with the highest voted comment saying slowing AI down is the point of restricting data centers. It’s so dumb and short sighted as if if we don’t do this research progress is going to stop.

Anti data center isn't quite Luddite - it's AI-skeptic meets NIMBY. And it's not just democrats, it's independents and republicans who crossed over because they didn't feel their concerns were being heard.

AI doesn't really count as a "tech" topic like we've ever seen before.

Transformers are not a particularly significant academic breakthrough in computer science or engineering, but they are an application of what we used to broadly call "big data". The research had a much smaller impact on the result than the sheer scale at which we started to throw hardware at it and the very permissive situation we found ourselves in regarding the data that feeds it.

None of this really works without the massive amounts of data and hardware. It's enough to make you wonder how many times similar thoughts had been floated before we accepted some variant of the "transformer" idea.

As a consequence, AI is more like 50% political, 30% sales pitch, and 20% "tech".

> It's enough to make you wonder how many times similar thoughts had been floated before we accepted some variant of the "transformer" idea.

It's hugely annoying when people downplay ideas that required years of human intuition to iteratively divine.

Regardless of your position on whether the current scaling trajectories are sustainable or ethical, we didn't have a good mechanism to generally apply ML to arbitrary, heterogeneously, and un-schematized data.

I don't really care about the ethics or sustainability. I think you're so engaged otherwise that you're looking for anti-AI sentiment that isn't there.

I don't think "AI" is going anywhere. It's here to stay, but it's also massively overhyped and still somehow misunderstood by those who never got a CS education. There are a lot of charlatans still making absurd claims long after it should have ended.

100% agree re: charlatan over-hype. But transformers deserve the appropriate amount of hype.

Transformers + an obscene amount of data and hardware.

Do you have a POC of this era of "AI" working out as expected without the part I added after the '+'?

I'm only saying that this is not like the rest of computer science. It's borderline brute force. That's the bottom tier for algorithms and often considered trivial.

I posted this elsewhere, but the calculus is this: the perceived benefit of a data center to a voter is zero. So anything that even remotely suggests a negative earns a "nay" vote.

If companies want to build data centers with low political risk, they have to show viewers what the value is.

This isn't a Democrat issue.

The democrats are just picking up on popular American sentiment. Nobody likes the data centers; the technology just isn't useful enough to offset the environmental effects.

Maybe this helps explaining.

> The rapid development of digital technologies, including applications of artificial intelligence (AI), is having a significant impact on the social, economic, and political life. From the way individuals communicate and form relationships to the methods by which political discourse and economic transactions occur, digital technologies increasingly mediate our lives and societies. But while presented as milestones in innovation and progress, these technological transformations have also raised concerns about democracy (Nemitz 2018; Kreps and Kriner 2023; Jungherr 2023; Coeckelbergh 2024) and seem to introduce and support mechanisms of control, forms of organization, and ideological patterns that bear striking resemblances to historical fascist phenomena.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9

> dems are the Luddite anti-tech party now

Really? Why can't we call them pro-life, since their stance favours living organisms?

I don't like pork chops, does that mean I'm anti-food?

Is this really the quality of comment you want to have put out there?

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