Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I know actual people who are deeply opposed to AI (well, the current AI tech anyway), for what seem to them to be good moral reasons.

I find the attitude a bit weird and very left-wing purity-spiral stuff, but it is a real attitude that real people have.

View on HN

what is the purity spiral and why is it left wing?

it seems like a group of issues that the general public might be concerned about

>what is the purity spiral and why is it left wing?

People trying to 1-up each other leading to the beliefs of a group being more polarized[1]. The naming doesn't imply it's a partisan phenomenon, any more than "right wing politician" implies politicians are a right wing phenomenon

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

i know what a purity spiral is. i was asking what this one is about and why the comment implied it is partisan

The datacenter opposition is definitely partisan, even if you can find some overlap in supporters

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260905_USC...

Independents are only about 7pts off there from Dems,

Are we just going to ignore the 30+% difference between democrats and republicans?

The ~32 pts between Independents and Republicans is pretty telling.

The Republicans and GOP are far off the mark from Dems and Independents, aka they are drifiting further from the center.

...or that many "independents" are just left wingers that want to avoid the democratic brand. See also: the fact that all "independent" senators caucus with the democrats

I would think that Elon Musk being Trump's lapdog while owning so much AI compute that he rents it out might have something to do with it.

There is probably a lot of overlapping factors, for example I would think that the general dislike of genAI in the art/creative scene (which skews left) would play a role.

Purely anecdotal from my point of view. The folks I see being very anti-AI are also the more left-wing folks in my bubble, who I know have gone down some of the purity spirals we've had before.

I don't know many right-wing folks. Most of the ones I do know are dealing with different issues and don't really give a toss about AI one way or the other.

It's both. It's not either or. It's absolutely both.

There are good reasons for people to be pissed off about data centers in the U.S.

China is absolutely funneling money to push anti-datacenter sentiment, and many of the people involved/receiving that money are not aware of where that money came from.

We are at the crux of a national security spiral in AI development that is naturally unpopular at home.

Unlike for example electric vehicles, you don't see China showcasing big data centers. What's up with that if China is scoring some propaganda victory?

You know it's entirely possible for China to be pushing this while dropping their own fortune into research, and for everyone to lose their investments.

Don't get me wrong, it's no that the tech is useless, especially for militaries and surveillance states, but it's not the economic miracle or 'new industrial revolution' so many have gotten away with promoting. I think many here will be shocked at just how quickly a fad can die when the money implodes.

Who are the people receiving money from China to be opposed to the wasteful data center buildout, and how can I get some? I'm still waiting for my check from Russia / Iran / Qatar for being opposed to Israel's genocide campaign.

> for what seem to them to be good moral reasons

Like the desire to have a livelihood?

I get this.

However, I was living in the UK when the miners lost their livelihoods. Entire communities left to fend for themselves on diminishing benefits with no support.

I see some hypocrisy in our (knowledge worker) industry. The same sort of folks who were supporting Thatcherism and cheerfully calling themselves Yuppies, completely rejecting any attempt to unionise or join any collective bargaining efforts, are the same sort of folks (though not necessarily the same individuals) who are now complaining that they'll be left without a livelihood by AI.

Best time to unionise was 30 years ago. Second best time is now. But this is still somewhat of a radical position for a HN reader to hold.

Is there hypocrisy in this? Sure. Does it matter? No. According to the CEOs, if you were to believe them, a lot of people won’t work in the near future. If white collar jobs don’t exist anymore, what happens to the blue collar ones? And that is the uncertainty people are grappling with that is fueling the resentment.

And not wanting all knowledge and skills strip-mined and then sold back to us.

I sometimes compare the user sentiments here and what I see and hear from my peers in the real world, and boy some people in tech are detached from day to day realities of life for the majority. Parent’s a good example.

The software industry is definitely the forerunner of the changes we'll see. It's being transformed completely, way more so than other professions. So to some extent it's not surprising that we (HN) have a different viewpoint than folks in other industries.

Case in point. The more hubris the more clueless.

Yeah it's not like all these ai-tech oligarchs enabled trump to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each and he proceeded to disenfranchise voters, kidnap minorities, and make a mockery of environmental protections. "left wing purity spiral stuff" people are watching community members without criminal records languish in work camps.

Agree completely, but what does this have to do with data centers?

The tech oligarchs that funded trump millions of dollars got to skirt the law and use their GOP connections to push through all of these data centers that nobody wants in their community due to noise generation and pollution. do you live under a rock? All of these local groups are telling you exactly why they don't want them if you would take a second to listen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com