This a baseless attack on me. You won’t find any posts from me ever saying billionaire are good, even back in my most centrists days (although I’ve been wrong before lol).
I don’t know why people keep thinking that the best line of attack on me is I used evidence and arguments from my fellow posters to change my mind about my politics. 
Anyway, going to ignore your further posts itt. Cheers.
Ok but now we have to decide when data centre opposition is about hating AI or just hating billionaires. That’s fine. It’s a strategic decision but I guess at that level we don’t care about the actual facts of their operation, environmental or economic impacts. If they are just a political proxy then not much more to discuss.
As the LLMs increase in complexity they need more and more computing power. That takes unfathomable numbers of chips. Thousands crammed into one huge campus with nothing but floors and floors of servers. That in turn takes massive amounts of power. One data campus can use the same amount of power as a city of one million people. Some of the proposed biggest ones would equal an entire states power consumption.
That’s what I meant earlier when I said regulations just don’t contemplate anything like these.
Don’t know if you mean literally “ecosystems” but if you did you are right. Very recent research is showing they can reject so much heat they create a localized heat island that can change the surrounding ecology. We don’t know much about this yet. It’s all new research.
Look at what you just wrote here. A single data center using the same power as a million people!
How can I read that and not have the kneejerk reaction to anything in this field as a scourge on the planet?
You want this discussion to be some morality test. That’s not interesting to me. If I could magically go back in time and make AI not exist I might do that. I’m not 100% sure I would, because I’m not as convinced as some it’s for sure a net negative in the longest historical timeline. But at this moment I likely would.
That’s not the world we live in. I’m therefore just more interested in what we can do in this actual world. And since my career is about regulation that’s where my focus is.
Hyperscale data centres are going to exist. Somewhere on earth. My point is, let’s learn how they actually work and what their actual impacts are so we can properly regulate them.
If we ban them all they are still going to be built in China, right?
Also, let’s remember data centres are not the only huge power users on earth. Aluminum smelters, semiconductor manufacturing and steel mills can use power of similar scale to the smaller and medium hyperscale data centres.
Normies are mostly mad because these data centers are raising energy bills and sucking up water while not providing jobs or seeming to do anything other than flood their world with AI slop that everyone hates.They’re told that AI will take all of their jobs and teachers have no idea how to deal with the rampant cheating. You can’t fuck people over like this and not expect them to start lighting things on fire.
The old adage is if you want people docile don’t f with their money.
Not if these hypothetical Chinese regulators have the same moral clarity as these hypothetical American or Canadian regulators.
They are? Well shit then, guess we’re out of luck. Where was this decided by the way, sounds like a meeting a lot of people would have liked to have been invited to, since it seems like a pretty contentious topic.
Maybe the way to properly regulate hyperscale data centers is by saying they shouldn’t exist.
Agree. I don’t think I’ve said anything against people who oppose data centres. Quite the opposite I think.
The job and economic benefit is another interesting angle. These campuses sell themselves as huge economic boons for the places they go but that can be dubious in some cases and is largely dependant on local zoning and tax laws. Some US counties have in fact made massive amounts of local tax revenue from data centres but lots of places, especially in Canada, have laws that will make it hard for some local governments to even recoup the costs of approving these developments.
The job numbers should also be taken with a grain of salt. When you read it will generate thousands of jobs that is always just during the construction phase. Once fully operational many types of data centres require few full time jobs to function. Some types called co-location do require more staff but never huge and any Costco of equivalent size would generate more long term employment.
You have to give people some kind of a treat to get them to go along with all this, why should some regular schmuck in Michigan be excited about a data center being built in his community? I have to change my location to stop Google from pushing its AI search results at me, FFS.
Sure. How would that happen? Can you think of a historical analogue where this occurred?
This is just a high-pressure sales tactic. Go ahead and let China win the race to light billions of dollars of capital on fire. Maybe we can trick them into making their kids dependent on ChatGPT to perform ordinary tasks.
A historical analogue where people got together and collectively decided that some particular thing is bad, actually, and shouldn’t exist? Of course, nuclear weapons testing in space, CFCs, leaded gasoline. There are a lot more to choose from I think.
This logic only holds up if your underlying assumption that AI is only negative holds true. As I said earlier, I am not as convinced as you seem to be. I don’t think we know yet if there is a possible positive long term benefit. I agree the short term and even medium term are very likely to be hugely negative for many people.
You seem to understand it a little bit:
I was thinking of things like this too but they are not perfect analogues in terms of scale. They are all pretty old too. I think we have significantly compromised our global ability to make these kind of international collective decisions in the last 15 years. I find it hard to imagine a world where all nations come together to create some kind of collective AI ban or even regulation.
This just goes back to my main interest in this thread.
We know there will be negative impacts. I’m interested in mitigations not just dreaming of a world where they don’t exist.
This is why things like guaranteed income have to be part of the conversation.
How bout free PPO, no copays and free medication for life?
I apologize if that’s how it came off. Wasn’t my intention. I recall seeing a post of yours in the guillotine thread where you were surprised at some of your earlier sentiments about billionaires, and you quite often make comments referring to how you’ve been kind of radicalized over the last decade re: dems/american democracy/etc and often make note of your ability to grow and change your mind on many topics. I was simply saying I can see this topic/thread ending with a similar outcome.
You’d be hard pressed to find me participating in any forum drama or baseless attacks around here, aside from the occasional LOL Iron, which is always appropriate. I’m not here for that bullshit. Again, no harm intended.