alt Hacker NewsA few months ago the founders of the top AI companies walked into Capitol Hill. Tried to explain to a room full of elected representatives exactly how their technology was going to put almost half the working population into under/unemployment and they should consider UBI [0]. Then they went back to the airport, got on their corporate jets, and went home secure in the knowledge that they really showed them. That they were the smartest people in the room.
BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.
[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
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> ... refused to answer ...
It's a "no." Why does anyone expect an explicit, vocalized response? It's "no" until they provide proof and guarantees otherwise. You don't need to hear them say "there are no jobs" to act as if (rather, to know) there are no jobs.
Construction jobs, yes. After that, a skeleton crew and a bunch of people in far off places, possibly outside the country.
> They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area.
The answer to that is so obviously "no" that I wonder how much attention they've been paying.
The people doing the voting are mostly talking about how much water datacenters supposedly use.
Most people I know (in Utah) are predominantly concerned with the pollution and water use. Water is the most ubiquitous concern across politics in Utah. No matter what political ideology you adhere to, water rights and water conservation are a core topic. If you watch local news for more than an hour or two, you will see propaganda to "slow the flow". One of the most common criticisms of our Governor is that he publicly prays for rain, while using an incredible amount of water on his own alfalfa farms.
The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.
> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses
In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.
I'm local-ish to Box Elder county in Utah, here people absolutely give a shit about the environmental burden to the region. It isn't just about water consumption, but other things. I think the "We need to win China is AI" narrative is (appropriately???) falling of deaf ears. Obviously I don't have the numbers, but even lay-people in my circles have asked how these alleged AI_driven benefits (fighting cancer, stopping climate change, and whatever) are really going to come to fruition, when what they really observe in their backyards are data centers being generated so we can fill our lives with AI slop.
Plenty of people care about their power bill. Water in some regions is a hot political issue. Data centers don’t create jobs of course, we don’t need anyone to answer that.
Out here in the US southwest, we absolutely do care about water usage as well as the potential for higher electricity prices. We also care about jobs, which in the case of data centers are only going to be boosted temporarily until construction is finished.
Why do people want to work if AI can do the job? What's up with the data center hate?
Why worry about marginal data center costs if there is UBI? Why aren't more people demanding UBI instead of demonizing data centers? The corpus they are trained on belongs to humanity. It's humanity's data. The gains belong to all of us. Is it just American hatred of anything that seems socialist? Imagine if in the the optimistic sci fi stories someone interrupted to complain they wanted to unplug the AI so they could be the one to fill out the spreadsheets.
Like who wants to have to work at a desk anyway? Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us? Why use government to turn off the spigot rather than redirect the flow?
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage
the environmental impacts is the only thing people actually care about, you are quite off base here. noise, proximity to housing, water usage, energy prices going up in the area. this is the core issue. not "will ai replace my job"
You can talk about UBI if you want to appear nice but people on UBI are also rather useless. Of course the real solution to the problem will be the change of carbon based life into silicon based life and the extermination of the former kind of life. Which is not the elected representatives problem if it happens to happen more than 4 years into the future.
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage.
They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."
People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.
When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.