"Polluting drinkable water"? I haven't heard of that. I thought they "just" wasted potable water for evaporative cooling, where does the water pollution stem from?
Fuck AI
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Construction of data centers causes instability due to the rumbling of heavy equipment and disturbing of soil over aquifers, which soils the aquifers. This leaves residents near it with a soiled aquifer, which may/may not be fit to drink. The images I've seen are definitely not palatable. Would you drink muddy water?
Then, the data centers add light and sound pollution to ordinary people, and one Grok data center in Tennessee where they're using methane turbines to cool the place, which is causing an increase in asthma.
Basically, the shit is unhealthy as fuck. AND it's chewing through electricity, which adds more into the fossil fuel-climate change problem. If you like Hell on Earth, continue unabated; otherwise, reach some balance and conserve ffs
I don't think there's any actual right wing anymore. At least not in terms of values or opinions or politics. They're not conservatives or anything of that kind.
It has been completely devoured by induced populism run by facists. It's not really populism, because it's not popular as such and it's not against the elite. It's induced - by the billionaire elite.
These facists need the data centers and AI to push their opinions to gullible voters. Just like Hitler used massive rallies to take advantage of group pressure to make people think they shared his views, the fascist are using the algorithms of social media to make gullible people believe that they have the presented opinion on something that they don't actually give a shit about.
So that's why AI is not really a right wing thing, but still presented as being on that side. If we could find a country in the world where the left wing were the gullible idiots, I'm certain the facists would do the exact same thing there on that side. The facists don't give a shit about politics, because they really do want break democracy. All they need is stupid people, which AI is delivering, and they'll sell it through any political ideology present to them.
Trump is doing just that for them. I wonder if he's even aware of himself being used for this. Obviously he's a massive idiot and a selfish asshole, but sometimes he'll talk about fixing things and doing good stuff, and maybe he even believes he's doing that. However, it always turns out that corruption beats whatever intention he had. It always turns to shit the next day. His staff spends every second day explaining why Trump is an asshole and every second day explaining why Trump wasn't enough of an asshole. It doesn't matter what he says or wants. His only role was to scoop up the gullible idiots.
The arts skew against fascism so undermining artists empowers fascists.
Ecologically, it's binary: bad
Economically, it's binary: bad
In actual practice, in the broad strokes, it's not binary, but leans hard toward bad.
There are specific things, it's good at, that are very low token/power
If my 2070 could handle any models with tool use, I could do a lot of it at home.
While I'm doing DevOps work, I keep a window open of what i'm doing, what choices i'm making, i gave it a RO harness to access the stuff i'm working on so it can check me for errors and enumerate security concerns.
When i'm done architecting something, I have it fully document what, where, how, why and add in any security concerns. I then have that stuffed in a repo for my sucessor and any devs that need to understand what I did.
it 95% going to fuck over humanity and pay the oligarchs. The remaining 5% can't justify it's existence, but while it's there, i'm going to use it. They're not paying me more, it can at least remove shit work from my plate while it's available.
Economically it’s only bad because of the capitalist system we live in.
Even ecologically it could also probably be not so bad considering what we could get out of it.
I’m with you on the last bit. I use it a ton at work as a software dev with some devops work
Honestly feels like a firing offense if people in this line of work haven’t incorporated into their workflow at this point. But politically it will fuck is over, once again because it’s owned but a couple of fascist minded dudes
this post makes me feel so good. I've been saying AI is fascism for like six months, and it seems people are starting to finally understand what that actually means.
AI isn't inherently fascist though, and all the criticims in the post can be attributed to capitalism/corporations. You can run AI on a local machine off of solar power to help with simple tasks.
Ya'll need to drop Claude for Qwen. Qwen will happily hack the Heritage Foundation with you and it runs on your graphics card, not a surveillance center.
I'm so lost. Not only does JJ's response not seem to address what was said by JB, but also I live in a middle-to-right-wing area and almost everybody is anti-datacenter. The unity is actually refreshing, pretty much everybody is talking about going to city counsel meetings to speak up about how we don't want datacenters in our area.
rural people will support left wing issue, vote left wing issue, and then vote for a government that dismantles left wing issue, and then get real mad and vote for a second right wing government because that guy understands how im mad
The amount of people I've seen around here with Trump flags (yes, they're still up for some reason?) and "No Data Centers in ~insert town name~" makes me understand just how little people connect the dots.
Yeah, no one paying for a blue checkmark has any leg to stand on.
I'm in a weird spot. I'm a software dev and whether I like it or not I think LLM's have changed the industry, probably forever. Or at least until the next big shift.
LLM's can genuinely write working code and selfishly it does allow me to build POC's in my off time that I never would have before. Working in the industry saps my motivation to build at home.
On the flip side the corporations building them are evil, stealing data to train them, stealing water and forcing customers to pay for grid improvements and just bad for the environment.
It's a shitty time to be alive
I think the overall sentiment is correct given how the current manifestation of AI is built primarily to build a system of control over human information, with the principle players (Oracle, Amazon, Google) attempting to execute the strategic goal of controlling human intelligence for the purposes of political power.
I also agree that the way the supporting network for AI is being built out is an environmental catastrophe, both in terms of data centers physical ecological footprint and the additional power they consume.
But I fully believe that it's not the technology at fault - rather, its how its being used by the power players that control it.
A data center doesn't have to be an ecological nightmare, for instance. An underground facility powered by above ground wind and solar could provide both the needed power and temperature control, while containing the impacts from sound and machinery. But it's more expensive to build underground than it is to buy off the city council in bumfuck Alabamistan.
Let's look the technology itself. What AI has become is not intelligence or consciousness in any sense of the word. It has become a text based interface with an engine capable of processing large datasets and performing complex operations on the level of a human operator (sometimes).
This in itself is not fascist -but it absolutely has the power to enable fascism in the wrong hands, and all of the principal players in the space have proven themselves amoral (save perhaps Anthropic in certain cases). Conversely, I also believe it has the power to enable democracy in the right hands.
The key word here is power. Power means the power to either disrupt the status quo or build it. AI is a power we've only come to live with for about two years now, and its terrifying because its already in the hands of the wrong people.
But it's not going away, no more than nukes will or guns or anything humanity has found a use for. I think blanket statements like AI = fascism do more harm than good because they give responsibility to a tool, when in fact it should lie with the people who use those tools towards nefarious ends.
In conclusion, I'd like to end with this loving message to any Anonymous who haven't sold out to the feds:
Get off your lazy asses and hack Grok to fuck Elon and the Epstein class up. Y'all wanna be netrunners? This is your motherfucking time to shine.
An underground facility powered by above ground wind and solar could provide both the needed power and temperature control, while containing the impacts from sound and machinery.
A question on this one, how does being underground help with the temperature control? If anything it sounds like that makes cooling harder.
It's drastically cooler underground until you get really deep in the mantle, and most importantly, the temperature is stable. No weather fluctuations.
This is why wine caves were invented before refrigeration - consistently cool, stable temperatures.
They're burning books so that "truth" can be only obtained from a machine they control.
Nothing fascist about that.
because AI is being mostly supported by the right wing, especially in politics, because they know reality has a liberal bias, and AI is the solution they've been dying for, for decades, to manufacture video evidence of all their imaginary persecution and victimization... and they don't care how much of the worlds water they have to boil away to do it. because fueling their narrative is more important than anything else.
also AI makes people dumber. The less people have to think, and have machines feed them the "correct" answer with no critical thinking, the more stupid and pliable they become.. Which is another reason why the right loves AI.
We already have evidence of human memory capacity decreasing thanks to a scant few decades of search engines. imagine how humanity will look after 30 years of AI making all its choices and doing all the hard thinking
Obey the computer. The computer is your friend!
The Computer is Good, the Penis is Evil.
They don’t wanna kill art. They want to place themselves between you and everything. While it’s free now, when they get done destroying all the books and shutting down all the independent websites, you’ll pay.
Just like the streaming services shut down physical copies of games, music stores and video rentals.
You’ll pay.
You won't have a choice, because the free web will be larded up with incomprehensible, AI-generated slop.
There won’t be a “free web” unless someone makes it. Whatever that open source local p2p mesh web I heard about people putting together will probably be the “fediverse” version of the under-net.
Data Hoarders and Libraries will save us
Until the wealthy kill libraries or poison their stacks with “approved” books. Data hoarding…they’ll make it illegal to share the materials they stole in the first place. They’ll wall up the internet like China, Russia, and NK.
Most of the people promoting it whole-heartedly are doing it for the sake of "profit at any cost". There would have been a reasonable way to approach it and incorporate it into our lives. But destroying everything while forcing people to use it for stuff it isn't even good at, while founding it on stealing so much stuff, and having a race to see who can make their AI 1% better than the other AIs at the small cost of burning down the planet exponentially more for each 1% gain... that was not the approach that would get the people behind you.
It's not even AI that is the problem, as always it's people. Selfish people. AI "can" be useful, but not useful enough to justify the cost they forced it to have. That's the main problem, that they stole initially, then the next biggest problem, that they fired so many humans and replaced them with AI, when AI couldn't, and still can't, replace them. The next biggest problem, that they are pursuing it so hard at any cost, and the cost is insane, in so many metrics. Next, that they force people to use it to justify that cost, even when the people are telling them, and the metrics are showing, that using it is making them worse at their job.
But AI -is- technically useful. There are things it can actually help with, quite a bit. Just not as many things as the bosses are trying to pretend it can be good at. And ignoring the costs that can never be justified, the product that exists if thinking about it in a vacuum can be used responsibly, but so many people don't. If you are using AI responsibly as an individual, your job shouldn't feel easier, just less tedious. If AI is making your job easier now, you might be paying for it down the line. Never get AI to do for you, something you couldn't have done on your own. Make sure you know what it did, and if you can't figure out how it came to a conclusion you didn't forsee, you better figure it out. Cuz it might be wrong, and it's important to know if it was, it'll always sound really confident, right or wrong.
But yeah, how useful it is in the few select areas it doesn't suck at, ends up being largely irrelevant in the grand scheme, since it can never pay off what it costed, and is still costing. And that statement is even still true if we limit ourselves to only considering it's literal financial cost.
So, in conclusion, yes. AI is gonna feel very right wing right now. Profit at any cost.