[bluepeter]

Holy moly this is upsetting to see on HN. If even here we're cheering on data center bans, AI is on track to become the next Concorde, or nuclear in the US. AI is the most amazing tech innovation that I've seen in my career since I started programming Perl back in 1994... Gosh, I'm gonna be gloomy for the next day.

[slg]

>AI is on track to become the next Concorde

A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?

[goldcountry]

If you had a data center in your backyard you'd change your mind on this one suuuuuper fast.

[wsve]

We as a society should weight the cost/benefits of new technologies like this. What is the actual benefit of gigantic AI data centers? Is that worth the costs of the data centers to the power grid

[PearlRiver]

Do you want to live next to one? Or do you think that honor should go to poor people?

Now that I think about it were do all these tech bros live...

[karmakurtisaani]

Rich people don't send their kids to wars or live next to their factories. Those are the rules.

[drivingmenuts]

If you're wealthy, it's not a problem because you probably won't have a data center next to you. If you're poor, you're screwed.

Those data centers require a ton of extra power infrastructure and the costs of those get front-loaded on the consumers already in the area, driving up their rates. The data centers get tax breaks because they can afford to buy the politicians, who get to claim progress and a bunch of other things that the poor won't see in their lifetimes, nor will their descendants. The progress and its outcomes might benefit society as a whole, in some small way, but the cost to society in terms of economic and environmental destruction will never be borne by the wealthy and will never equalize out because income disparity never lessens.

We're already starting to see some of the effect in lost jobs because business owners see AI as a replacement for technical labor. The people who are losing their jobs aren't being retrained and are becoming the equivalent of modern day coal-miners.

Meanwhile, their energy costs are rising to subsidize a data center that will be used to run an AI that will replace them and the owners will get richer.

But hey, at least the data center isn't in their backyard.

[twoodfin]

NoVA is one of the richest areas of the entire country and is loaded with data centers.

[Karrot_Kream]

You can make this argument for any industrial building.

[xboxnolifes]

Yeah, and it would be equally valid.