[tengbretson]

In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?

[halestock]

Because it's pretty evident that all these data centers are primarily intended to eliminate jobs and make more trillionaires and destroy democracy, and the positive stuff (like solving unsolved math problems) doesn't remotely justify that.

[tengbretson]

Everyone on this site has been cashing checks building the job eating machine for years. The concern is only pouring out now that it may not need us anymore.

[mk89]

I am not against AI but putting automation tools is in a different category than "AGI, you only need specs and they do the work for you".

20 years ago even with automation etc you needed armies of people to make something work. It was more of a transformation of the type of work. Look at the amount of work Amazon as a company has created. It changed how people buy stuff etc, but behind the scenes there is always human workforce, to deliver, to invent the recommendation algorithms, to package the items, etc (although here there is heavy automation).

Now the idea is that we need AI so we can replace humans, so "people can spend more time on what they like to do". Which is what, searching for jobs on LinkedIn?

[philipallstar]

Amazon have gone back to having senior engineers review all code before production. Don't believe the hype about AGI when your own eyes have seen how fast the Tesla self-driving progress was until it almost hit a wall a few years ago.

[rcpt]

Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"?

Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power

[adamredwoods]

The monetary advantages gained by AI are not going to the lower class, but rather a small group of wealthy people. Meanwhile data centers cause disruption in energy prices, water, and real estate for the lower class.

Thus, economic inequality leads to backslide of democracy:

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-de...

[esperent]

> Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"?

Oligarchs (trillionares and billionaires as they get called in the US) are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

[richwater]

You can use the word fundamentally all you want, it doesn't make it true.

Explain _why_.

[baq]

If they also solve fusion, famine, climate disaster, cancer, dementia and child development disorders it isn’t as clear cut

[hibikir]

Once you start from destroying democracy, the chances that the results will quickly put keeping the owner in power ahead of anything good for humanity are high. Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation. The loss of representation will get us the loss of prosperity real quick.

This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works.

So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has.

[philipallstar]

> Once you start from destroying democracy

This is too unrealistic a statement. Democracy in the US has had some destruction wrought on it since the media started believing that activism and opinion journalism were more important than facts, and that change is the goal of journalism. That's a massive blow to democracy - far greater than anything happening today. We are living in its results.

> Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation.

This is totally wrong - autocracies can be extremely efficient. Mussolini made the trains run on time. That is one of the few problems the autocracies don't have, unless their bureaucracy is genuinely so inefficient it can't carry out the autocrat's will.

All government options and private companies can definitely reward loyalty over competence.

[csh0]

The notion that Mussolini made the trains run on time is a myth, a bit of state propaganda.

[baq]

I'm just taking destruction of democracy for granted; the question is if we get anything in return.

[themafia]

The word happiness, fulfillment or even freedom didn't come to mind?

Well at least you're planning to have a very healthy population of enslaved serfs. I'm sure they'll appreciate all you've done for them.

[msy]

Do they? There's been a lot of hot air, quite literally, but aside from some math conjectures actual evidence of meaningful progress on anything that actually helps humanity seems rather thin on the ground.

[baq]

Velocity of capability growth is only surpassed by velocity of goalposts.

[JKCalhoun]

"If."

—Sparta

[fooster]

The number of doomers and luddites with extremely hyperbolic views on a site for tech entrepreneurs is wild.

[jkwn]

You have no frame of reference, Donny.

I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals.

Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it.

Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design.

What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.

[tengbretson]

You have to admit-- it is interesting that all of this media, that was made during a time when there were standards and morals, has painted such a clear picture of what you now expect life to be like.

[Jare]

It's speculative fiction after all.

[jkwn]

It's easy to understand once you understand the power structures at play.

The US was founded on Christian principles. Even the chief author of the constitution separated church and state for the express purpose of spreading the gospels of Jesus. There is the source of morality.

And then since the mid 20th century this stronghold of morality was by the hidden architects of human affairs allowed to diminish by the corruption of the monetary system. The constitution only allows for the federal government to mint silver and gold coins, but over a series of events (starting with the sinking of the Titanic, believe it or not) the power to print money became centralized and co-opted by the global banking elites, and now everything that gets in the way is either purchased or neutralized.

Some of the media I cited like 1984 or the Terminator series were as a warning by moral men. It's not surprising that we failed to heed these warnings against the god of money, at least temporarily. Others like Back to the Future 2 (Biff == Trump), or the Simpsons, are predictive programming leaks from mortal architects.

What's more surprising to me is the myopic greed of those who choose the dark side willingly despite the forewarned consequences as if all of this wasn't already written about by higher powers, heavenly and earthly. We're living in biblical times whether you agree with it or not. They've been planning for global depopulation since the 60's w/ the World3 simulator. We just lived through the man-made pandemic from the Wuhan lab ala EcoHealth funded by Fauci, and I'm guessing it'll never bother most readers here that he's still not in jail because y'all neither have the attention span nor resources to learn the truth anymore because you keep scrolling censored sources.

Which reminds me... Utopia (the UK version), more predictive programming. It's just two seasons, I suggest everyone watch it to get a sense of what I mean by predictive programming. In one scene you'll even find the masonic square and compass. In the US version they even added Bill Gates as a character, just to hammer it home.

[20after4]

All of the things you say have been around in the form of fringe conspiracy theories for a long time.

Thing is, way too many conspiracy theories, it would seem, are just plain facts (or at least very close to the truth if not 100% perfectly accurate in all the details)

[King-Aaron]

Luddites were not against the advent of new technology. They were against capitalists using new technology as an excuse to cut skilled labour and not offer any avenue for reskilling etc.

Which is what's happening again.

[veber-alex]

Don't bother, you will just be downvoted to oblivion.

Assume every post here is automatically anti something and don't engage. Your mental health isn't worth it.

[budududuroiu]

I'm not an AI booster, nor an AI detractor. I like tech and progress. I'm mortified at the possibility of a data centre being built next to me at some point in the future [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo

[rcpt]

That video is completely fake btw.

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

[mukmuk]

The number of realists on this site is encouraging.

[Aunche]

The reason all the communist powers switched to capitalism is because they too realized that people with purely selfish intentions can unintentionally help society by satisfying market demands.

Just because capital is happy to take advantage our current incompetent authoritarian populist administration doesn't doesn't mean they don't prefer predictable technocrats in charge. Trump was outspent during all of his campaigns.

[mulmen]

> now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?

Because it’s easy. It’s free to post internet comments. The doomers have the lowest effort take so they’re very prominent. People doing things are too busy doing things to post doomer comments.

[thrance]

We saw what happened to the early optimism of the internet era, what corporations made of it. There's no reason to believe this time will be different. Trust me, they are not building these data centers to solve math problems.

[dlev_pika]

How much of the total pie of resources consumed is ‘solving math models’, really?

[viccis]

Because we can learn?

[ozgrakkurt]

> that's literally solving unsolved math problems,

It is extremely hard to imagine that the world where this amount of money going into actual research tools and researchers wouldn’t give vastly better results.

Building a nuclear powered shovel to dig a grave would work but it doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do

[doctorwho42]

The sheer size of and resource consumption to build and operate them.

Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ...

And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!

[xp84]

100% of the water that is 'used up' in a datacenter, or even in electrical generation, is evaporated into the atmosphere. The same one where the rain comes from. Everywhere East of the Rockies, they don't even have droughts, so that seems like a lot of area where we can use a lot of water with basically no impact because it's all just coming back into the water cycle directly as opposed to ending up in a water treatment plant and flowing into the sea.

We'll be able to increase chip capacity eventually, and we're also still doing pretty well at clean energy conversion. Eventually we'll get there.

I'm much less pessimistic about this.

[ianbutler]

Most new builds don't even use evaporative cooling afaik, this will probably be closed loop. The implications being you're not risking the local water table and overall consumption is lower, a lot lower.

[dqv]

What percentage of new builds are using closed loop cooling? I've seen this pop data center "fact" thrown around, but with no data to back it up.

[Schiendelman]

By capacity it's trending from around 60% now to 80% by 2030.

There is LOTS of reporting about this. One example:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/microsof...

[dqv]

I don't see in that article where you're getting 60-80%. Why link to one example instead of the "LOTS" of reporting that shows the 60-80% number you're claiming?

[Mistletoe]

> Everywhere East of the Rockies, they don't even have droughts

What?

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

[xp84]

Pardon my mistake. How do you even manage to have a drought when it rains all year long? Sorry, that just doesn't make any sense. You can drive around anywhere on the East Coast and everything everywhere is green all summer. I've seen plenty of places where people have 2-acre lawns that have no irrigation whatsoever, it just stays green. How can this be and still have a "drought"?

Maybe "drought" doesn't mean what I think it means. In this case, I amend my comment to say "There's clearly lots of water there" instead of "drought."

[doctorwho42]

Seriously... I get really annoyed with people who state opinions as facts...

Like the water situation east of the rockies has been pretty bad... It just ain't the desert that you get over in California or Arizona

[leptons]

The datacenter is still heating the atmosphere and consuming enormous amounts of electricity, which also heats the atmosphere. And it still won't solve our global climate disaster and is far more likely to contribute to a lot of bad things happening for humans.

[Schiendelman]

Compared to what? Meat consumption? Land use regulations? This stuff is just not a drop in the bucket in comparison to the decisions we actually tell our government to make.

[doctorwho42]

Compared to any other electrical system.

When these days centers say they use (x) MW/GW, that is all turning into heat, with some additional (%) on top for inefficiencies.

And don't forget, they are literally making the largest natural gas power plants. Which in turn generate a fuck ton of heat to make the power because they burn gas to heat water to turn it into steam to turn a turbine... Which in itself is another +30%-60% of heat on top of what ever number they quote for power because of the inefficiencies.

So for every MW, it's really 1.3-1.6MW of heating, then they use that 1 MW to power the cooling systems or the server clusters. So for every 1MW of power use, it's on the order of 2.3-2.6x of heat generated.

[Schiendelman]

Do you think that meat consumption doesn't release heat equivalent to the caloric input?

[chneu]

Beef consumption dwarfs data centers in terms of environmental damage for no good reason and does much worse things to water, but nobody cares cuz beef is a status symbol for people. AI is easy to hate and requires no sacrifice. But giving up red meat is kind of tough so nobody does it.

[doctorwho42]

Show me the numbers compared to all the new data centers for AI.

AI data centers dwarf any previous data centers you know about

[youre-wrong3]

It’s clear you don’t know what you’re talking about. Data centers don’t use water.

[doctorwho42]

So how does their cooling work? Clearly you haven't looked into this much

[youre-wrong3]

After a closed loop system is filled how much water does it consume?