Much of our rising energy costs come from a decades-long campaign of progressive environmentalists and Democrat backed regulators to tear down coal-fired power plants, block nuclear and natural gas expansion and make America reliant on wind and solar — the two power sources most popular during the dark ages. Data centers get blamed for higher power bills, but the reality is inflation has much more to do with those rising costs.
The fear about data centers, however, is spreading with misinformation about rising costs, social harms, etc., spreading from a well-organized propaganda campaign similar to the campaign against fracking a decade ago.
Helping spread the fear are the CEO's of the AI companies — men on the spectrum, enamored with their technologies and largely unable to relate to humans.
OpenAI's Sam Altman, who created ChatGPT, says AI is going to destroy the world. He says he is scared of what he is creating. Palantir's co-founder, Peter Thiel, cannot even say "yes" to whether or not he wants humanity to endure. Dario Amodei of Anthropic warns AI could cause massive job losses. Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity says AI job losses were part of a "glorious future." Elon Musk has said AI is "summoning demons." Nvidia's Chinese communist friendly CEO Jensen Huang says companies should be letting AI do everything, even if job losses result.
With champions of technology like this, who needs astroturf campaigns to scare Americans?
Between the egotistical and tone-deaf comments of AI CEO's and the astroturf campaign against AI, a majority of Americans are now scared of embracing or building data centers.
Data centers have been around for a very long time. What is different now is that the large language model computer models used by AI programs need even more data center compute power. China wants the United States to lose the race and has a vested interest in scaring Americans. It'd be like the Soviet Union trying to scare Americans via social media, targeting the space race or, what they did successfully, the expansion of nuclear power in the United States.
In the late 90s and early 21st century, many companies went belly up by overbuilding internet and fiber capacity. But our economy is now benefiting from that overbuild out. They were too soon, but without their buildout and the ensuing financial problems, we would not have had such a robust digital economy for the past 26 years. The same thing is probably happening with data centers — some companies are building too much too fast. But the economy of the future will get greater efficiencies from AI even as the population probably continues to decline.
In the process, we will get a lot of societal benefits. AI is, for example, allowing doctors to spend more time with patients, generating more rapid discoveries related to cancer cures, generating earlier detection of disease and improving medical imaging analysis. That's just in medicine.
AI is helping engineers problem-solve complex mechanical issues more quickly. It is helping auditors discover fraud more easily. It is less about costing people jobs and more about making people efficient at their jobs, so, with a declining population, fewer people can get more done.
There are people losing jobs to AI. And there are problems with some data centers, noise and other issues. But the benefits outweigh the negatives. Unfortunately, the AI CEO's are scaring people and the progressive and Chinese propaganda campaigns are only amplifying it.
The AI CEO's should be touting the benefits for people in their daily lives and pointing out that you already benefit from data centers in your daily life. But autistic nerds who feign social networking skills have a hard time seeing the forest from the trees and are too in love with the technology to see its practical uses. They need Jesus and some serious humility about what they're building. Their products will not be as transformational as they claim. But they will be transformational.
If the AI CEOs cannot figure out how to speak to normal people as a normal person without scaring them, the Chinese and progressive degrowth operations are going to win and the United States will be the loser in the future.
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