Most of this feels like people trying to get rich off VC money — and VCs trying to get rich off someone else’s money.

The article literally starts with hyperbole and not being charitable at all. I'm sure there are many arguments for why AI will bring doom and gloom, but outright being dishonest in the first 7 words of the article will put off the people you actually want to read this article.

What happened to well-research and well-argued points of views? Where you take good faith arguments into account, and you don't just gaslight and strawman your way into some easy to make points for the purpose of being "sharable" on social media?

> Again, I think that AI is probably just a normal technology, riding a normal hype wave. And here’s where I nurse a particular conspiracy theory: I think the makers of AI know that.

I think those committing billions towards AI know it too. It's not a conspiracy theory. All the talk about AGI is marketing fluff that makes for good quotes. All the investment in data centers and GPU's is for regular AI. It doesn't need AGI to justify it.

I don't know if there's a bubble. Nobody knows. But what if it turns out that normal AI (not AGI) will ultimately provide so much value over the next couple decades that all the data centers being built will be used to max capacity and we need to build even more? A lot of people think the current level of investment is entirely economically rational, without any requirement for AGI at all. Maybe it's overshooting, maybe it's undershooting, but that's just regular resource usage modeling. It's not dependent on "coding consciousness" as the author describes.

And yet here we are.

>I’m more than open to being wrong;

Doubtful.

>That’s quite a contradiction. A datacenter takes years to construct. How will today’s plans ever enable a company like OpenAI to catch up with what they already claim is a computational deficit that demands more datacenters?

Its difficult to steelman such a weird argument. If a deficit cant be remedied immediately, it should never be remedied?

This is literally how capex works. You purchase capacity now, based on receiving it, and the rewards of having it, in the future.

>And yet, these deals are made. There’s a logic hole here that’s easily filled by the possibility that AI is a fitting front for consolidation of resources and power.

No you just made some stuff up, and then suggested that your own self inflicted confusion might be better explained with some other stuff you made up.

>Globalism eroded borders by crossing them, this new thing — this Privatism — erodes them from within.

What? Its called Capitalism. You dont need a new word for it every 12 months. Emotive words like "erosion" say nothing but are just targeted at like, stirring people up. Demonstrate the erosion.

>Remember, datacenters are built on large pieces of land, drawing more heavily from existing infrastructure and natural resources than they give back to the immediately surrounding community

How did you calculate this. Show your work. Pretty sure if someone made EQ SY1 SY2 and SY3 disappear, the local community, the distant community, communities all over the planet would be negatively affected.

>When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a century of national energy policy suddenly gets turned on its head and nuclear reactors are back in style

To take the overwrought disproportionate emotive language out of this.

"How are private entities allowed to build big things I dont like, including power sources I dont like"

The answer is that many people are allowed to do things you don't approve of. This is normal. This is society. Not everything needs the approval of the blogerati. Such a world would be horrific.

>when the infrastructure that powers AI becomes more valuable than the AI itself, when the people who control that infrastructure hold more sway over policy and resources than elected governments.

Show your working. How are the infrastructure providers going to run the government? I believe historically big infrastructure projects tend to die, require some government inducements and then go away. People had similar misgivings about the railroads in the US, in fact it was a big bugbear for henry george I believe. Is Amtrak secretly pulling the strings of the US Deep State? If the US Government is weak to private interests, thats up to the good burghers of yankistan to correct at the polls. If electoral politics dont work, then other means seppos find scary might be required. Freaking out about AI investment seems like a weird place to suddenly be concerned about this.

See Also: AT&T Long Lines, Hydro Electric Dams, Nuclear Energy, Submarine Cable Infrastructure. If Political power comes from owning infrastructure we should be more worried about like, Hurricane Electric. Its demonstrable that people who build big infra dont run the planet. Heck Richest Man and Weird Person Darling Elon Musk doesn't honestly command much infrastructure, he mostly just lives on hype and speculation.

>but I’m really just following the money and the power to their logical conclusion.

The more you need to invoke "Logical conclusion" the less geniune and logical the piece reads.

>Maybe AI will do everything humans do. Maybe it will usher in a new society defined by something other than the balancing of labor units and wealth units. Maybe AGI — these days defined as a general intelligence that exceeds human kind in all contexts — will emerge and “justify” all of this. Maybe.

Probably things will continue on as they always have, but the planet will have more datacenter capacity. Likely, if the AI bubble does burst, datacenter capacity will be cheaper.

>The market concentration and incestuous investment shell game is real.

Yes? And that will probably explode and we will see AI investors jumping out of buildings. nVidia is in a position right now to underwrite big AI Datacentre loans, which could completely offset the huge gains they have made. What about it. Again, you demonstrate nothing.

>The infrastructure is real. The land deals are real.

Yes. Remember to put 2 truths before your lie.

>The resulting shifts in power are real.

So far they exist in your mind.

>we will find ourselves citizens of a very new kind of place that no longer feels like home.

Reminds me of an old argument that a raving white supremacist used to push on me. That "justice" as he defined it, was that society not change so old people wont be scared by it. That having a new (possibly browner) person running the local store was tantamount to and justification for genocide.

Change is a constant. That change making you sad is not in and of itself a bad thing. Please adjust accordingly.