Electricity costs make the headlines, but I have also heard that the datacenters apparently make a loud perpetual buzzing noise that is audible from a large distance. That sounds like reason enough to oppose one being built near me.

You know what the largest cost of any goods are? The energy cost. You know what these datacenters are demanding massive amounts of? Energy.

Sorry to all the techbros here that think LLMs are the future of every job but a lot of people here think you are delusional, and we would be happy to let you have your delusions if it didn't mean significant rises in both personal energy costs and the costs of every other downstream good. But I can't afford to tack on 30% more costs onto ever material object I need as someone not earning 6 figures doing tech work.

There is a reason the US doesn't process tons of aluminum or supply the world with fertilizer, we don't have all that cheap of energy. Go to Canada and build a hydroplant, or build a solar field.

And that is before we get into the fact that many people think the LLM boom is a massive crash waiting to happen when it inevitably doesn't change the world overnight to justify the trillions in investments.

"Yet widespread cynicism about AI, I think, doesn’t stem from any inherent property of the technology itself, but rather from our politics."

No, AI is partly rejected as mind numbing, it produces SEO slop, it produces bad code, it steals IP. Is this author living under a rock?

She then proceeds to parrot the industry that we'll have arrangements that go in the direction of UBI. This whole article sounds like a trojan horse for Vox readers to distract them from the real issues.

EDIT: The pre-IPO downvotes get aggressive again. Mentioning how the press works is strictly forbidden.

No, it's not a proxy fight about AI. The data centers are just bad, for several, easy-to-explain reasons:

1. They get massive tax breaks;

2. Everyone else pays for the electricity infrastructure that they need to suppor tthem;

3. They pollute water supplies;

4. Everybody's electricity prices go up while the DC has a sweetheart deal that, again, everyone else is paying for;

5. There are no jobs unlike, say, if someone used that same money to buuild an auto plant; and

6. They tend to very far noiser than you might think, such that they probably violate noise ordinances when built near residential property but nobody enforces that. We have industrial areas for this reason but that zoning just gets completely ignored.

AI is a whole separate debate. That one, too, is pretty simple. AI is selling labor displacement and wage suppression. That's the only product. Getting rid of the data centers won't get rid of that. The DCs are just going where it's cheapest, where local officials don't have the resources to fight it and where people can be bullied or bribed into approving it. Move them somewhere else slightly more expensive and it'll still be displacing labor.

It's easy everyone needs to stop using AI, yet the response is "China....." Let them destroy themselves maybe or they thrive more. A double edge sword we (U.S.) created!

Backblaze increased the price per TB (we should be getting emails "ten times the storage for the same price"). Reliable VPS for 5EUR/month are basically gone. Affordability of assembling own PC is back to maybe late 1990s.

Tear it all down.

I agree with the datacenter hate in spirit, but the thing that always bothers me is that most of us working in tech have been telling John Q. Public for DECADES not to trust big tech. Don't put all your data in the cloud, switch to open source alternatives, keep your physical media (or copy it) and don't rely on streaming, etc. I personally have offered my time and knowledge on numerous occasions to help someone make the switch from say, Windows to Linux, Google Drive to a NAS, etc. I've always tried to be as helpful as I can, avoiding jargon, breaking everything down into simple terms, making it easy to understand, being excited to teach people a way to interact with technology without being abused by a corporation.

You know what I learned? Nobody wants to. People will always choose the more convenient option no matter how bad it is in the long run, even when the far more ethical option is only just slightly less convenient. They choose instant gratification every time. They'll whine about it, they'll swear each new enshittified update or price hike is the last straw, but they will keep paying the bill.

And don't even get me started on trying to get people to donate money to open source projects.

So maybe it counts as victim blaming, and the sociopathic techbros that run these companies are certainly responsible for their own behavior, but, at a certain point... it's hard to blame the lion when the tourists keep walking into its den.

Ya'll wanted the cloud, you wanted Ring doorbells, you wanted Alexas, you wanted Kindles, you wanted ChatGPT to write your emails for you, you wanted iPhones... We've been telling you for years: It's just someone else's computer.

When a right wing party pushes a new tech really hard, it's usually a bad thing.

AI the technology isn't the problem. It's just a tool like anything else. Corporate persons as legal persons and the shielding of the people within that corporation from the consequences of their crimes and malicious actions are the problem. The ability to control elections by dumping unlimited amounts of money is a problem. We need states to change their articles of incorporation to make them accountable. We need states to start revoking corporate charters. Hawaii is leading the way on this. Of course this doesn't help that much when most corporations incorporate in states which are already co-opted and controlled totally by these non-human persons; like Delaware, which is now even given corporations the right to vote in state and local elections.

This is paywalled. Without reading the article, I don't think Americans are fighting data centers because of AI.

I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.