Trust and local effects shape data-center opposition

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 56:15

   I think the water issue has been overstated and, you know, there's been movement on that in the discourse, like Andy Masley has done the most to kind of educate people on this. I actually would push back on the claim that AI data centers use similar amounts of energy as like normal, you know, data centers, like they're just much more intensive and bigger. And so the carbon effects are stronger and the potential effects on, you know, the electricity rates for communities can be bigger, they can also, you know, be set up to go the other way.

2. 56:48

   And I mean, Jasmine Sun did some great reporting on data center opposition. And her big takeaway is that a lot of it was coming down to trust. You know, these communities just didn't trust the companies to deliver on their promises, because in a lot of cases, they had been promised something before. And then, you know, this big construction project from Foxconn didn't actually get completed. And so now there's like this unfinished, like ugly industrial park in the middle of town or something. And, you know, so much of trust has just been burned by, you know, the Trump administration, by tech elites, by the flood of slop and misinformation on the internet. And, you know, this technology is coming into the world after a decades long decline in trust and institutions, which I think is borne out or downstream of those institutions

3. 57:41

   failing in very visible ways. You've got the financial crisis, you've got the war in Iraq, you've got Trump trying to do a coup and failing and then still being allowed to be the president again. And you've got the media, which has just consistently failed to educate people on what matters. And you've got the war in Gaza, which has been misrepresented by the media and has been supported by both parties, despite it being, in my mind, a genocide. And so, yeah, lots of people have lots of reasons to distrust the people in power right now. And that makes it very hard to negotiate. If you go like, we're going to reduce your energy rates, we're going to give all the teachers in your town a bonus, we're going to do all these great things. If they don't believe you, if the people on the other end of that deal don't believe you, then it's very hard

4. 58:31

   to convince them it's worth doing um and then yeah i think like the actual effects on the community seem to be the dominant driver of opposition to ai data centers um but they are the physical you know manifestation of this broader like world eating process of everything becoming you know vertical video everything becoming ai slop and you now see like flock cameras becoming like the physical obelisks to, you know, the surveillance state, which people are like rejecting. And I think this is all very exciting, encouraging. My worry is that the energy will not get channeled towards the right things. And so like a data center moratorium is like, will slow down.

5. 59:22

   the industry but less than other things that would be like uh less you know economically disruptive to you know the the country so like you could freeze how good ai chips can get and this would affect the NVIDIA's valuation and other you know companies valuations but it wouldn't have as much of a real economy effect um and i think you should just ban certain developments and developing AGI would be top of the list for me. Because you could get the data center moratorium in the US and then they'll build them elsewhere. There are already data centers around. You can swap out the chips on those data centers so there will be more compute in the future. And everything that has happened so far with AI, which many people are rejecting, has happened with less compute than will come online based on just already what's been planned.

6. 1:00:13

   And so if it's trying to stop AI, it's not going to work. And that creates more distrust as well. If it's like, oh, we got the big win, we like beat the local project or we beat all projects nationally. And still my life sucks and feels like out of control and AI is taking my job or, you know, polluting the internet with slop or, you know, melting my kid's brain, you know, that's going to feel like dispiriting and dejecting.

7. 1:00:41

   And so I'm taking like a yes and approach and going to people who have these concerns and being like, okay, great, like, let's do that. And then also let's do these more ambitious things that will address the problem more directly.