People can't even be arsed to vote in elections. Nobody is going to be burning anything. There's Netflix to watch and doom to scroll.
replyRoman colloseums in our pockets. Maybe climate change effects will be a factor in the rich getting eaten.
replyIf there is mass starvation that kind of lethargy can quickly change.
replyAt least in America, The 2024 (63%) and 2020 (66%) elections had the highest turnout since 2004. Political violence has been steadily increasing here since 2000. It's gotten to the point there are multiple assassination attempts on the President per year.
replyMoreover there was a spat of warehouse arsons earlier in the year. So for me, I would not be so confident in saying nobody is going to be burning anything.
They're sizing these data centers now using "Manhattans" as a unit: https://www.techradar.com/pro/utah-just-approved-a-data-cent...
replyI know you're being facetious, but you're going to need a lot of molotov cocktail to burn them down.
These anti AI westerners won't burn down the datacenters in China. These westerns will be subjugated to a lower quality of life as Asia in general rises as they embrace tech and use the advantages for their own. The same with the tech companies the westerners try to neuter, they'll pass the advantages to giant Chinese conglomerates instead
replyThis is the lifecycle of every civilization. Reach dominance and then when life becomes easy, forget about what it takes to stay at the top. This makes room for the next civilization.
replyIf you burned down every data center in the world, AI would still not go away. It's just a computer program. You can run it on your laptop. You can't burn down an idea.
replyNot too many people have a problem with AI technologies conceptually, and arguing like they do is ignoring the real criticism in favor of semantics. People have a problem with the economics of how AI things are being implemented, positioned, marketed, and used. Burning data centers would radically change the economics of AI.
reply> People have a problem with the economics of how AI things are being implemented, positioned, marketed, and used.
replyThose economics are also changing very quickly, with free local AI becoming increasingly dominant for many everyday uses and even starting to become relevant for the enterprise ones.
How many devs would be able to keep working if GitHub disappeared tomorrow?
You can do inference on SOME laptops, but the current shape of GenAI need massive data centers to be used at scale.
replyAlso the existence of various big tech companies rely on these data centers being place, without them they are useless.
The nice thing about local AI is that it really can run anywhere, you just need enough storage space for the weights and the context. It just gets slower if you run it on potato-level hardware.
replyFor bang-on user cases like coding, sure. For concept art and other still-image diffusion tasks, sure. For damn near anything else, calling hardware that doesn’t approach the inference breadth and performance of data-center-hosted remote services ‘potato-level’ is pretty disingenuous… never mind any significant training. Not only that, hardware is less accessible than it’s been in years— nvidia is re-releasing the 3060 so gamers can buy something. For anything you’d stake your business on? Good luck.
replyYou forget about the robot armies that will soon defend the data centers.
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