Sounds a lot like we need another "All you had to do was pay us enough to live" moment
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
or what, motherfuckers?

Or what? They'll drive local energy prices even higher?
This is still pretty much bleeding edge technology, who's to say that the way we are currently doing thing is the most optional one? I'd rather they stop building these massive data centers and instead have their researchers focus on making these models run on consumer level hardware since throwing more and more compute power at the problem is not sustainable in the long run.
AI is, sure. But data centers have been around for literally decades. There’s nothing bleeding edge about it.
We know how to run data centers efficiently and less wastefully. It’s just more expensive so these fucks don’t want to do it.
They could power themselves entirely from solar and wind. They won’t. They could use closed loop cooling. They won’t. Because those options are more expensive and AI isn’t profitable yet (if ever).
They could do like what you’re saying and turn their models into locally run things on the end user device. They won’t because the only way they’re making money right now at all is on the mass data they collect from it.
They don’t want the risk of actually having to design, build and market products to consumers. They want to sell a fungible commodity that someone else makes a product with, they get to make money regardless of the success or failure of any given product.
Ultimately, they’re not really interested in any of this because they think that it’s a useful technology. They’re only interested because the business model of building a bunch of data centers and selling the computer is simple and low risk. They wouldn’t be putting any money in to it if not for that business model.
Most of the leadership at these companies made their names in the cloud services and web hosting boom. They’re sticking to what they know and what has been the only really big success for the industry in the past decade.
Well well, that reminds me of the US car industry where they thought bigger and bigger motors and cars were better. And American consumers still think so. When all else in the world knows that that’s not sustainable in the long run.

Nope.
It's not just that we don't care about any AI race, it's that we're also over American exceptionalism too.
We don't want to be ahead of Chinese AI, we want to stop Chinese AI from ruining the environment.
The executive accused the media of spreading “misinformation and outright lies,” arguing that “in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before.”
Dude, you are literally trying to build the lying pipe, that makes the lying more conversational, and this is your argument. You are holding 40 bloody knives and yelling that THEY are sending a dude with a knife if we don't act right now... You are in the hot dog suit.
These people should be elected to the "Sun council for exceptional beings". Very prestigious... Very wow... It's where we shoot you into the sun.
Have any of these AI CEOs, politicians or tech bros that try to rally behind a nationalistic "gotta win the AI race against China" ever explained what is actually consequential about this race in their view for anyone but themselves? Like other than your personal company's outlook, your stock portfolio or your political influence/military usage over what is, best case scenario (being generous), a valuable and useful advanced tool for some types of work... what difference does it make to the average internet user if their AI chat bots or agents are developed in or run on data centers in the US or China?
Or more realistically, if they have the largest market share in the world, because there's no lose state that means that the US AI companies can't still exist... unless the AI companies keep pissing people off enough for the public to actually just shut down every data center.
It seems pretty clear that the only real motivation is an unimpeded return on their massive investments. China having market share in AI applications does not, inherently, threaten anyone's safety any more than if they have a minority share in the market.
Using rational reasoning like you are doing here exposes the deeper meaning of this
I advise to take a look at this book
Amazon wants communities to stop »defying« its AI data centers, which is a fascinating way to describe democracy when democracy becomes inconvenient. Apparently locals should provide the land, water, power and infrastructure, then politely shut up while one of the world’s richest corporations decides what »progress« looks like.
The clear sense of entitlement coming from these companies is appalling. And the history of American politics shows us that when the whims of the wealthy entitled are denied the go fucking nuts. These people are going to want revenge, it's going to be brutal, and we need to be ready for it.
Its oligarch logic. Democracy is foul and needs to die because democracy means Bezos has one vote, the same as any barista or construction worker, which is utterly ridiculous. He should be in charge, of course. So stop defying him.
It’s why they buy legislators and city council members. And presidents.
It's the american dream, stop resisting!
The tech industry has fully lost its plot.
It never had one, those companies are complicit in genocide, war crimes, news manipulation and part of imperialism since two decades, so destroying the earth is like a side hustle.
I mean wikileaks documents in 2012 showed that google were intentionally involved in the proxy war of Syria, this was lead by western governments co operated with islamist terrorist to start a civil war.
Julian assange wrote an article in 2014 warning everyone about google.
Honestly, 2 decades is charitable, more like since computing was first invented, in the 1940s
Please, I BEG of You, LET us REPLACE your Jobs!
-Matt Garman!
So this guy is claiming we’re listening to misinformation while simultaneously hiding behind NDAs regarding data centers.
You're referring to case of an entire town council that got caught being binded by NDAs, right?
How cam those superseed the duties abd obligations elected officials have towards their constituents?
It’s not just one. It’s standard for data centers. NDAs regarding water, electricity, and general operations.
Some, the city council calls it a warehouse and then the residents find out later it’s a data center.
That should be a crime. An electes official bound by a privately signed document? That's rich.
Insane. They have gone completely insane. I am one of the people who say Machine Learning and LLMs are a good technology, and that the amount of ressources used by the common ChatGPT-User is not worth writing home about (as long as they aren't generating slop videos, which are using remarkable amounts of ressources for the arguably crappy results), but what these people are doing has nothing to do with anything even remotely rational. All of this is a financial desaster waiting to happen, just for militaries and spy agencies to scoop up what has been built to turn it against all of us.
This gentleman can eat a dick.
He can eat a dildo cause he ain't worth a dick
“Just like the national highway system, our country’s economy, national security, and everyday lives stand to benefit immensely,” he wrote.
Right out of the gate, the national highway system is owned by the public, not fucking corporations you knob.
The truth is slipping out of the lie. It's a tacit admission that the real customer for all this compute is the Orwellian surveillance system ICE/Flock/Palantir/the Trump regime in general is building.
"Guys, shut up and just do what I'm saying!"
Incels that were just in the right place at the right time to get rich.
The executive accused the media of spreading “misinformation and outright lies,” arguing that “in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before.”
Yeah? Well whose fault is that?
We're all looking for the guys that did this.
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman pleaded in a 3,000 word blog today with communities to embrace data centers
Who the fuck is reading the blog of some Amazon executive who isn't already on the kool-aid?
(also, lol at job title inflation finally reaching the "CEO" level. I see Amazon now has 3 CEOs and an "Executive Chairman".)
That's at least 3 different salaries that can be replaced by AI, and distributed among the workers, possibly 4.
In our county Amazon is being allowed to build a massive data center right next to our reservoir, take over maintaining a dam on the creek that comes out of the reservoir, and discharge 98 degree water into the creek.
Time for tropical fish.
Sounds sustainable.
„We‘re stealing your intellectual property, your infrastructure that you paid for and your land to rent it back to you later. Please do not resist.“ -AI industry
What else needs to be said other than, yeah, these criminals have lost the plot.
Yea, stop defying and start actively opposing
The executive accused the media of spreading “misinformation and outright lies,” arguing that “in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before.”
Misinformation and outright lies? Isn't that "executives" playbook?
I don't believe anything what "corps" are trying to tell.
Remember the tale of the kid crying wolf? That's on them.
Especially the companies who literally made social media a thing
"I won't listen to words anymore" - Bezos
Can we stop talking about water usage and start talking about how this is a military operation
Nah, people latched onto the water use for some reason. We're rolling with it
Our enemies have long had no understanding of why they opposed making things better for everyone, when they come ranting about Amazon stealing our water we need to welcome them to the cause and tell them the bad guys are developing mad Max militarized AI tanker trucks to steal it harder
Uh, fair enough. Yeah I guess that's a good hook. But still, I can only see the correlation between the exponential increase in Flock cameras and datacenters. Clearly it's all for surveillance, precrime and the like. If we center discussion around water we move it away from the actual harm being done. Policies become about "ensuring water isn't wasted" instead of "ensuring datacenters don't get built". It's a distraction, no? Or rather, it's co-optation.
I mean...I don't disagree with you
But there's a hard truth I know I'm still grappling with
None of it matters. Most of our allies are not at a level they will engage with the truth of the matter. If their faucet is blocked by a tree root, they'll be further convinced, and if they always have water they won't be unconvinced
So if they care about water, good messaging means that water becomes the stand in for the right to privacy. Nothing you say (or at least nothing I have tried to say) will make them understand the privacy implications. I haven't convinced a single person that privacy is actually critical to democracy. And trust me, I've tried a lot of angles with many different people
We just have to accept they're pointed in the right direction, and that trying to educate them can only hurt the cause. They won't be ideologically won over, but on the flip side, it's not really about water for them either
Even if we did reach them on the issue, that wouldn't wake them up. They won't care about the next issue, like the cameras, until they're worried that agents are laughing over their genital pics or something, whatever they latch onto next
So just let water be the metaphor. They'll cheer with us, they'll march with us, and they won't blink when you tell them AI water usage is eroding their rights