9 Comments
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Muruacus's avatar

"That failure should have created an obvious opening for libertarians."

It should have, but instead exposed libertarians as passive do-nothings with a fetish for intellectualism, in addition to their obsession with capitalism.

Tom Karnes's avatar

What is Libertarianism, what is Austrian economies, what is a free market, might as well ask Neil Armstrong how far a golf ball travels on the moon because on this planet there is only one form of governance, military fascism and if your out of compliance your an anarchist

neener's avatar

This is probably the one issuue that has the potential to unite everyone

Earth's avatar

“They also use enormous volumes of water,”

Nonsense.

Stan's avatar
2dEdited

Great post.

Libertarianism, like Marxism, humanism, socialism, Fascism etc. is a utopian construct. And inside every utopian is a mass murderer struggling to get out.

F*ck libertarians.

Ben Mordecai's avatar

Realistically the big issue is that there are lots of lies about AI and datacenters, not that they are uniquely a problem.

If you do all of this in a smart way, it could turn into a giant boon for the local and global economy, but it depends on not cutting corners or having corruption. AI datacenters use about the same amount of water as a golf course, but without the runoff. If they are designed for a closed loop process that water can be maintained. Power is going to depend on new generation, which means you could subsidize grid infrastructure upgrades that benefit everyone, but you have to structure it in such a way that it doesn't impact meter prices for residents.

But obviously you can see how corruption could occur as well over this. It's also a convenient excuse to layoff employees you already wanted to lay off without the political blowback for doing so. Not necessarily a true justification.

In the automation industry, automation is often used to reduce the labor required for the level of production but often that spell more production rather than reduced headcount. I could easily see this happening in business with AI. Maybe there are more businesses that can get off the ground because AI reduces the costs enough and that on the net creates new jobs.

Right now the bottleneck is how much compute you can get. With compute sufficiently built out and cheap, there are entirely new things we can do. It is pretty exciting. It carries both upside and downside but I think we should be optimistic and to the extent we are skeptical we need to channel that energy into direct accountability and policy making.

Sage Alfields's avatar

It's another meaningless market ARG like COVID. Make work nonsense with no meaningful material output.

I lool forward to owning you all once you have fully degraded your cognitive capacities.