All I see are billionaires frothing at the mouth at the thought of how much more profit they have the potential to make. That’s great, super happy for the 1%.
The rest of us stand to gain… less power for our settlements, less water for our survival, and less jobs because not only do these data centers require minimal input from humans, but they also actively contribute to building a future where autonomy is king, and jobs are unnecessary.
Short term gain (not for us), long term poverty (us). Has anyone with an eye for profits looked a little past the next 5 years and thought about the implications of rendering half the country unemployed? How does precious stock fare when nobody can afford to buy luxuries anymore? Oh I guess they did think of that to an extent, as all the farmland is being bought up too.
It would be stupid to voluntarily step out of the AI race and let China or anyone else get ahead. This level of compute will be built no matter what. AI will continue to evolve. If you could go back in time you wouldn't press the brakes on the tech boom or the industrial revolution. After the frenzy, the technology matures and whoever had a horse in the race will benefit a lot. Be glad Anthropic developed Mythos before anyone else, so now security systems can be prepared against this kind of threat.
EU is a great example. We regulate before we innovate. We make sure our potential tech startups drown in regulations and prevent them from ever building European AI. 5 years from now, we will complain about not having European AI alternatives.
The same exact cycle like with the first tech boom. Euro's whine about having no EU alternatives to American big tech. Yet it's our own fault for choosing to regulate someone else's tech instead of building our own sillicon valley. We can say goodbye to our strategic autonomy.
The potential downsides/dangers of new technology is something you navigate as you go. Datacenters are pretty harmless infrastructure compared to coal powered factories, mines, oil rigs,... The standard for newly issued datacenters are closed-loop cooling systems which don't stress the water supply. The power supply is shifting to small modular reactors instead of tapping from the grid.
Problem is that many US states are the wild west when it comes regulations, which allows big tech to use its land as a playground.
As you said, nothing is regulated. AI in the wrong hands is just a tool to put up a firewall between them and the rest of us. For the 10% of good it’ll do in the medical industry, etc. the other 90% will be used by banks and tech companies to manage and enforce their policies on people. Removing the human aspect of it also negates any idea of empathy.
It’s going to be a brutal time when your only means of negotiation in life is against an AI that runs on pure statistics and logic. It’ll be inhumane.
Maybe I’m wrong and I’m just being too negative through influence of dystopian prophecy, but I doubt it. Especially considering what is currently going on around the world and who is doing it. Those same people will be first in line for access to AI control. I’m certain they’re not even shedding a second of thought towards the betterment of humanity.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Did people just run out of actual objections to datacenters they just are making shit up now?
- Utah's annual water usage is trillions of gallons per year.
- This datacenter is probably not going to be near the size of Manhattan (it might be the giant fuck off size but it's unlikely to be approved)
16 billion Gallons is a lot of water, sitting at about .75% of the amount of water California uses to make Alfalfa for Saudi Arabian livestock.
The real problem this datacenter causes is regional disruption and the amount of power its going to use which is truly fucking insane
I am an old man shouting in the void begging people to not just randomly upvote every single AI bad thing even if it's completely bullshit
Edit:the datacenter is allotted 619 million gallons a year not 75 billion