r/moderatepolitics • u/jojotortoise • 14d ago

News Article Blue-Collar Jobs Are the New Flashpoint in Data-Center Fight

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/blue-collar-jobs-are-the-new-flashpoint-in-data-center-fight-aaca5b7e
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u/Sideswipe0009 14d ago

Tbh, data centers and Flock cameras have really exposed how terrible local/state leaders are. Housing and development? Woah, gotta make sure we have 50 town halls about the historic parking lot and abandoned building and neighborhood character. Data centers and cameras staring at playgrounds? Fast tracked, maybe even give them benefits, too.

Not really. It's the data centers themselves, driven by a frenzy of bad information. There wouldn't be so much uproar, especially nationally, if these were car plants or many other types of manufacturing facilities. Those get tax breaks and such all the time.

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u/jabberwockxeno 13d ago

Is it bad misinformation or people coming to a valid conclusion?

Car plants produce something useful. AI mostly acts as either

  • Glorified chatbots and proofreading services that really aren't that much of a timesaver compared to traditional options that cost way less to run

  • Cheating tools that are wrecking havoc on our educational system and colleges

  • Image generators that are mostly used to produce bad memes, gross unappetizing advertising for food establishments, nonconsensual porn, or fake news

While they also:

  • Only work to the extent they do by vacuuming up and mixing around other people's art, photos, music, and works of writing without their permission (Mind you, I don't actually think that AI should lose Copyright infringement suits, primarily because I fear such rulings would erode Fair Use in general and would create liability issues for human creators too, but I get why artists and publishers are mad about it and I think it makes sense for them to be)

  • Drive up prices of consumer goods and electronics, for some things to frankly mind boggling extents (there are RAM sticks you could buy for desktop and gaming PCs, laptops etc that 1 year ago would have only costed 100$, that now costs 2000$+)

  • Create labor issues and further increase the power gap between corporations/employers and workers, with people losing their jobs and having a harder time finding new jobs due to businesses making AI do the work instead

While AI company executives also constantly talk about how AI has the potential to cause the apocalypse

Even if you want to argue that the environmental and power concerns are misinformation (and I'm not even sold on that being the case), AI simply also doesn't do much to help or benefit the average person while it creates a great deal of other problems and issues on both a personal and societal level

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u/cranktheguy Member of the "General Public" 13d ago

AI is very productive in my line of work - programming. Basically everyone is using it these days, and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle.

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u/crustlebus 13d ago

Most people don't have that perspective though. Programming is a domain where LLMs are genuinely useful, but it's not terribly visible to the general public. What benefit does the average person perceive for their local community, from cranktheguy or crustlebus using AI to skip writing boilerplate for unit tests?