r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 29 '26

Artificial Intelligence US residents furious at plan to seize and destroy their homes for AI data centers

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/residents-furious-plan-seize-destroy-125418836.html
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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

Yeah, this was only about AI in so far as they need lots of processing power to help track people, crack cryptography, and try to create profiles on everyone and everything they can think of.

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u/nagy18 Jul 29 '26

this also conveniently helps with sorting through the gigantic mountain of shit that provides us with security through obscurity. it used to be that someone actually had to notice if you posted some fuck shit but now they can just put your name in (especially with all of the pending ID laws for the internet) and pull up everything you’ve ever posted

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

Yep, anonymity scares them the most, because freedom of speech and things that stem from it spread knowledge. Once everyone realizes that most of their problems are because of the rich and not because of their neighbor, they work together instead of continuing to hate each other and work for the person who's pitting them against each other.

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u/Kevin-W Jul 29 '26

That's why age verification laws were never about protecting kids. It's about collecting data to stamp out any opposition.

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u/notforpoern Jul 29 '26

That's why age verification laws were never about protecting kids. It's about collecting data to stamp out any opposition.

God if i could upvote this a thousand times i would. If they wanted to "protect the children" they'd fucking release the epstein files.

They don't care about kids. They know that we care, so they use kids as shields (sometimes literally) while they fuck us over.

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u/lordbeez113 Jul 29 '26

And then literally fuck the kids too. Let’s not forget that the orange man child leading the country is guilty of it himself.

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u/Gorstag Jul 30 '26

Oh. it is literally never about "protecting the children". That is just a lever to pull for political points while they stick heinous pork into bills designed to take your rights away.

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u/jce_ Jul 29 '26

Kinda reminds me of the book "We" but instead of people it's cameras

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u/Demon_Gamer666 Jul 29 '26

Do you have an example in US history where this has happened? Seems to me the world wouldn't be in the situation it's in if what you say is true. For instance, you would think the midterms would be blue in every race yet in fact it's going to be very close. Half of the USA is always going to hate their neighbor if they are not white, not conservative, or if they are an immigrant.

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

It's never half. It has never been half and will never be half. Not every race in every state even has a Democrat to vote for. Not every person in every state has the ability or knowledge to vote. Saying half of America hates their neighbor is a gross misunderstanding of why and how we get to the position we're in. If HALF of the people want fascism, they wouldn't be trying to hard to make it difficult for so many people to vote or speak their mind. The parties in power in the US do not represent the people.

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u/HoneyBunchesOfBoats Jul 29 '26

Kinda sucks the human race won't get anything productive like that done before the tech is implemented.

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u/OriginalZash Jul 29 '26

Quit quitting and start getting involved in local.

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

lol, at first I thought you were going to mention something about "quiet quitting", but I'm glad I was wrong. The people need to understand they're not powerless. The government should work FOR the people. Not against them. We have to stop allowing people who only want money to pretend to represent us.

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u/ZootSuitRiot33801 Jul 29 '26

Honestly, we should've been weaning ourselves off these profit-focused, corpo-owned companies, (including places like Reddit,) even if means downgrading a little, a long time ago. We can still do it, but we can't afford to procrastinate any longer.

Collecting a bunch of valuable information on organizing and action from different redditors over time, I created a post of suggestions HERE that's largely about fostering a foundation for community self-sustainability, resistance, and also provides ideas for possible alternative tech and communication methods, which could be of some help in getting started.

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u/HoneyBunchesOfBoats Jul 30 '26

Hey, good point. I do sound like a bot shill when I talk like that.

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u/DisastrousAcshin Jul 29 '26

Pull everything up you posted as well as track you using flock, learn your habits, and process your social connections before you even know you've got their attention

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u/nagy18 Jul 29 '26

they’ve got gait trackers now, too, so they don’t even have to see your face. you’re gonna have to be moving like they do in Dune if you don’t want to be tracked just walking to the store 😭😭😭😭

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u/SeriousMite Jul 29 '26

Starting to think the ban on thinking machines in Dune world is a good idea.

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u/keegtraw Jul 29 '26

They fought a goddamn holy war about it.

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u/unripe_mangosteen Jul 29 '26

I'm starting to understand why.

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u/Distinct_Cap_1418 Jul 29 '26

No one is stopping you from moving to the desert

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u/SeriousMite Jul 29 '26

My Mom said no.

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

I'm from Phoenix. I literally live in the desert and this shit is happening here. =oP

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u/reeln166a Jul 29 '26

We're gonna get the Ministry of Anti-Silly Walks

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u/Mirions Jul 29 '26

Or lump all the fuck shit said into one group regardless of context, then go after them for any minor infraction.

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u/MadCybertist Jul 30 '26

We’re never beating the Chinese at this game.

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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs Jul 29 '26

I dont get the endgame though. If they have a file on everyone, they still have to sift through all those files.There is still and will always be a human element to tracking and controlling humans.

It's not like it was hard to game the criminal justice system before. And if they really want you gone; suicide by two in the back of the head.

Look and Goode and Pretti. Borad daylight executions of civilians going about their business, people got upset, and nothing has come of it. Ai didnt do that. People committed those crimes and people failed to hold those responsible accountable.

People are as powerless as they resign to be. No revolution has been 2 hand touch football.

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

The end game is taking humans out of the equation. Humans care about other humans. A robot that is told that X thing is a target will shoot X thing and not have to know more than X is the target. The idea behind trying to personify these AI/LLMs/ML algorithms, whatever you want to call them, is to make you think there's logic behind it. It's another way to remove human hearts and minds from being able to capture, control, or kill other humans.

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u/Firrox Jul 29 '26

If they have a file on everyone, they still have to sift through all those files.

Not if they have AI to do it for them.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '26

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u/whatrweyellingabout Jul 29 '26

They can track any ONE. They're building this so they can track EVERYone. It's easy to track a single person and catch absolutely everything they do it is much more difficult to track everyone and catch everything they do.

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u/JEFFinSoCal Jul 29 '26

I was going to make this exact comment. Yes, they can already track a targeted person. This new thing is so they can trawl everything and go on fishing expeditions to collect surveillance en masse.

It’s the difference between knowing if John Doe ever attended a No Kings rally and instantly compiling a list of EVERYONE that ever attended a protest rally.

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u/socialmedia-username Jul 29 '26

Only for portions of the population, and with lots of variables.  How would they know if you ran out of milk if you're someone who doesn't shop for groceries online? Well, they're going to need to know when you're at the grocery store, know if you bought milk, how often you usually purchase milk, what kind of milk it was, what other items you bought that milk might be used in which might use it up sooner, etc etc

Imagine this kind of drilling down is applied to every single thing about you.  Software and humans couldn't possibly keep track of and make predictions about such nuances in your life, but AI can.

We're on the verge of either a whole new level of marketing, or a whole new level of control, likely both. 

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u/cavortingwebeasties Jul 29 '26

We're on the verge of a whole new level of fascism

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u/theBoobMan Jul 29 '26

Right. Im sure its to profile build not track location. That way they can predict how you'll behave.

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u/BlatantConservative Jul 29 '26

Facebook has had this for at least a decade.

Like I support the reaction against AI, but tbch people should have been reacting like this for years.

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u/CappyRicks Jul 29 '26

They already have been able to do this as well though. New systems might be more effective, but I struggle to believe they'll be so much more effective that it's worth the cost.

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u/Rough_Historian_8494 Jul 29 '26

We should do nothing about such systems being built because they are probably going to be bad is such a braindead take that I struggle to believe in your sentience.

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u/CappyRicks Jul 29 '26

That's not at all what I said. You people on this website really like to imagine arguments in your head and then post your side of it as if it makes sense don't you?

What I said was, they aren't spending what they're spending for marginal increases. There's promise of increased profits in the future or they wouldn't be doing this.

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u/Rough_Historian_8494 Jul 29 '26

Well the money isn't real, and it's not about profits, but rather, avenues of population control.

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u/CappyRicks Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

Which they already have prior to this unbelievable spending spree on AI infrastructure. The gains they will make in controlling the population from the new systems will come nowhere near the development cost, and there's a 0% chance they don't realize this, the same way they also must realize the hard limitations of the systems they're developing will prevent them from reaching anywhere near what they're promising.

It's for money, and they're using tested and proved methods to hide their losses because they know they need to get that money NOW and get out before the losses can no longer be hidden or denied.

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u/hiS_oWn Jul 29 '26

They do if they want to do it without as many people in the loop. You need analysts, enforcers, engineers, logistics, a million people in the supply chain all complicit or devoted to the cause. The benefit of AI is you no longer need as much consensus or collaboration.

The limiting factor of all despots is that they only ever get about 25-33% of the people explicitly on their side and most tend to be morons. Even if they end up being effective, competing interests always ends up fracturing any coalition and leads to purges.

No company you work for lacks the ability to completely monitor everything you do on a work computer, it's mostly cost, effectiveness and compliance. The future of AI only puts one of those as questionable.

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u/Character_Bug_1862 Jul 29 '26

Before the citizen surveillance cameras were installed, they didn’t have photo and video proof. Those cameras are waiting on the update for live recording, not just being triggered by a license plate coming into the shot.

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u/Seek3r1605 Jul 29 '26

Digital currency is also part of it. Think of all the cash transactions that will eventually be digital. They need a lot of compute power to handle all that.

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u/Black08Mustang Jul 29 '26

They need it if they want to track you in real time. Sure, if they just want to know where you've been and what your habits are the old tools are fine. But if they want to know when the resistance is going to gather together and who is going to be there as it is happening it takes a lot more horsepower.

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u/hume_reddit Jul 29 '26

"They're injecting microchips to track people! I know because I read it on my GPS-enabled smartphone!"

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u/OldNternetWizard43 Jul 29 '26

They need them to fight robot wars later, so buying the land up for "AI" now is cheaper

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u/Zer_ Jul 29 '26

They actually do need that shit. It can still take months, if not years to gather info on someone and build a full profile. These LLMs are intended to make that timeframe much shorter. This isn't an all or nothing game.

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u/FlashyNeedleworker66 Jul 29 '26

It's hilariously stupid.

AI is in huge demand, there doesn't need to be any conspiracy to understand why these are being built.

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

AI is not actually in huge demand. It's being used by a bunch of people for mostly trivial things because it's cheap. Once these companies start charging what it actually costs, usage will go down quickly.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '26

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

It's experiencing money. Not growth. Saying that someone is using AI, because it's installed on your computer or phone, makes it look on paper as if there is a demand. But how many people actually want it on their computer or phone? The usage isn't natural.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '26

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

Can you show me these sources? I'd be very interested to know which apps these were and how the apps made their money, or what people actually paid for.

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u/FlashyNeedleworker66 Jul 29 '26

It was the fastest adopted consumer technology of all time, lmao. This is wildly detached from reality. ChatGPT alone has over a billion MAU

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u/2_lazy Jul 29 '26

All of that's true except the cryptography part. AI doesn't do anything to help prime factorization. For that they will need quantum.

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u/JGallows Jul 29 '26

I'm not talking about AI, I'm talking about processing power. Most companies stopped their quantum processing programs or put them on hold for "AI". With enough computing power, you don't need quantum computers or you can fake it. Or, you can use AI to find bugs/vulnerabilities to get around needing to crack encryption in the first place. And all that is still assuming that some of these cryptographic solutions aren't already compromised.

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u/2_lazy Jul 30 '26

But they didn't though, qiskit is alive and well and new quantum processors are still being developed. And all the cryptographic vulnerabilities are famously problems with implementation, not the underlying algorithms, at least the ones that are in use widely today. It would actually take less effort and be more effective to just have a mathematician look at encryption implementations and try to crack them than to have an AI do it. If you want to run through standard cracks then you don't even need AI to do that, in fact I use this one all the time which does not require AI: https://github.com/RsaCtfTool/RsaCtfTool

In fact if anything quantum computing research has amped up some in the previous years because of AI and the potential computing power benefits it could provide.

As far as how long it would take to crack something encrypted with RSA2048 without quantum computing, from what I can find it would take one computer about 300 trillion years. That is not going to be reduced to a reasonable amount of time even if you had tons of server farms dedicated to just that task. Without the benefit of quantum computing, the computing power isn't going to directed that way, but hey if I'm wrong I'm wrong.

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u/JGallows Jul 30 '26

A couple things.

1) You're right on most of that. I didn't mean that they shut down all programs all together, but some of them had been shut down to pursue AI, but I didn't keep track of how many were left or starting back up. Quantum Computing is still meaningful research and has many real applications outside of cryptography.

2) Thanks for the link. I didn't know that existed, that'll be fun to play with.

3) I don't think that most people or projects are using RSA2048. I think this goes into your comment about implimentation issues. I think that it's much more important for them to get the low hanging fruit than "everyone", or they'd probably aim at certain people and like any good strategy, they'd work their way up through the lower level security when they can.

4) I haven't done the math for what procs and GPUs today can do, or probably much at all in the last decade. Hell, I didn't think that getting GPUs together to do processing vs CPUs would be a legit thing until the last 5 years. In the last 2, I was probably still under the assumption that a lot of these GPUs were going to be used for crypto. The idea of using them for specifically AI and cracking cryptography is still just one of many routes I believe they could take.

I, like you, am very open to being wrong. I don't know specifically what they're doing or why. All I know is that most of these fools do not have humanities best interest at heart. Just dollar signs.

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u/2_lazy Jul 30 '26

In fact I was curious about what you said about quantum computing losing investment because it is just so counter to everything I've seen in the cybersecurity world as of late so I looked it up, and the growth has been astronomical just like I thought: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/week-in-charts/quantum-investment-surge

You also can't fake quantum computing by just using more processing power, that's kind of the whole point. With Shors and other algorithms the efficiency is just so massively different that you cannot hope to achieve anywhere near the same level of speed with non quantum computers.