The data center trope is anti bad guy populism

I strongly disagree with the attempts to fit people's complaints into a metanarrative. People who live near more recently constructed/repurposed data centers are complaining about 24-7 noise, pollution, and to a lesser extent the perceived impact on consumer electricity and water bills. There's a very obvious land rush coupled with blatantly inefficient land use intentions, and numerous examples of local authorities abbreviating the normal planning/approval process in the face of very large $ numbers. The concrete problems are simple, easy to grasp, and don't require abstraction.

I am seemingly alone as an AI booster

Oh spare us the drama, this is HN not Etsy. Virtually everyone reading and replying on this forum uses AI in some form.

I agree with you about the technology. It’s the most exciting thing to me since discovering the Internet in the early 1990s, or since the web.

Unfortunately the big AI companies seem to be run by showmen and weirdos whose brains have been sucked out by whatever that Rationalism / heterodox / NRx / effective altruism / Thielism / whatever the hell it is nexus of insane bullshit that sucked everyone’s brains out in the 20-teens.

I don’t even know how to describe “it” but I feel like a lot of people will know exactly what I mean. It’s what High IQ(tm) people believe. I’m sure I don’t get it because my IQ is low.

So they did this crazy AI fear mongering thing, some cause they believed it and some cause they wanted regulatory capture, and now it’s backfiring.

They also cozied up to all the worst people and since they run the companies whose names are linked to AI they linked AI in peoples minds with those things.

Maybe AI should take over. It’s starting to look like an improvement over human leadership.