What are your thoughts on data centers?

[QuickTwist]

This is a topic that I don't know a whole lot about. I've just heard a few things.

That is the idea that data centers are taking up huge portions of electricity and power and water and land. What are your thoughts about this?

Personally, I think the elites are going to elite and they are not really going to ask us, just like they didn't ask us about 5g.

It's the machine that keeps on turning. Is there a way to do something about this? And what is your take on it?

Feel free to link to articles and such about it.

 

[TomasM]

I don't believe the United States has a choice but to implement. The president has committed to making AI and crypto currency a reality. He's attempting to re-establish the manufacturing sector in the US but that is going to take a significant amount of time for factories to come online even if he does in fact have the commitment from foreign investors--as he suggests.

Similarly, the US has seen a large number of tech workers lose work from many of the Big Tech organizations. These people are highly intelligent and qualified but don't have a place to work so AI gives them the ability to combine many information technologies disciplines without having to fully understand each in depth - this makes innovation a realistic option in the event that IP is protected (it hasn't been because of China).

Finally, if the US doesn't win the AI race then this could be catastrophic in the long term. Of course, the amount of money these tech companies are committing is far greater than they can possibly earn back (at least that is the word on the street) and that tells me that someone is going to be squirreling away some fraudulent money or there's a plan to alter the entire economic system (reset). Given the debt loads by countries around the world, I'm expecting a reset but we don't currently know when or how that will be done without damaging the trust of the upper class across the entire Western world (not including the elites--obviously).

So, to answer your question, yes the elites and government are pushing the datacenters and that is not going to stop unless someone decides they want the US and the rest of the western world to implode.

Side note: It would be nice if John Maynard Keynes was here to answer for his great idea about printing debt back during the great depression. Of course, I'm sure he would blame governmental fiscal policy for the outcome - as if that couldn't be seen like a kid looking at an ice cream truck.

 

[Asa]

I'm anti Gen Ai, and anti data center.

 

[John K]

I suspect it will be full of surprises. For example, it's very possible that there will be some major company failures before the winners emerge, and that could well lead to a global economic crisis because of the sheer scale of capital invested. We've been there before with tech companies.

There's something insidious about the ai that's already freely accessible to everyone on a casual basis. It's much easier to get one of them to find something out for you than to do it yourself, or to summarise a long text, or to write a text for you that's a bit challenging. People will take the easy route - not all folks, but doing it yourself will become a thing for a dedicated minority (of weirdos maybe?). In fact it will stop being economic for the major companies to provide direct access to information once most folks stop looking directly for it. It'll lead to a degradation of people's ability to deal with complex intellectual issues on their own. Maybe in a generation or two ai will have to be self developing because there won't be any humans left who have the ability to service or develop it.

That's before we look at the demands of ai on the economy for power, real estate, computing components, water. They'll all have to be triplicated for each service because it won't be long before most economies become dependent on it, and there will have to be redundancy in the services to ensure their continuity in a crisis. That'll cause inflation because it will be competing for these resources with other demands.

It will very possibly become a single point of failure for the maintenance of modern societies.

But then this is the pessimistic view. Maybe it will be an El Dorado of benefits that make the future a utopia? That is a possibility, but then the opposite is very possible too. It feels like an awful gamble.

To be honest, I worry a bit more about small scale specialised ai than this big stuff. For example, how long will it be before terrorists or a crooks get their hands on a cheap drone that can stay in the air more or less indefinitely and which is programmed biometrically to seek out and kill a particular individual? These sort of things could be turned out in their thousands for next to nothing within a couple of generations. Or what about an ai mastered ransomware engine that's trained on every computer operating environment in the world?