5 ms·

In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's

In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?

halestock 4mo ago
Because it's pretty evident that all these data centers are primarily intended to eliminate jobs and make more trillionaires and destroy democracy, and the positive stuff (like solving unsolved math problems) doesn't remotely justify that.
- fooster 4mo ago
  The number of doomers and luddites with extremely hyperbolic views on a site for tech entrepreneurs is wild.
  - jkwn 4mo ago
    You have no frame of reference, Donny. I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals. Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it. Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design. What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.
    - tengbretson 4mo ago
      You have to admit-- it is interesting that all of this media, that was made during a time when there were standards and morals, has painted such a clear picture of what you now expect life to be like.
      - jkwn 4mo ago
        It's easy to understand once you understand the power structures at play. The US was founded on Christian principles. Even the chief author of the constitution separated church and state for the express purpose of spreading the gospels of Jesus. There is the source of morality. And then since the mid 20th century this stronghold of morality was by the hidden architects of human affairs allowed to diminish by the corruption of the monetary system. The constitution only allows for the federal government to mint silver and gold coins, but over a series of events (starting with the sinking of the Titanic, believe it or not) the power to print money became centralized and co-opted by the global banking elites, and now everything that gets in the way is either purchased or neutralized. Some of the media I cited like 1984 or the Terminator series were as a warning by moral men. It's not surprising that we failed to heed these warnings against the god of money, at least temporarily. Others like Back to the Future 2 (Biff == Trump), or the Simpsons, are predictive programming leaks from mortal architects. What's more surprising to me is the myopic greed of those who choose the dark side willingly despite the forewarned consequences as if all of this wasn't already written about by higher powers, heavenly and earthly. We're living in biblical times whether you agree with it or not. They've been planning for global depopulation since the 60's w/ the World3 simulator. We just lived through the man-made pandemic from the Wuhan lab ala EcoHealth funded by Fauci, and I'm guessing it'll never bother most readers here that he's still not in jail because y'all neither have the attention span nor resources to learn the truth anymore because you keep scrolling censored sources. Which reminds me... Utopia (the UK version), more predictive programming. It's just two seasons, I suggest everyone watch it to get a sense of what I mean by predictive programming. In one scene you'll even find the masonic square and compass. In the US version they even added Bill Gates as a character, just to hammer it home.
        20after4 4mo ago
        All of the things you say have been around in the form of fringe conspiracy theories for a long time. Thing is, way too many conspiracy theories, it would seem, are just plain facts (or at least very close to the truth if not 100% perfectly accurate in all the details)
    - redsocksfan45 4mo ago
      [dead]
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - budududuroiu 4mo ago
    I'm not an AI booster, nor an AI detractor. I like tech and progress. I'm mortified at the possibility of a data centre being built next to me at some point in the future [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
    - rcpt 4mo ago
      That video is completely fake btw. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
      - budududuroiu 4mo ago
        You can literally hear the 24h whir of the data centres, what are you talking about? Dude wrote an essay around infrasound being pseudoscience and chose to ignore the obvious, audible, constant hum.
  - King-Aaron 4mo ago
    Luddites were not against the advent of new technology. They were against capitalists using new technology as an excuse to cut skilled labour and not offer any avenue for reskilling etc. Which is what's happening again.
  - veber-alex 4mo ago
    Don't bother, you will just be downvoted to oblivion. Assume every post here is automatically anti something and don't engage. Your mental health isn't worth it.
- mukmuk 4mo ago
  The number of realists on this site is encouraging.
- tengbretson 4mo ago
  Everyone on this site has been cashing checks building the job eating machine for years. The concern is only pouring out now that it may not need us anymore.
  - mk89 4mo ago
    I am not against AI but putting automation tools is in a different category than "AGI, you only need specs and they do the work for you". 20 years ago even with automation etc you needed armies of people to make something work. It was more of a transformation of the type of work. Look at the amount of work Amazon as a company has created. It changed how people buy stuff etc, but behind the scenes there is always human workforce, to deliver, to invent the recommendation algorithms, to package the items, etc (although here there is heavy automation). Now the idea is that we need AI so we can replace humans, so "people can spend more time on what they like to do". Which is what, searching for jobs on LinkedIn?
    - philipallstar 4mo ago
      Amazon have gone back to having senior engineers review all code before production. Don't believe the hype about AGI when your own eyes have seen how fast the Tesla self-driving progress was until it almost hit a wall a few years ago.
- baq 4mo ago
  If they also solve fusion, famine, climate disaster, cancer, dementia and child development disorders it isn’t as clear cut
  - msy 4mo ago
    Do they? There's been a lot of hot air, quite literally, but aside from some math conjectures actual evidence of meaningful progress on anything that actually helps humanity seems rather thin on the ground.
    - baq 4mo ago
      Velocity of capability growth is only surpassed by velocity of goalposts.
  - themafia 4mo ago
    The word happiness, fulfillment or even freedom didn't come to mind? Well at least you're planning to have a very healthy population of enslaved serfs. I'm sure they'll appreciate all you've done for them.
  - hibikir 4mo ago
    Once you start from destroying democracy, the chances that the results will quickly put keeping the owner in power ahead of anything good for humanity are high. Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation. The loss of representation will get us the loss of prosperity real quick. This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works. So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has.
    - baq 4mo ago
      I'm just taking destruction of democracy for granted; the question is if we get anything in return.
- youre-wrong3 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - chinathrow 4mo ago
    Can you proof them wrong?
  - pibaker 4mo ago
    If I'm going to complain about low quality comments I wouldn't do it on a zero karma account.
- rcpt 4mo ago
  Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"? Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power
  - esperent 4mo ago
    > Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"? Oligarchs (trillionares and billionaires as they get called in the US) are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
    - richwater 4mo ago
      You can use the word fundamentally all you want, it doesn't make it true. Explain _why_.
      - esperent 4mo ago
        Because when all the financial power, lobbying, advertising, housing, manufacturing, media etc. is controlled by a handful of oligarchs, it doesn't much matter what way people vote. Too much of the power is owned by the oligarchs rather than the voting public. That's why oligarchies and democracies are fundamentally incompatible.
  - adamredwoods 4mo ago
    The monetary advantages gained by AI are not going to the lower class, but rather a small group of wealthy people. Meanwhile data centers cause disruption in energy prices, water, and real estate for the lower class. Thus, economic inequality leads to backslide of democracy: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-democratic-erosion-study-finds https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-de...
- Aunche 4mo ago
  The reason all the communist powers switched to capitalism is because they too realized that people with purely selfish intentions can unintentionally help society by satisfying market demands. Just because capital is happy to take advantage our current incompetent authoritarian populist administration doesn't doesn't mean they don't prefer predictable technocrats in charge. Trump was outspent during all of his campaigns.
doctorwho42 4mo ago
The sheer size of and resource consumption to build and operate them. Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ... And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!
- xp84 4mo ago
  100% of the water that is 'used up' in a datacenter, or even in electrical generation, is evaporated into the atmosphere. The same one where the rain comes from. Everywhere East of the Rockies, they don't even have droughts, so that seems like a lot of area where we can use a lot of water with basically no impact because it's all just coming back into the water cycle directly as opposed to ending up in a water treatment plant and flowing into the sea. We'll be able to increase chip capacity eventually, and we're also still doing pretty well at clean energy conversion. Eventually we'll get there. I'm much less pessimistic about this.
  - ianbutler 4mo ago
    Most new builds don't even use evaporative cooling afaik, this will probably be closed loop. The implications being you're not risking the local water table and overall consumption is lower, a lot lower.
    - dqv 4mo ago
      What percentage of new builds are using closed loop cooling? I've seen this pop data center "fact" thrown around, but with no data to back it up.
      - deleted 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
dlev_pika 4mo ago
How much of the total pie of resources consumed is ‘solving math models’, really?
viccis 4mo ago
Because we can learn?
ozgrakkurt 4mo ago
> that's literally solving unsolved math problems, It is extremely hard to imagine that the world where this amount of money going into actual research tools and researchers wouldn’t give vastly better results. Building a nuclear powered shovel to dig a grave would work but it doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do
mulmen 4mo ago
> now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why? Because it’s easy. It’s free to post internet comments. The doomers have the lowest effort take so they’re very prominent. People doing things are too busy doing things to post doomer comments.
thrance 4mo ago
We saw what happened to the early optimism of the internet era, what corporations made of it. There's no reason to believe this time will be different. Trust me, they are not building these data centers to solve math problems.

halestock 4mo ago

Because it's pretty evident that all these data centers are primarily intended to eliminate jobs and make more trillionaires and destroy democracy, and the positive stuff (like solving unsolved math problems) doesn't remotely justify that.

fooster 4mo ago
The number of doomers and luddites with extremely hyperbolic views on a site for tech entrepreneurs is wild.
- jkwn 4mo ago
  You have no frame of reference, Donny. I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals. Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it. Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design. What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.
  - tengbretson 4mo ago
    You have to admit-- it is interesting that all of this media, that was made during a time when there were standards and morals, has painted such a clear picture of what you now expect life to be like.
    - jkwn 4mo ago
      It's easy to understand once you understand the power structures at play. The US was founded on Christian principles. Even the chief author of the constitution separated church and state for the express purpose of spreading the gospels of Jesus. There is the source of morality. And then since the mid 20th century this stronghold of morality was by the hidden architects of human affairs allowed to diminish by the corruption of the monetary system. The constitution only allows for the federal government to mint silver and gold coins, but over a series of events (starting with the sinking of the Titanic, believe it or not) the power to print money became centralized and co-opted by the global banking elites, and now everything that gets in the way is either purchased or neutralized. Some of the media I cited like 1984 or the Terminator series were as a warning by moral men. It's not surprising that we failed to heed these warnings against the god of money, at least temporarily. Others like Back to the Future 2 (Biff == Trump), or the Simpsons, are predictive programming leaks from mortal architects. What's more surprising to me is the myopic greed of those who choose the dark side willingly despite the forewarned consequences as if all of this wasn't already written about by higher powers, heavenly and earthly. We're living in biblical times whether you agree with it or not. They've been planning for global depopulation since the 60's w/ the World3 simulator. We just lived through the man-made pandemic from the Wuhan lab ala EcoHealth funded by Fauci, and I'm guessing it'll never bother most readers here that he's still not in jail because y'all neither have the attention span nor resources to learn the truth anymore because you keep scrolling censored sources. Which reminds me... Utopia (the UK version), more predictive programming. It's just two seasons, I suggest everyone watch it to get a sense of what I mean by predictive programming. In one scene you'll even find the masonic square and compass. In the US version they even added Bill Gates as a character, just to hammer it home.
      - 20after4 4mo ago
        All of the things you say have been around in the form of fringe conspiracy theories for a long time. Thing is, way too many conspiracy theories, it would seem, are just plain facts (or at least very close to the truth if not 100% perfectly accurate in all the details)
  - redsocksfan45 4mo ago
    [dead]
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- budududuroiu 4mo ago
  I'm not an AI booster, nor an AI detractor. I like tech and progress. I'm mortified at the possibility of a data centre being built next to me at some point in the future [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
  - rcpt 4mo ago
    That video is completely fake btw. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
    - budududuroiu 4mo ago
      You can literally hear the 24h whir of the data centres, what are you talking about? Dude wrote an essay around infrasound being pseudoscience and chose to ignore the obvious, audible, constant hum.
- King-Aaron 4mo ago
  Luddites were not against the advent of new technology. They were against capitalists using new technology as an excuse to cut skilled labour and not offer any avenue for reskilling etc. Which is what's happening again.
- veber-alex 4mo ago
  Don't bother, you will just be downvoted to oblivion. Assume every post here is automatically anti something and don't engage. Your mental health isn't worth it.
mukmuk 4mo ago
The number of realists on this site is encouraging.
tengbretson 4mo ago
Everyone on this site has been cashing checks building the job eating machine for years. The concern is only pouring out now that it may not need us anymore.
- mk89 4mo ago
  I am not against AI but putting automation tools is in a different category than "AGI, you only need specs and they do the work for you". 20 years ago even with automation etc you needed armies of people to make something work. It was more of a transformation of the type of work. Look at the amount of work Amazon as a company has created. It changed how people buy stuff etc, but behind the scenes there is always human workforce, to deliver, to invent the recommendation algorithms, to package the items, etc (although here there is heavy automation). Now the idea is that we need AI so we can replace humans, so "people can spend more time on what they like to do". Which is what, searching for jobs on LinkedIn?
  - philipallstar 4mo ago
    Amazon have gone back to having senior engineers review all code before production. Don't believe the hype about AGI when your own eyes have seen how fast the Tesla self-driving progress was until it almost hit a wall a few years ago.
baq 4mo ago
If they also solve fusion, famine, climate disaster, cancer, dementia and child development disorders it isn’t as clear cut
- msy 4mo ago
  Do they? There's been a lot of hot air, quite literally, but aside from some math conjectures actual evidence of meaningful progress on anything that actually helps humanity seems rather thin on the ground.
  - baq 4mo ago
    Velocity of capability growth is only surpassed by velocity of goalposts.
- themafia 4mo ago
  The word happiness, fulfillment or even freedom didn't come to mind? Well at least you're planning to have a very healthy population of enslaved serfs. I'm sure they'll appreciate all you've done for them.
- hibikir 4mo ago
  Once you start from destroying democracy, the chances that the results will quickly put keeping the owner in power ahead of anything good for humanity are high. Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation. The loss of representation will get us the loss of prosperity real quick. This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works. So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has.
  - baq 4mo ago
    I'm just taking destruction of democracy for granted; the question is if we get anything in return.
youre-wrong3 4mo ago
[flagged]
- chinathrow 4mo ago
  Can you proof them wrong?
- pibaker 4mo ago
  If I'm going to complain about low quality comments I wouldn't do it on a zero karma account.
rcpt 4mo ago
Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"? Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power
- esperent 4mo ago
  > Can you explain how new data centers "destroy democracy"? Oligarchs (trillionares and billionaires as they get called in the US) are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
  - richwater 4mo ago
    You can use the word fundamentally all you want, it doesn't make it true. Explain _why_.
    - esperent 4mo ago
      Because when all the financial power, lobbying, advertising, housing, manufacturing, media etc. is controlled by a handful of oligarchs, it doesn't much matter what way people vote. Too much of the power is owned by the oligarchs rather than the voting public. That's why oligarchies and democracies are fundamentally incompatible.
- adamredwoods 4mo ago
  The monetary advantages gained by AI are not going to the lower class, but rather a small group of wealthy people. Meanwhile data centers cause disruption in energy prices, water, and real estate for the lower class. Thus, economic inequality leads to backslide of democracy: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-democratic-erosion-study-finds https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-de...
Aunche 4mo ago
The reason all the communist powers switched to capitalism is because they too realized that people with purely selfish intentions can unintentionally help society by satisfying market demands. Just because capital is happy to take advantage our current incompetent authoritarian populist administration doesn't doesn't mean they don't prefer predictable technocrats in charge. Trump was outspent during all of his campaigns.

doctorwho42 4mo ago

The sheer size of and resource consumption to build and operate them. Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ... And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!

xp84 4mo ago
100% of the water that is 'used up' in a datacenter, or even in electrical generation, is evaporated into the atmosphere. The same one where the rain comes from. Everywhere East of the Rockies, they don't even have droughts, so that seems like a lot of area where we can use a lot of water with basically no impact because it's all just coming back into the water cycle directly as opposed to ending up in a water treatment plant and flowing into the sea. We'll be able to increase chip capacity eventually, and we're also still doing pretty well at clean energy conversion. Eventually we'll get there. I'm much less pessimistic about this.
- ianbutler 4mo ago
  Most new builds don't even use evaporative cooling afaik, this will probably be closed loop. The implications being you're not risking the local water table and overall consumption is lower, a lot lower.
  - dqv 4mo ago
    What percentage of new builds are using closed loop cooling? I've seen this pop data center "fact" thrown around, but with no data to back it up.
    - deleted 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

dlev_pika 4mo ago

How much of the total pie of resources consumed is ‘solving math models’, really?

viccis 4mo ago

Because we can learn?

ozgrakkurt 4mo ago

> that's literally solving unsolved math problems, It is extremely hard to imagine that the world where this amount of money going into actual research tools and researchers wouldn’t give vastly better results. Building a nuclear powered shovel to dig a grave would work but it doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do

mulmen 4mo ago

> now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why? Because it’s easy. It’s free to post internet comments. The doomers have the lowest effort take so they’re very prominent. People doing things are too busy doing things to post doomer comments.

thrance 4mo ago

We saw what happened to the early optimism of the internet era, what corporations made of it. There's no reason to believe this time will be different. Trust me, they are not building these data centers to solve math problems.