Comment by akersten
8 hours ago
Eh, if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event, I don't see any contradiction in doing the opposite.
8 hours ago
Eh, if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event, I don't see any contradiction in doing the opposite.
> if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event...
If you mean besides the extensive harm to air quality, the large land fingerprint of data centers, the massive strain on water resources and treatment facilities, the insane electricity demands resulting in skyrocketing prices pushed onto everyone else, the deafening noise pollution, and what they've done to the price of RAM, then sure. And that's just the data centers!
The usage of AI itself has resulted in all kinds of harm and even actual deaths. AI has wrongfully denied people healthcare coverage they were entitled to preventing or delaying needed surgeries and treatments. There's a growing list of LLM related suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots). The use of AI in parole systems has kept people locked behind bars when they shouldn't have been due to biases in the bots making decisions. AI used for self-driving driving cars have killed pedestrians and other drivers. There are thousands of AI generated harms tracked here: https://airisk.mit.edu/ai-incident-tracker
What a load of shit. I have relatives in Ashburn VA, the data center capital of the world, and none of these negative effects are anything but NIMBY bullshit.
Yeah, I'm going to believe the many many documented cases of these problems in VA alone over your non-example
https://www.businessinsider.com/living-next-to-data-centers-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/data-centers-northern-virgin...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/opinion/data-centers-ai-a...
https://virginiamercury.com/2026/02/19/legislature-considers...
https://www.wdbj7.com/2026/02/04/virginia-lawmakers-look-add...
https://news.vcu.edu/article/northern-virginia-data-center-a...
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God I hate safetyism
so the jobs have to be lost _first_ , then we can ban it?
Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that. We would all be stuck working on farms today, because we didn’t want to allow tractors or other machinery because it would take away farming jobs.
Instead of banning tech to save jobs, pass laws that make sure tech prices in externalities (tax carbon emissions), and find other ways to assist people who lose jobs (UBI, good social safety nets, etc).
Don’t stifle progress just because it makes us have to work less.
Right - fix the economy instead. Why should increasing efficiency cause people to have less resources - that makes no sense.
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Car dealerships would like a word.
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> Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that.
The US has continually set up protectionist policies to preserve a local workforce. Automotive manufacturers, the shipbuilding industry, etc.
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If the idea was that laws must be motivated by a negative occurrence rather than preemptive, then that'd follow yeah (if counting job loss as a reason to ban something, which I think is questionable). But note akersten is saying that it's normal for laws to be preemptive in both cases.
Just like when musicians were on strike and the radio people decided to play a recording over the air (gasp! a record!) rather than live performances.
A nice ban on playing recorded music would have saved those jobs.
Bad example. You are agreeing that copyright is owned by the people whose work an AI agent is trained on. Sure, come take a class of jobs, and then pay them in perpetuity to license the exposition of their work. For 75 years after the authors death, just like current copyright.
>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.
You don't think there's reasons pass laws banning AI...datacenters?
Because what state is banning the concept of AI? They're banning/restricting the creation of a type of infrastructure within their borders because they feel that is detrimental to their citizens. Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
I'm already running an LLM locally. This is just me renting space in a data center. Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things? For the record my local models run off the solar bolted to my roof. Even including the data center I'm using 1/10th of the energy we were using on tube monitors back in the 90s. This is exhausting. My GPU would be demonstrably using more power by playing a videogame right now than when I run a local LLM.
Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things?
This question is not the obvious winner you think it is. To me, and I am sure many, it sort of undermines your argument.
Even in the most ‘free' cultures, society has _always_ restricted people’s individual ability to do things that it collectively deems harmful to the whole society.
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>Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things?
When those things impact other people - such as by skyrocketing utility prices, overloading the electrical grid, and more.
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> Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things?
At least 4000 years ago, but that's just the earliest we have evidence for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
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>>when did we restrict people's abilities to do things? That's literally what most laws are, saying what you can and can't do. This is like, a foundational understanding of what government/regulation is.
>>this is just me renting space... Okay, so a "network effect" is when things have greater impact due to larger usage. So the data center usage that you're talking about does not represent the overall impact of the data center. Saying "I only pour ONE cup of bleach into the ocean, so I don't see why it's so bad to have the bleach factory pump all its waste in as well" is a WILD take.
Why should we stop there? Let’s ban people flying on vacations, because why should our resources go towards some dork laying out in the sun? Air travel is horribly wasteful. Let’s ban people racing cars, that is also wasteful. We shouldn’t be using our resources to drive in circles.
How do we pick which activities are worth using resources? Which ones are too ‘dorky’ to allow?
Look, I am all for pricing the externalities into resource consumption. Tax carbon production, to make sure energy consumption is sustainable, but don’t dictate which uses of energy are acceptable or ‘worth it’, because I don’t want only mainstream things to be allowed.
I didn't say any of that in my comment nor express an opinion about this whole thing writ large. I'm only pointing out that it's not weird for legislature to preempt a real world use case by way of pointing out similar laws.
I'm going to do this again:
>>>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.
What did you mean? Why do you believe there has not been a motivating event to ban data centers when those bans have happened, which is literally what you said?
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> Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
Why would it be your business, or anyone else's, to stop someone from doing this?
Because these data centers are at best overstressing utility grids and elevating prices for everyone and at worse running dirty generators and poisoning entire communities, for a start.
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