Comment by stego-tech
4 hours ago
This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.
As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.
So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
> This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.