Comment by bigmadshoe
2 hours ago
So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”? What does this “future” do for us besides take our jobs? We literally have a say in how the future looks.
2 hours ago
So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”? What does this “future” do for us besides take our jobs? We literally have a say in how the future looks.
OOC, which past exactly do you want to go back to (and presumably stay at)?
many futures are open to us. It isn't a question of going back to an imagined past, it is choosing and shaping the future we create.
We do. But currently we are choosing the Luddite way of doing things. Simply ignoring this fantastic technology is not a choice but economic suicide.
The Luddite movement wasn’t opposed to progress or technology. They were demanding protections from exploitation by the capital class: abolishment of child labour, fair wages, social protection from job loss, etc.
There was no labour law at the time. Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.
Ultimately the capitalists won that conflict. Many Luddites were murdered or jailed. And the history that was written tried to tell us that the Luddites were backwards peasants who didn’t understand technology and progress.
I agree that the original Luddite movement has been mischaracterized, but you're also leaning toward mischaracterizing them in too friendly of a light.
The Luddites were also guilty of violent acts and they were afraid to threaten or use violence to protect their interests. It wasn't a simple disagreement of evil capitalists versus saintly laborers. They cared more about protectionism for their personal businesses.
They were also very clearly on the wrong side of history. We would not be better off if the Luddites had won and forced us all to be doing manual labor all day without the help of those evil machines they were destroying.
Interesting — so in your opinion every country must build out datacenters or be left behind?
I'm not the original commenter, but I do think this is true, so I'll bite.
Datacenters process data, but they do it in a particular location, and therefore are subject to local and national laws.
It would be folly for a government to decide that some other country's laws and enforcement standards should be applied in absentia. Whether you love the singularity or hate it, you should whole-heartedly be advocating to have whatever datacenter your country will use be built on shore.
In fact, you should also be whole-heartedly advocating for local frontier models / or at least locally managed open weights models for the same reason. But the datacenter is easy. Just build them. Your fellow citizens will use them. Why send all their data to some other country that might be a strategic adversary?
To a point, yes. Otherwise you are at the mercy of whoever's compute you use.
This is a lot of assertions with zero evidence.
* fantastic technology [citation needed]
* economic suicide [citation needed]
Try Claude Code for a weekend. Maybe that clears up the confusion about how amazing AI can be.
You can also take a look at North Korea as an example of a nation that decided the industrial revolution was one to sit out.
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Your comments read as unhinged. Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite? People who are working in the tech industry but are somehow anti future because they are concerned by the ever growing energy demand from AI? How much are you ok to sacrifice to the LLM gods before you would start to question the technology?
Well, that depends. How much do you actually know about the Luddites, versus making assumptions vs their use as a pejorative in pop culture?
The more our definition of "Luddite" becomes historically accurage, the more it is true that yes, the HN audience is composed of people like that.
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> Do you actually believe that HN audience of all places is composed of Luddite?
The core tenet of totalitarianism is pretending any opposing view is terrorism. You are either supporters of the system, or dangerous anti-social criminals who must be eradicated.
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Europe can opt out if they want, hyperscalers are building in South Asia, SEA and MENA where they get tax breaks. We'll see how that plays out for Europe.
Exactly. There are plenty of data centers being built in places that want them. The neat thing about data is that it's a quick speed of light to anywhere on the planet, so it doesn't matter where they are.
Anyone who wants to opt out can do so and it'll play out just fine for them.
The hyperscalers want to sell AI services in Europe. Not everything is about supply, a lot of it is about demand.
> So we have to give up our land, our water, our energy, even our planet just to usher in “the future”?
what are you referring to here? because it certainly is not data centers
The hyper-scaler rhetoric absolutely applies here. The proposed Utah data center project will use more energy than the entire state. Do we really need this? The heads of labs have been very clear that the explicit intention is to take away our jobs. We have a choice.
I still haven't seen anybody demonstrating we have to do such thing.
We do have to spent a bit of each for any new tech advancement, but the alarmist, disproportionate claim you make is really not helping.
ArcelorMittal Dunkirk rolling & steel complex alone is ~450–550 hectares (more than colussus) and consume 2.23 TWh/year (colussus is ~2.6 TWh/year at 300 MW continuous load) and of course, water consumption for metal working is gigantic.
That's just ONE single facility in France.
I don't think anybody who understands the basics of civilization would want to go back before the Industrial Revolution.
Tech has a cost, and you usually pay a lot more at the begining of creating it.
Does it cause problems? Sure. Should we take it very seriously? Definitely.
But just repeating internet outrage is not a way to make good decisions.
Engineers, in general, tend to be libertarians and have a positive outlook on capitalism. They are, in general, people that have no roots, or any sense of culture or taste. Which is why they are uncritical towards what we call progress - they are not in a position where they could lose their culture, their roots, their home because they do not possess anything like that. They are men without qualities, revelling in their obsession with optimisation, mowing everything down that may introduce friction in their parasitic nature.
If we want to have a future, we have to ask the engineer question at first.
Spot on. The difference in thinking with the US is enormous.
I wonder if all they want from the future is fat people on mobility scooters like the beginning of wall-e.
Sure, AI may be the future for a certain market, but datacenters aside we will always need clean land, air and water, food for our bodies and homes to live in.
This is a pretty broad generalization with nothing offered to back it up. In addition, it seems pretty insulting generally.
I think we need a citation about the libertarian / capitalism thing? I know a lot of leftist engineers. Look how blue the bay area votes?
Does the Bay Area have forced bussing for schools? Massive amounts of affordable housing? East Asian city levels of public transit?