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I'm not a fan of AI, but I've been struggling to understand the criticisms of AI datacenters. And the extreme polarization of views makes it hard to find articles that don't feel heavily skewed. But it feels like most arguments against datacenters could be solved with better legislation?

Too much power use? Make datacenters pay a premium on electricity that goes to building more solar/nuclear power Too much water use? Apply regulations/fines on water use that makes evaporative cooling not viable Too much land use / heat generation? Regulate max size / output

And obviously some places are not fit/equipped for datacenter buildouts and it shouldn't happen there. but idk, "no datacenters anywhere" doesn't seem like a great end-goal. But again this is a very naive take and I wish I understood it better.

Here are better questions you should ask: -Why do they really need so many data centers? Data as a commodity is an industry of collection, and their stochastic time wasters already started eating themselves from running out of the current data supply

-Where are they building the data centers? I can't speak to correlation/causation, but patterns of strip mine company moving in then abandoning a town, W*lmart moving in then abandoning a town, etc, all seem to rhyme with proposed patterns; not to mention gerrymandering highways through communities

-Why, if they are so smart, can't they improve their "technology" to not require such facilities to run them? They want to tout that they are akin to the creative power houses of the past, eh? "Better, cheaper, or both," those are your options, and they have not proven their worth

It seems impossible to get a company to not act for profit. What I asked was targeted at how citizens and government can incentivize and offer tradeoffs such that the company's profit and the people's well-being are (mostly) aligned. As others brought up, that unfortunately requires good government

If you'd like to hit me with "the goal of a business is to make money" neat I've read that book, too. And it's sequels. But allow me to elaborate: It is in fact not required to have more data to run their bots, those are not the cheapest locales BY FAR, and I explicitly mean improve the bots

The problem isn't just bad government, it's optimism toward toward these companies; nothing about these plans lines up with anything honest