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.
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...
OK, so datacenters are turning it into an unliveable shithole...
> Loudon counts itself among the fastest-growing counties in America with a population over 100,000. Homeowners have watched the median sales price rise more than 70% over the past decade.
Well, there you go, right from one of your ragebait journalism articles. People who are bitter and hate their lives are always looking for something to blame for it, and the most popular thing to blame is the new thing that is in the news. And the click whores that some people call "journalists" will be right there to meet the demand. But it's all bullshit as the massive rise in home values in the area reveals the truth.
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.
Because there are people who live off rent (in a broad sense of this world), and there are people who live off selling their ability to work. Increased efficiency and productivity may or may not benefit the second kind of people, depending on whether they can sell their labour to be used for something else.
So instead of figuring out ways to limit the ability of people to live off rent, we want to ban beneficial things that people could extract rent from?
This is like saying, "We don't like how landlords extract value from housing, so we are banning apartment buildings"
Banning AI does increase efficiency. It makes it more efficient for a working class family to afford to survive. What perverted definition of the word were you considering?
How is this different from saying "Banning mechanical farm equipment does increase efficiency, it makes it more efficient for farm workers to afford to survive"
You are fighting against productivity improvements when you should be fighting against people hoarding the benefits of productivity improvements.
That doesn't answer my question. My claim is that people working is efficient.
A carpenter using a hand saw instead of a power saw just to keep more carpenters employed is not being efficient. It's Pareto-better to keep all those carpenters employed, earning the same salary for fewer hours.
> 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.
These are bad things
Car dealerships would like a word.
Another example why these types of laws make things worse for people.
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.
This is literally why America was founded. Too many people stifle innovation. Move to Europe if you want to be stuck in the 20th century frankly. That doesn't mean we can't take care of folks. But the ludites need to get the fuck out of the way. You're all exhausting.
America was founded because rich people didn't want to pay taxes.
If it wasn't for America you'd still be using a shovel and hoe instead of writing code for a living.
Please, don't be so negative about the rest of the world. No one has any idea what would have happened if the US did not create their country the way they did. This is the same level of under-appreciation of humans that the ancient aliens people have when they say its impossible for humans to have built the pyramids. Lets be constructive instead of just hating on everyone else please.
I was born in Europe. I know this for a fact. The difference in "can do" culture between old world and new world is everything. There's a reason Europe still doesn't have a self landing rocket. They aren't even trying. It's crabs in a bucket mentality writ large. I wish it weren't so. Yet it is.
It's partially true but it's not as true as doomers would like. It's not America: innovation=yes, Europe: innovation=no. Most of the American innovation came from a small number of very rich people. It has a lot of very poor people as a consequence.
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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.
I thought this was a free market? Or is that not how things work anymore?
Never has been. A totally free market doesn't work and has failed every time it was tried. You want one today, go set up shop in Somalia.
I can't respect that opinion. It's full of holes.
Holes such as what?
There have always been rules and laws. The US has never been a totally free market. Most of the laws and rules we have were written in blood by people professing a "free market" right to poison our people, rivers, air, and more.
America was largely a free market until the 1920s. Since then more regulations have actually increased the cost of living. The healthcare problem in America has a lot to do with increased regulations. For one we have a fixed limit on how many doctors can graduate every year. That was put in place by the medical lobby in the US. Ever since then healthcare costs have increased exponentially. Tale as old as time. This happens with every single new rule put in place. Rent control does the same thing. Prices just go up. This includes NIMBY laws.
The US does not limit the number of doctors that can graduate. The limit is on the number of residencies funded by medicare. If the private sector wanted more doctors in order to pay doctors less, they could just offer paid residencies themselves. Somehow the free market hasn't solved that one. This ignores that doctors' salaries aren't a significant cause of the problems and insurance companies are the true root of high prices.
Rent control stabilizes prices while more supply can be built, because it is in the interests of society for people to be able to afford to live, and we can't will additional buildings into place overnight. High eviction rates destroy communities and have many negative side effects.
In the absence of regulation, corporations lie, cheat, and steal, and have a massive power imbalance against ordinary people. No one has enough time and energy to research every option for everything in their daily life, and they rely on laws to establish safety measures they can rely on.
Oh you're one of those. You actually believe rent control works in the face of overwhelming evidence that all is does is increase the cost of housing. Fascinating. Pointless talking to you.
What are the holes? There are places today with no government - perfect free markets. If you think perfect free markets are awesome, you can move there and do business there. It's a bit like telling someone who loves communism to go to China.
An absolute free market would, by definition, permit the selling of the service "restrict someone's freedom for me".
Not sure if that leaves it a free market. So if we're gonna be talking holes in the cheese - seems like you're reasoning in terms of a basically self-contradictory notion.
But truly, what do you reckon about the 1st point, in terms of the interpretation of market freedom which you use?
> 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
I don't think you understand the qualifier. I meant in the tradition of liberal free markets that have unlocked human potential on the global scale. I'm saying no it's actually good that you don't have to ask the local government when you want to do something. If American style free markets didn't gain traction we'd still be doing subsistence farming.
The thing is, since we recognized that such a tradition led to the unfettered destruction of the natural environment which we depend upon to survive, we have decided that local governments should be responsible for preserving said environment by regulating the destructive actions performed by the liberal free market. Not doing so will even destroy our ability to perform subsistence farming in the long run.
So far all I hear is complaining about electricity prices. No one actually cares about the "environment". They are just mad that the KW/h is up 3 cents.
>>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?
In the context of the discussion a correspondingly negative event would have been along the lines of "we built a data center and then it exploded, we need to make sure that doesn't happen." Not "we're worried about the effects the data center might have," which is vis a vis to "we're worried about the effects banning ai might have." All I'm saying is neither of those last two are weird reasons to enact a law.
GP was insisting that "rights" named laws always come after some negative event and it is weird that we have this "rights" named law without someone being deprived of their computation or whatever. I'm disagreeing with the premise that that's weird by pointing out laws preempt real world events all the time, in either direction (restrictive or permissive).
> 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.
Oh no, we couldn't possibly generate more power! Impossible! We're at our limit!
China has 100 reactors under construction - meanwhile in the West, folks like you exist.
If the businesses that want data centers want to pay the full construction costs for the new power plants, great. Otherwise consumers are paying for them in the rates they pay to energy companies.
It should not be considered shocking or controversial that people already hit hard by corporate greed and other effects of late-stage capitalism don't want to pay higher utility rates to subsidize the data centers being built by megacorporations who want to take away even more of their jobs.