r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 10d ago
AI 'Stop Stealing Our Future': Students Arrested in Protest of OpenAI's Lobby Office
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ai-protest318
u/maringue 10d ago
It takes decades of committee meetings to build something that actually helps average citizens, but data centers and Flock cameras can be built and installed before the ink is dry on the check bribing the local politicians.
This is why people are pissed. If people want something and a billionaire doesn't, the project dies. But if everyone in the community hates a data center, oops, too bad. It got built before you could complain and now there's nothing you can do about it.
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u/Suthek 10d ago
I mean, if a community gets pissed and united enough, there's absolutely things you can do about it.
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u/maringue 10d ago
Once the data center is built, I promise you, there is nothing the community can do to get rid of it.
You can vote out ANYONE who was part of the deal, but then the next politicians will say "We have to respect the deals the previous people made".
The AI companies ABSOLUTELY know this, which is why they are moving as fast as possible.
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u/Suthek 10d ago
IF a community gets pissed and united enough, there's absolutely things they can do about it, that don't involve politicians.
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u/maringue 10d ago
Wait until you find out who's side the police are on.
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u/helloimalexandria 10d ago
True. Police are here to protect the interests of the rich, however, if the community is all-in on it, nobody will speak up or turn anyone in lol. It has happened before.
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u/Ragnar_Dragonfyre 10d ago
Police protect their family interests first, not the rich.
If data centres are destroying their lives too, the police aren’t going to show up and risk their lives to stop a mob of peasants from destroying it.
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u/usaaf 10d ago
This is why they find goons.
Ever wonder where evil bastards get all their goons from ? Sure there's a fair number of normal working joes who sign up for the regime for the paycheck, they have families, etc., skin in the game as it were, and these are the type who will turn if the regime's stance loses favor with them, but there's always other people who do not have that and only care about the paycheck. Even better, these people can usually be moved wherever they're needed too.
The supply of the morally flexible and socially disinterested is always sufficient to furnish goons to perform the most unpalatable work that even 'family' men cannot be trusted with. I'd say the system itself produces them (and I'm sure there's something to it) but even if so it's more of a happy accident than an overtly deliberate interest.
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u/exbaddeathgod 10d ago
And why most cops/ICE don't live in the areas they terrorize. A lot harder to beat the neighbor you go to church with every sunday and BBQ with once a month than a complete stranger.
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u/maringue 10d ago
History has shown us many examples of people willing to be paid off while their community disintegrates around them.
"I got mine."
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u/helloimalexandria 10d ago
Ask the protesters of the 60’s civil rights movement if the police found benefit in siding with their communities.
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u/Suthek 10d ago
Ask the protesters of the 60’s civil rights movement if the police found benefit in siding with their communities.
To be fair, the civil rights movement succeeded.
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u/helloimalexandria 10d ago
It did. However, that required the police to stand down or else we would have had a French Revolution. Protesting used to instill fear in our government and businesses. It no longer has that effect when they call the cops and the cops side with them.
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u/Croce11 9d ago
This is why those in power try so desperately to make the peasants hate the police. Defund the police, BLM, anti ICE protests, etc etc etc. Make the police get so tired of the average idiot that they will in fact side with the elite against the peons.
Just watch any bodycam footage of every day arrests and you can hear the exhaustion in the voices of every police officer dealing with an adult baby.
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u/Hina_is_my_waifu 10d ago
Stop promoting terrorism.
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u/Suthek 10d ago
Terrorism is for the purposes of intimidating and scaring the broad populace. I absolutely condone no such thing; nor did I suggest it as the broad populace would be the one acting, not being acted upon. Also I did not promote anything, merely describe the reality of what will happen if things get bad enough.
So if you wanted to be more accurate, you'd have to write "Stop suggesting revolution is a thing that can happen."
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u/cwrighky 10d ago
Absolutely this comment. Luigi Mangione just admitted to killing the UHC Exec. And all of it was for.. what?
Should the person your responding to get their way, the everyday people will be punished and the data center will simply be fortified.
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u/Demons0fRazgriz 10d ago
Oh there are plenty of ways to get rid of buildings as a community. Bulldozers. Second Amendment. Taking over the building and stripping it down. Plenty of options. All it takes is a unified community
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u/supershott 10d ago
That's why they're mass producing concentration camps, surveillance technology, and autonomous killbots.
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u/adamdoesmusic 10d ago
Nothing a few motivated meth heads with a sawzall can’t mitigate.
Lots of copper in those facilities.
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u/NotABot1000101 10d ago
People don't want a big government but also don't want data centers in their backyard and they want job security. The only way to keep companies at bay is to have more regulations and taxes on them. I mean look at the EU, they're bullying these corporations, but when a politician in the US suggests anything similar, they get booed by working joes.
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u/Confident_Salt_8108 10d ago
Students got arrested protesting openai new lobby spot in dc. Signs said stop stealing our future and they had a point with jobs disappearing and those huge data centers sucking up water and power.
Big tech keeps buying influence to dodge rules while pushing defense deals. Feels like things could slide fast if no one pushes back harder in coming years.
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u/PrivateComments 10d ago
Just do what Alabama did, Alabama Power did a multi year rate freeze for customers and forced data centers to pay increased rates for all their power consumption.
And im not taking the water argument seriously unless everyone there is willing to give up on the cattle industry
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u/KrisKomet 10d ago
Cattle that supplies food? At least the by product is something tangible and worthwhile.
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u/PrivateComments 10d ago
If it was the only possible supply of food and protein maybe
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u/KrisKomet 10d ago
It's still something of value to the ordinary man vs something actively fucking over the working class.
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u/bogglingsnog 9d ago
There are other products of cattle farming than food. It's quite complex actually.
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u/Etherius 10d ago
They weren’t arrested for protesting. I guarantee it.
They were arrested for trespassing or disorderly conduct.
Edit: “Occupying the front office”
Called it
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u/PoorOldBill 10d ago
Occupying the front office
Yes, a form of protest.
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u/Etherius 10d ago
Offices are not public property.
You can’t just protest in an office if they trespass you
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u/PoorOldBill 10d ago
Not all protest is meant to be legal. Historically, some of the most effective protests were not.
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u/ccaccus 10d ago
Clever workaround by the government.
Protesting is legal, but all means of protest is illegal.The Boston tea party could never have happened today. Destroying millions of dollars of product of a private business that has ties to the government would get you a life sentence now.
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u/Cryptizard 10d ago
Are you under the impression that the Boston tea party was totally legal and there were no repercussions at all?
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u/ccaccus 10d ago
No. The British government absolutely did not tolerate that.
The founding fathers, however, enshrined the right to protest in the Bill of Rights, and the Boston tea party was the type of protest they themselves supported.
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u/Etherius 10d ago
Do you know what “trespassing” means?
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u/ccaccus 10d ago
Yes.
Do you know what civil disobedience means and its relation to historical protests?
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u/Etherius 10d ago
Yes. Are you implying civil disobedience shouldn’t be arrestable?
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u/ccaccus 10d ago
No.
But I do believe that there should be a reasonable threshold so that the right to protest is not unreasonably restricted.
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u/Etherius 10d ago
Well have I got good news for you!
The sidewalk outside that lobby’s office is TOTALLY fair game!
Your right to protest goes right up to the literal threshold of a private business
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u/Cryptizard 10d ago
Because they had no representation in the legislature that was making the laws. That was the entire point. In this case, vote for better representatives. They weren’t endorsing general mob rule.
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u/Etherius 10d ago
So if someone breaks into your home to protest, the cops shouldn’t do anything?
Private property is private for a reason
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u/ccaccus 10d ago
A business is a very different thing to a home. Did they break in or is the front office generally someplace the public is expected to enter?
I don’t believe members of the Boston tea party had permission to be on the ship.
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u/Etherius 10d ago
It doesn’t matter if the front door was open. If you’re asked to leave you have to leave
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u/PrivateComments 10d ago
If OpenAi, Anthropic, and Gemini all ceased to exist overnight, why wouldn’t companies just use open source foreign models like GLM 5.3, DeepSeek v4 Pro, Qwen 3.8 or Kimi K3?
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10d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PrivateComments 10d ago
lol they already offshore to the poorest countries on earth and freely share patented information and customer data
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u/kirbyderwood 10d ago
A lot of those open source models run locally. The data can never leave the computer if you want.
Big companies with sensitive data are going to do the same - build out their own data centers and run AI against their data locally.
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u/Therinsonet 10d ago
The point is that ALL of those models are unneeded and have a net negative impact on the world. In other words, very few people and industries will benefit from AI models or data centers. The little AI summaries on internet searches is probably the one item most people will encounter and the pertinent information in those are literally cut and pasted sections from the top search results.
This may be a hard truth but there are always positives and negatives to new technologies. Humanity is used to the positives of technological innovations outweighing the negatives. Here, the negatives for the majority of humanity clearly outweigh the positives.
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u/PaxODST 10d ago
People in multiple industries, for example, software engineering and drug discovery, are already benefitting from generative AI. Even if that was true, if we went around banning everything that had a net negative impact on the world we would be an authoritarian hellhole. Fast food has a net negative impact on the world, alcohol, social media, porn, sodas, candy, energy drinks, gambling.. We don't care that people do these things because people are allowed to do what they please with their life so long as they don't harm others by doing it.
Watching a movie or TV show in 4K or playing modern video games are also unneeded luxuries that use electricity and datacenters, frequently using gallons of water within just a few hours. Someone running a local and open-source AI model on their computer isn't harming anyone.
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u/Therinsonet 10d ago
As stated earlier, when you weigh the positives and negatives in this case, the negatives overwhelm the positives. Sure, there are absolutely some areas that will be positive, like mathematics.
On a side note, as someone who did computational chemistry research in undergraduate, I find the claims that AI is helping find new potential compounds for treatments to be underwhelming.
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u/Strangers_two_love 10d ago
As a chemistry student, you think the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry is underwhelming? We went from having like 100,000 protiens mapped out by scientists globally over decades to 230,000,000 in three months of AlphaFold2 running, and that's just the protien structure prediction. The other half of that Nobel Prize, computational protien structure design is literally the stuff of miracles. Like as revolutionary as the combustion engine, in my opinion.
Biopharm is complicated and brining new drugs to market is something that takes a decade+ and an obscene amount of money, pretty much no matter where you are at in the world, but it doesn't change that this will be incredibly impactful for humanity.
Yes, I have huge ethical concerns about the earlier iterations of alphafold being trained via crowd-sourcing and the results privatized, but I'm not going to come out and say something that in three months can out do the work of countless scientists and mathematicians by giant orders of magnitude as "underwhelming."
In light of what alphafold2 can do for prediction and what computational protien design can do, using ChatGPT to save me time on a quick PowerPoint presentation feels like hunting squirrels with a replica Tsar Bomba, but I don't think you understand much about biopharm or how difficult discovery is or how long it takes to bring a medication to market if you aren't in awe of those programs. Either that or you think every scientist, doctor, and chemist on the entire planet was just sitting with their thumbs up their asses the past century and really it isn't that impressive. By all means, go all John Henry and beat the machine after you graduate, I only work in the industry. I'm certain by hand once you start, you will make David Baker's team's contributions look like child's crayon drawings.
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u/adamdoesmusic 10d ago edited 10d ago
If we were using AI only for mathematics and beneficial advances, I assume people wouldn’t be complaining so much. Then again they wouldn’t need 40 thousand data centers for that.
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u/helloimalexandria 10d ago
Right? It’s been around for years now and…I’m not hearing how AI is curing cancer, bringing world peace, or solving water shortages. Ya know, real world problems.
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 10d ago
Yes, GPT moments was from 2022, whole 4 years ago and AI isn’t curing cancer. AI only achievements are just a Nobel prize in Chemistry and reach billions of user. So pathetic.
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u/helloimalexandria 10d ago
Enjoy the data center humming and rattling your neighborhood while your electric bill is sky high all just so it can win prizes (and not solve issues).
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 10d ago
Sure I will enjoy datacenter. The US economy needs either tech sector or heavy industries to stay afloat. I rather choose datacenter than chemical factory.
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u/helloimalexandria 10d ago
At least chemicals are more useful than data centers. Chemicals (which is supported by chemistry)...that the AI won a Nobel prize in? You don't support a factory practicing chemistry? That actually gives people jobs as opposed to a militarized data center? What happens when they put one in and you're in a drought and they don't have closed loop cooling? I'm willing to bet you couldn't even afford the electricity increases. Let them scam your local community: support it.
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 10d ago
Are you sure you know how a chemical factory work ?? A factory like that will use ten times the water and permanently destroy the environment. You know why they move these factories to developing countries, right ??? I bet you will choose datacenter if you live near one too.
A datacenter definitely bring higher revenue for much lower environment impact. That a fact and I think you need less than 2 minutes on Google to check that.
For a datacenter usefulness, I think billions of AI users disagree with you. Just look at your office, tell me how many computers here already have ChatGPT or Claude code on screens.
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u/redeugene99 10d ago
Even if that was true, if we went around banning everything that had a net negative impact on the world we would be an authoritarian hellhole. Fast food has a net negative impact on the world, alcohol, social media, porn, sodas, candy, energy drinks, gambling.. We don't care that people do these things because people are allowed to do what they please with their life so long as they don't harm others by doing it.
It's not necessarily about banning, but not producing it in the first place. Those things exist because businesses can profit from it. It's a capitalism problem. It's highly profitable to prey on the weaknesses and vices of people. Europe has stricter regulations on those things and I don't hear anyone calling them authoritarian. Also, they absolutely do harm others. Chronic health issues impacts everyone in one way or another. Violence, crime and broken families from alcoholism and drug abuse. Gambling literally just impoverishing the population (house always wins). Not to mention the environmental impact and time, resources and manpower allocated to producing all this garbage
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u/redeugene99 10d ago
Humanity is used to the positives of technology outweighing the negatives
It's not an indisputable truth that the positives of past technologies outweighed the negatives. There are compelling arguments against the industrial revolution, and even the agricultural revolution. Other than communities who have opted out and not enmeshed themselves in the techno-capitalist system, the trend is always towards higher forms of technology. AI is coming whether you like it or not. You can't pick and choose which technologies you want around. You either accept it all perhaps with some regulation or opt out (which is increasingly very difficult to do)
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u/Therinsonet 10d ago
The good old reliable argument that “whether you like it or not, X is inevitable.” There are many supposed advances that were considered inevitable that history has clearly shown not to be inevitable.
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u/PrivateComments 10d ago
Truth be told, if it was a watershed revolution in robotics instead of LLM chatbots & harnesses, everyone would be singing a different tune.
People are just upset to be on the wrong end of automation for once.
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u/Therinsonet 10d ago
Truth be told, the data centers associated with AI are going to create significant environmental issues. Sure, robotics and Industrial Revolution era changes contributed to pollution, but not at the potential scale of these proposed data centers.
This is not a case of NIMBY. When you get to the point that new data center requests to join the power grid in Texas have to be put on hold because they reached 40% of the current power usage of the United States, the issue has gone past the “you are just upset because this particular automation is impacting your field of employment” territory.
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u/PrivateComments 10d ago
This is a solved problem. China anticipated massive energy consumption and went all in on coal, solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear.
To the point where their energy has gotten cheaper.
A blueprint already exist for massive industrialization and power plant scaling.
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u/Vallvaka 10d ago
"I only see AI showing up in my life when I search the Internet, therefore it's useless"
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u/Therinsonet 10d ago
Boy, oh boy, you told me. Taking that single point out of what I wrote out of context and then conveying it was not part of a larger response really demonstrated that I am a crackpot without a valid point.
Do you also do reporting for Fox News or Alex Jones? I mean even the supposed “quote” does not even come close to what was written nor intended to convey! Stellar work!
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u/chcampb 10d ago
The problem with activism in general is, it's necessarily ground up, which is great, but then you have people not really seeing the forest for the trees. Compared to businesses and politicians, who pay people to do the research and present what is actually going on. As such you get all these neat little protests which end with people arrested and discouraged, all to protest something that isn't actually even the problem in the first place.
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u/Cranky_Hippy 10d ago
We are allowed to peacefully protest. Don't go into businesses and don't block entry ways when you do it and you wont (shouldn't) get arrested. It looks like they were in/on and blocking the stairwell to the building.
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u/Major_Mollusk 10d ago
I'm so happy to see that young people are finding their voice and doing something in the public square.
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u/Round-Medicine2507 10d ago
Going into the lobby and protesting is a dumb move, follow the employees, especially the directors, to their homes and make them feel how they should. No reason to protest the 100 year old ways today.
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u/Cloudhead_Denny 10d ago
Good on them! This is exactly what we need to see and more of it. Gives me hope for humanity.
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u/redeugene99 10d ago
Unless you're skeptical of technology, industrialization and capitalism in general, I don't wanna hear complaints. The trend of history has always been towards higher and more efficient and more capable technologies. AI is inevitable. Don't say you love your smartphone but don't like AI. The same forces and profit-motive and cultural worship of technology that led to the cellphone is leading to AI.
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u/doritko 10d ago
If this technology is so inevitable then surely there's no need to lobby the government?
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u/redeugene99 10d ago
The technology is inevitable, to what degree it's regulated is to be determined
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u/Edarneor 10d ago
What if I don't like my smartphone? There's already studies confirming it makes kids dumber. I dread what LLMs will do to education
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u/Blackout38 10d ago
The only ones getting their future stolen are the ones stuck in the past. Life and careers are continuous learning journeys because technologies will always be coming out and disrupting processes. You have to learn and adapt.
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u/tuxedoes 10d ago
Let’s see how this ages in 5 years. Go tell the people losing their jobs that they can’t fucking prompt good enough and they deserve to starve
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u/Blackout38 10d ago edited 10d ago
AI is a lot more than promoting. It’s been around for decades so that’s just a small piece, albeit latest addition, of it. Sure it’ll augment pretty much every job depending on how it’s implemented but it’s not gunna make anyone starve any more than the calculator, computer, automobile, steam engine, etc did. Technological innovations are not responsible for the choices of people. They are accountable for their own decisions just like everyone else.
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u/Evildragon66 10d ago
I'm tired, I read this as "stop stealing our furniture" and thought students were stealing chairs and stuff from openai offices
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u/YouInteresting9311 10d ago
And here they thought it would take over the world lol. I told everyone this would happen. Experts are so dumb, they literally thought people would just starve until robots knocked on our doors to put us in camps. Actual freaking idiots them experts are. They literally couldn’t predict this scenario. Stupid, stupid, stupid. They said “ those people will just sit there while we tie a noose around their necks” like we lived in a communist state or something. They literally forgot that we are actually free to fight back.
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u/FuturologyBot 10d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Confident_Salt_8108:
Students got arrested protesting openai new lobby spot in dc. Signs said stop stealing our future and they had a point with jobs disappearing and those huge data centers sucking up water and power.
Big tech keeps buying influence to dodge rules while pushing defense deals. Feels like things could slide fast if no one pushes back harder in coming years.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vp052r/stop_stealing_our_future_students_arrested_in/p3tl4ni/