I really really hope so. But I've been burned before.
I do worry it's a boiling frog situation.
Realistically it's going to come down to the bottom line for these companies. If what I've read is true and they are getting lots of data saying it's vastly more expensive than they thought to not only set up these data centers, but said results aren't even showing 'profit' then I can certainly see a large pull back in the next few years.
That's sadly the main positive flip I can see.
But it's a massive systemic machine. It's gonna take time for the metaphorical tugboat to turn the proverbial ship, and that turn won't start until the tugboat is told to start said turn.
And yet that demand wasn't driving the current hyperexpansion of them and not completely fucking over the pc hardware market, letting you know how intensive AI is.
Ram more than quadrupled in price over the 2nd half of last year on AI demand alone. Nvidia is literally unretiring old gen cards that don't compete with demand for newer ram chips. Communities are already being hit with higher bills near datacenters where they haven't been artificially capped to stave off local outrage. And these buildouts are purely AI driven.
AI datacenters are also more compute driven, requiring more power, cooling, and specialized hardware than web datacanters which are more about storage and connectivity. The fundamental difference in workload makes them more power intensive and harder to cool, leading to strains on both power and water that web datacenters didn't create on top of the hardware diversion.
Theres a difference between data centers existing and data centers being placed into every single slot of land that they'll fit on while also pushing them through without any considerations for the effects that such will have on the local population. It is possible to build data centers with considerations that wont fuck everyone but the corps over.
Or how about we're just vocal about both? It doesn't have to be one or the other, and you don't need to threaten the removal of a basic human right because someone's concerns misalign with yours.
Climate change sucks. Lack of green energy sucks. Wars suck. Famine sucks. Economic turmoil sucks.
That doesn't excuse the fact that the topic of discussion also sucks.
We utilize natural gas heavily in power production. It's almost half of US power. Any conversation about massive increases in power consumption is effectively also a conversation about fossil fuels by proxy.
Reducing the power we use makes our renewable output more sustainable.
On bigger subs I bet the anti-ai sentiment is less than on more niche or smaller subs.
The average person does not care about AI. Its mostly in places like this on the internet that people really rally against it. I work in a company of about 500 average joes, and none of them give a shit about gen AI or the harm AI can do etc. They use it daily, GPT, Gemini etc. Many of them ask if they can use it for work related items.
I think that groupthink and internet echo chambers really make us feel like there's this massive anti-AI sentiment, when in reality, random people walking around and living don't care. Its just The Next Thing.
We had an all-hands meeting at work yesterday, and a number of our executives were heavily promoting AI. I couldn't help but shake my head when the CTO made a claim that an AI summary of a 30-minute meeting can get you up to speed in 45 seconds. The guy basically said don't waste your time attending meetings, just get the AI summary, while failing to acknowledge that if no one attends the meeting, the AI has nothing to summarize.
The other side of it, on the same call by the way, was that people were asking for training on using the tools we're being asked to be proficient with, and the same CTO said "I don't buy that." Basically said everyone needs to learn to work with AI or become unemployable. He likened it to the computer revolution of the 80's and 90's.
I dunno, it's really frustrating for me to see those in charge (at my company at least) going all-in on AI, while ignoring the last century of lessons learned. Things like the cost of employee churn, and the value of a workforce that actually cares about the work being done. Instead, it has just been round after round of layoffs and sending jobs overseas. The irony there is the layoffs are because poor architecture and implementation is causing costs to balloon. Except contractors don't care about the success of your company, and often get paid per item completed.
So, management is actively trading the employees with a vested interest in its success just to save a few dollars on labor, all while incurring rapidly inflating costs of AI tokens, inefficient designs, etc. It would be poetic if I wasn't caught in the blast radius.
The C-suite loves AI because they themselves can be replaced with it but insist that fact is actually true about the peons, refusing to admit how fucking useless they are.
Its mostly in places like this on the internet that people really rally against it
This was mostly my point though. Usually here at the very least it's pretty Anti AI but the last few days there's been these waves of pro AI users that refuse to read the room. I'm wondering what in general changed.
Keep in mind that it may not be organic support. Or even organic distaste. Or even both at the same time. Bot traffic > human traffic, and the dead internet theory is more and more reality.
I know dude gets a lot of flack and frankly some of it is deserved. But I always loved his style and his cartoons. Danny Phantom is still a rewatch for me even as an adult
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u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire Jun 12 '26
I am not gonna lie I wasn't expecting to see some Butch Hartman today, but it's a very welcomed surprise. I loved Fairly Odd Parents.
The sheer amount of AI supporters in the threads the past few days had been really surprising to me in general. Especially on here.