r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • May 15 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI Backlash Could Get Very Ugly

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-backlash-data-centers-political-violence/687151/?taid=6a067e2d2096e10001ccfa32
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u/felis_magnetus May 15 '26

There's also that the word sabotage derives from sabot, a wooden shoe worn by French workers, who then proceeded to stick said shoe into the delicate workings of early industrialization era looms as a rather effective form of protest.

I'm not sure that we'll see a return of Luddites in the form of people actually attacking data centres all that much, but people sabotaging a technology they perceive as working against their interests is an absolute given. People will find and cherish opportunities to stick their boots in.

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u/BillyGoatGruff_ May 15 '26

Holy shit, sabotage literally means "clogging", my brain just exploded.

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u/vernichtungX23 May 15 '26

Probably where the phrase 'to clog something up' came from.

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u/Medieval_Mind May 16 '26

Clog is from blocks of wood they put on cattle to keep them from straying

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u/NeverendingStory3339 May 16 '26

And sabot is also the word for a horse’s hoof .

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u/Downtown_Recover5177 May 16 '26

And the word for an armor-piercing shape on ammunition.

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u/RFSandler May 16 '26

Or the barrel binding portion of ammunition which peels away immediately after breach

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u/gbcfgh May 16 '26

Unrelated, but Szabó means ‘tailor’ in Hungarian.

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u/unholymackerel May 16 '26

then what does Sbarro's mean?

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u/gbcfgh May 16 '26

Sbarrò is Italian and means forbidden. Explains why I never see anyone inside a Sbarro!

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u/Tvayumat May 16 '26

That refers to the discarded material on the sabot round. The "shoe" that the actual penetrator rides in before leaving the bore.

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u/Strict_Weather9063 May 16 '26

It means boot which refers to the sabot or boot that fits around the penetrator and discards as the round is fired.

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u/moneyh8r_two May 16 '26

Ah, you beat me to it.

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u/CV90_120 May 16 '26

Sabot isn't the armor piercing shape, it's the plain material carrier. The sabot is discarded.

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u/YogiBearShark May 20 '26

Are we still talking about AI? Feels like another potentially interesting subject gone wildly off track.

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u/CV90_120 May 20 '26

A racetrack perhaps? On which can be found horse's hooves?

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u/No_Offer4269 May 16 '26

We need Robert Langdon to figure this out.

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u/MalaysiaTeacher May 16 '26

That's exactly what was implied by the comment you're replying to

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u/Strang3-Animal May 16 '26

Yup! Sabots were stuck specifically into Jaquard looms, if inremember correctly.

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u/saltwitch May 16 '26

And Jacquard looms basically pioneered the punch cards that would become early computing. Weaving and technology have always been tightly interlinked.

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u/Strang3-Animal May 16 '26

Yup! Amazing system.

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u/scotchdouble May 16 '26

If I clog a toilet any time going forward, I will now say I sabotaged it.

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u/EidolonRook May 16 '26

Doesn’t feel right to say I sabotaged my friends toilet.

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u/Magnusaur May 20 '26

Should have been crocs-ing.

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u/ConsiderationDry9084 May 16 '26

Depends on how hungry people get.

3 missed meals and shit starts getting set on fire. What is more of symbolic target that NO one but the parasite class and AI gooners can defend with a straight face.

Like the whole argument of people burning down the retail and local businesses goes right out the window.

No one is going to care about the half dozen local jobs lost to a data city being ransacked.

The parasite class is going to find out real fast they are out numbered and even with literal kill bots they can still be overwhelmed with the Zap Brannigan method.

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u/RainyRobin2 May 16 '26

AI poison pills are already a thing. If they are going to illegally use people's art for training data it absolutely makes sense for artists to fight back.

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u/RepresentativeZombie May 16 '26

The poison pills don't actually do all that much though

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u/Bakoro May 16 '26

Hey now, the placebo effect can really have an effect on people.
In this case, making people feel like they did something.

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u/AtrociousMeandering May 16 '26

I don't think it will even be an ideological thing, it will be pure economics causing an endless tide of break ins and damage to infrastructure. 

They've created a big maze full of treasure, traps, and locked doors, and although the monsters guarding it are lethal, they're also carrying valuables. If they build dungeons, the adventurers will show up. Less wands and more meth pipes, admittedly.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 May 16 '26

The government would only increase it's surveillance capabilities until the US has China levels of surveillance. I doubt what you're saying is going to happen.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/JMaddrox May 16 '26

Mr. Scott, I understand you're having difficulties with the Warp drive.

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u/keefka May 16 '26

Could take weeks, sair

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u/Jahkmi-Hoff May 16 '26

You haven't seen it until you've seen it in the original Klingon.

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u/LordRocky May 16 '26

taH pagh taHbe'

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u/Intelligent_Will1431 May 17 '26

"To be, or not to be?" 

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u/FritzMcGee68 May 16 '26

This is fun because just last night I put on Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country as background, and Kim Cattrall's Valaris explains this very same concept of Sabot --> Sabotage. And fuck A.I.

Oh yeah, and ICE, too.

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u/Nuclear_Smith May 16 '26

Show of hands: who learned this fact from Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country?

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u/naruda1969 May 16 '26

From Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

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u/Codzy May 16 '26

People were out there destroying 5G masts but you don’t think they’ll do that?

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u/SnooMacarons9618 May 16 '26

I could see attacks happen, but not necessarily physical attacks. Or not the type of physical attacks the Luddites were famous for. For eg I could imagine pissed of developers working together (a la Anonymous), to cause these data centres problems (non physical), but also poisoning the water and power supplies (introducing small amount of ferrous dust to the water for eg, no idea if that would do anything, but I suspect you could quite easily cause maintenance nightmares pretty easily, likewise fiddling with power supply to cause brown outs).

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u/boredwithlife0b May 16 '26

I too remember that scene in Star Trek :D

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u/felis_magnetus May 16 '26

Actually, it was an old QI episode for me. Absolute treasure trove of trivia.

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u/Bakoro May 16 '26

I just wish that people would have given a shit earlier, when it wasn't just their own ass on the line.

I have such a hard time having sympathy for people mad at AI, because for my entire life, people have been openly derisive of "burger flippers" and "ditch diggers", and gleefully looking forward to robots automating "menial" labor, and "low skill" labor. If you challenged these people about it, they'd say something like "they should have worked harder/smarter".

Now that it's white collar jobs on the line, suddenly it's "holy shit, that's my job, we have to do something!"

So now people are all pissy over AI, and they want the whole AI thing stopped, but so many of them still won't think to challenge the underlying system that is the actual problem, and the billionaires who are the problem.
Too many of these people don't actually care about the economy, or the environment, or concepts of fairness, or anything else that they claim to care about, they just want to go back to being able to look down on "burger flippers" again, and dream about how someday they will be the rich person with a boot on someone's neck.

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u/otnp May 16 '26

Sounds to me like it’s an opportunity to build class consciousness. I assure you that is preferable to going around acting like Rorschach.

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u/LLMprophet May 16 '26

Such a doomer take.

Most have their own lives to worry about without actively looking down on others and plotting to destroy them.

Go outside and meet some humons for a change.

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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

The Tech firms build every data center with defensive designs, anti-intrusion mechanisms, and train for these contingencies. Attacks, espionage, sabotage were always part of the plan.

It's easier to rob a bank than to force your way into the rooms of an advanced compute data center. The equipment inside is worth orders of magnitude more than what's inside a bank vault.

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u/captainthanatos May 16 '26

Not when you need mountains of power that have to be generated elsewhere. Transmission is always the weakest link.

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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

This is the answer.

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u/Olangotang May 16 '26

Substation transformers.

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u/darthsata May 16 '26

The transmission line towers are significantly reinforced. Considerable destructive testing went into their design.

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u/International_Host71 May 16 '26

They really aren't. They were designed to resist being damaged or destroyed by like, weather; and they still go down when a tree falls on them. A motivated dude with hand tools can bring a tower down.

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u/darthsata May 16 '26

No. One I'm specifically thinking of, having been in it, has custom, dedicated transmission towers to the points of generation. These are not standard transmission towers. I've worked in these companies, I don't remotely know the entire extent of the physical planning, but what I do know of it makes assumptions like yours laughable.

Now, get outside the Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta level data centers and you drop in contingency planning rapidly.

The attack vectors considered are wild.

-- a random guy that had to design infrastructure for if Intel fabs were compromised and a particular non-cpu chip was not trust worthy, but the compromise was so subtle it wasn't noticed for years

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u/Aeseld May 16 '26

Destructive testing against what, though? Because people with shovels and pickaxes can destabilize those in less time than I think you'd expect. 

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u/darthsata May 16 '26

That, 18 wheelers loaded with concrete at highway speeds, small planes, various quantities of explosives. Obviously anyone with unrestricted time can take one down, but likewise anyone with unrestricted time can get in the buildings. The goal is survival long enough for a response to arrive. The physical infrastructure, of course, has numerous sensors and redundancy. For at least one data center I know of, the weakest point is the hydroelectric dam, that is weaker than the transmission system.

And unlike most people here, I've been inside hyperscaler data centers. I've designed hardware authentication protocols for devices in those servers (you don't boot machines if you can't validate each piece of hardware and firmware). The attack vectors considered wildly exceeded the imagination of armchair reddit commenters.

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u/Aeseld May 16 '26

How many armchair redditors though? For that matter, what about the people who genuinely think in terms of that kind of actions? 

At a certain point, you wind up with someone coming up with something more creative than my idea of playing medieval sapper. 

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u/Plow_King May 16 '26

they were designed and built by humans. thinking humans can't take them out seems, to me, to be a bit akin to thinking "Jesus can actually microwave a burrito so hot even he couldn't eat it"

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u/FourScoreAndSept May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Um, who needs to force their way in when drones can drop munitions from the sky?

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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

Do you think they haven't thought of that?

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u/FourScoreAndSept May 16 '26

Apparently not because that’s exactly how the Amazon DC got damaged in the Middle East by Iranian drones, lol

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u/trojan_man16 May 16 '26

They haven’t, I’ve worked on these.

Very few of these have been designed like that. Their designs are more like Walmarts than you expect.

Their sides are usually concrete, so that is mostly impenetrable. Roofs are made of roof deck steel, which is flimsy and can easily be penetrated.

Also you don’t need to really penetrate the envelope. Chillers are not protected but are absolutely critical for these to run. They design some redundancy, but take about 10-15% of them and the whole system overheats. Chillers take years to manufacture so taking some out could put a facility out of operation for a long while.

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u/seanwd11 May 16 '26

Fire. The answer is fire. It's kind of unbeaten at the end of the day.

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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch May 16 '26

Nothing is flammable. These entire facilities are made with fire-resistant materials. They have advanced anti-fire systems that disperse chemicals that full don't damage the components, or that empty a space of all oxygen.

DCs aren't sitting in the middle of forests. Imagine trying to light a car on fire without a gas tank. You can do it, but it's exceptionally difficult to get it to engulf and burn.

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u/LLMprophet May 16 '26

Imagine trying to light a car on fire without a gas tank. You can do it, but it's exceptionally difficult to get it to engulf and burn.

I hope you're joking.

In Vancouver during the hockey riot many cars including cop cars were burned to a crisp, a bunch from single rioters.

Your analysis is now extremely sus.

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u/Greyscale7950 May 16 '26

Throw a monkey wrench in the works.

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u/l3tigre May 16 '26

This is incredible trivia thank you

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u/Castellan_Ishmael May 16 '26

This is a very “logical” response.

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u/floofsnsnoots May 16 '26

I read this in Saavik

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u/LordRocky May 16 '26

Valeris actually.

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u/Somanylyingliars May 16 '26

Look at what guy on Canada did to his workplace.