That’s because the key ingredient for a data center is not an abundance of water and power, but regional officials who can be bribed to fuck over the local neighborhood.
In other parts of the world, data centers are regulated, required to not overwhelm the local infrastructure, and not bother the neighbors, but here in the US, politicians come cheap.
Data centers are Mako reactors from FF7. They’re sucking the lifeblood of the Earth to use it to speed up our destruction at the hands of cartoonishly evil megacorps.
And the promise the tech companies sold their investors on was to cut out the need for human workers and replace them with defective chatbots.
That’s the next giant bubble that’s about to burst. Old money got taken by tech conmen who promised they could finally stop having to deal with human employees and their need for money for basic necessities.
It’s all just so incredibly evil. Billionaires are a blight on all of humanity. From Epstein’s Island to this incredibly shortsighted gamble and all the ones before it. They’re greedy, evil, and stupid, while being entirely unchecked by basic critical thinking.
They are actively trying to doom us all for just a little more.
except its provides useful energy albeit a hazardous one. AI datacenters provides no use or any kind of output.
That sounds like a metaphor for oil and capitalism (industrial society), which data centers are a product of. Good reference. Maybe I’ll check out that game in the future.
If LLMs don’t turn into AGI and instead the AI bubble pops, maybe some of the data centers don’t get finished. Even so, many of the rest will likely continue to operate and consume water.
The US federal government will soon start decreeing how the overdrawn Colorado River will be resolved and things will get very ugly. Western water rights law is an unsustainable construct and all real solutions hurt rich people (even as they also hurt everyone else). Maybe the current administration is waiting until enough of the data centers are built before “solving” the water crisis by prioritizing AI over crops and humans in the name of national security.
But we’re still living in a bad B movie. If AGI actually works and we get SkyNet in the end, then the water infrastructure in most of those regions is probably plenty for the machines once all of the humans are gone.
With the way LLMs work, there’s no chance of them becoming AGI.
And the bubble is already starting to pop. Since Anthropic and OpenAI jacked up the prices, the contracts other AI companies who use them on the back end are unprofitable.
Axios reported that AI is now more expensive than the humans it tried to replace.
I’m kinda looking forward to the collapse of the Ai bubble.
Once upon a time, a lot of telecom bubble startups went under and left behind lots of dark fiber optic cable that others snatched up for far less than the capital cost of construction. But eventually, over subsequent decades, most of it was put into use. I expect these AI data centers will be similar, except a bunch of them are being built in stupid ways like with their own on site electricity generation.
I’m not that excited about what people will do with all of the super cheap bankruptcy auction surplus (formerly AI) data compute capacity. But at least it will be a novel problem.
except the AI chips and equipment are pratically useless for commercial use.
And the depreciation of hardware is magnitudes faster than fiver optic cables. You can’t slowly snatch up hardware over the course of a decade. In a decade it would be electronic scrap.
LLMs don’t need to become AGI. They only need to convince people in charge that they are.
The thing is that they are now attempting to pivot to cloud computer services with the data centers instead of only AI. It is not a thing consumers wants either, but the tech giants (particularly nvidia and microslop) have the power to simply stop producing consumergrade hardware, so people will be forced to rent their shitty services.
That is another bubble which will need bursting.
I’d like to think everyone gets the worst of all worlds. Data centers get the water and cause mass migration. The rich fail to manifest Skynet and go broke, then spur on a civil war in a fight amongst each other for fiefdoms.
The US is showing a lot of the classic symptoms of approaching civilization collapse, from unmitigated climate change to polarization of wealth and power at the top, to the open, extreme corruption of government officials.
All the horsemen of the apocalypse are getting ready to ride.
But in the aftermath, we’ll learn all the ways that the empire stabilized the rest of the world, and conflicts between local warlords will break out across the world like hives.
Absolutely not. The US creates war through coups, military intervention, and puppet states.
Left to their own devices, many states would have socialist governments that focus on their quality of life, whereas the empire is purely extractive.
Currently the US is going after several Latin American governments. These states would be better off without US interference. This is just a fact.
I didn’t say other nations wouldn’t be better off without US interference. The US has caused a lot of problems and overthrown plenty of governments, sometimes for no greater crime than being an ideological threat by its presence, or refusing to let capitalist interests exploit their resources.
But the US is responsible for a lot of stability in the world. This is one of the reasons the dissolution of USAID has been so disastrous. It was a vector by which the US did good and created stability.
And yes, the fall of the US would mean that some military adventurism from the US would not happen, allowing some societies to develop in peace…but at the same time, other societies looking to expand violently will also be emboldened. It will be chaotic and unpredictable.
