Americans Would Rather Live Next to a Coal Plant Than an AI Data Center
Less Popular Than Coal
In this election, nearly fifty ballot measures about data centers all trended toward restricting new construction, and a data center moratorium helped Gina Hinojosa win the Texas governorship. Summer polling had already shown people would rather have a coal plant next door. The author argues the backlash is really about a deeply unpopular industry, not just ugly buildings, and urges AI workers to push their employers toward a better direction.
But if you're working for something more hated than the tobacco industry, maybe it's way past time you stood up to your employer and demanded a better direction.
- pseudosavant
The anti-AI sentiment has more to do with tech than AI. Big Tech's actions speak to how little they care about people, and people have picked up on it loud and clear.
Tech companies could build data centers in ways which are more palatable to local residents, but using less water or straining local electricity grid less costs more. And they care about costs more than communities. Even though a coal plant is objectively worse than a data center, that is (understandably) what local residents' sentiment is.
Big Tech is going to face ever growing opposition until they start catering to the needs of the communities they want to operate in. They aren't entitled to operate like this in any of our communities.
- jordemort
> At some point, we techy folks have to reckon with how much people hate what we build.
Only the techy folks building the stuff people hate have to reckon with that. There are plenty of techy folks building perfectly likeable products; I'd hazard to guess that only a minority of programmers are involved in the creation and development of LLMs and LLM accessories. I will grant that the ones that are building all the things that folks hate so much are a very very noisy minority, though, near-deafening really.
- dzink
Maybe if more people used AI to make fun non-ai products like https://santawho.com there would be less aversion to it.
- cozzyd
Big Coal doesn't think that heating homes is an inefficient use of furnaces.
- Grombobulous
I think something that isn’t talked about enough is how the tech industry burned its bridges in the last era before AI.
For example, Facebook was a site you trusted for enjoyable socializing and it morphed into a horrifically evil platform.
Amazon.com is a massive rug pull where it used to be an amazing place to buy good products at good prices, now it’s a hellhole of dark patterns, sponsored listings, and upsells.
Try to find one popular Internet company from ~2010 that hasn’t been massively enshittified or turned into dystopian surveillance/algorithm/addiction capitalism.
The tech industry trained its own customers to believe that any product they launch will eventually get way worse than it is now.