Technology

Future generations will look back on the pre apocalypse population and call us sleep walkers. I know, as I'm one of them. Life is difficult enough already without jeopardising my freedom as the only way to change our course is violence at this point.

AI and the investment around it are literally the only thing holding up America’s economy right now. If you take the artificial growth and the vast amounts of investment that are being pumped in AI development data centers, the US economy has barely grown half percentage point.

No surprise that they are going to power this beast at all costs until it falls apart along with the US economy.

And capitalism!

What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger! Or chronically ill, but in a cool way, really.

Our current system is going about how Marx predicted it would. The course correction that occurred after the Great Depression has been now completely reversed and we're back staring at its approaching collapse. I don't think we can escape that long term, and we'll lose democracy in the process, unless we start moving away from capitalism. We gotta attack private firm ownership. Otherwise we'll keep getting people accumulate enough capital to buy the rest of the system and steamroll the rest of us for profit.

Meanwhile China is going all in on renewables.

BUT

AT

WHAT

COST

If that makes you uncomfortable about what our political and economic systems in the West that brought us here, well, you know the meme: “facts don’t care about your feelings”.

It might be cold comfort, but none of these business models have the liquidity behind them to build out coal power at the levels they claim they'll need.

Nevermind that solar/wind would be cheaper. Or that the raw manpower to yield coal in quantity no longer exists. So much of these proposals are - at their heart - the same vaporware that promised waves of new nuclear construction and hydro-power and geothermal.

Bottom line is that GenAI's primary revenue comes from dumb VC and bad debt. They can't build, much less operate, any of this shit.

We are a nation of man/woman children. Petulant little kids who don't want to grow up and be responsible for anything.

The capitalist class loves the idea and rewards companies with investment money. They think it could be the ultimate tool to snuff out any power the working class still has; making many employees optional, total surveillance of the population, etc. I think it will be a long time until it can do many jobs, but the surveillance tech seems to be coming along pretty well (with "AI" cameras recording license plates and biometric identifiers being put up everywhere).

Wish my coworkers would get the memo. Constantly trying to shove AI videos in my face like "haha look at MLK Jr and Tupac as pro wrestling announcers haha"

As an artist I am deeply repulsed by AI. But other people around me? They love it for some reason.

its the techbros that are obsessed with AI slop.

So close, AI will kill us with coal robots and Shit-Wells

Remember, everytime us plebs are told to sacrifice for the environment it’s so the corpos and parasites can off load moral responsibility onto us.

Sure but energy use per datacenters was on a downward trend before ai, then it went the other way hard

Datacenter != AI

Except the demand for new data centers is driven entirely by the capacity constraints of the current AI models.

If you are using the internet for anything with cloud storage, you are contributing to datacenter growth.

"Why are you mad at my five ton diseal SUV when you just adopted a pet chihuahua? They both emit carbon!"

Yes but data center growth prior to AI was manageable. There isn't a grid on the planet (except maybe china?) which can support the growth of AI data centers.

These people have to plan energy needs on a 10-20 year life cycle, not 2. It's the 2 that's the problem.

Why not blame both?