Sorry, I'm not impressed much. First of all, their presence has a huge impact on the existing infrastructure, and let's face it, these corporations are not doing improvements out of their goodness of their hearts and because they care about the people that live in those areas. They do it because, pragmatically, they need those upgrades to function in a longer run. Secondly, it is indicative of the state of the current infrastructure and the fact that cityhalls don't have money to improve the infrastructure just for the sake of the locals. I've seen a documentary with a family affected by a datacentre built by meta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3_YYf0ty4s
I totally identify with Rob Pyke's reaction, because that's how I feel about generative AI every day, especially when more and more articles are published about the negative impact generative AI has on the normal people and especially kids who are very vulnerable to manipulation detrimental to their very own existence. The tech bros don't give a rats tail about us. You can reason and analyse all you want about who does what and whose fault is it, but at the end of the day it would not have happened if this technology didn't exist or it was not pushed so aggressively by all the big corporations. Personally, I hope the bubble will burst and generative AI will crawl back into the hellhole where it came from.
That documentary is about the Georgia data center where construction errors damaged local water supplies - it's bad, but it's not evidence that continued operation of data centers is harmful to local water.
There was no indication that things will be somehow repaired. The video stated that the data center consumes 10% of the whole county water need. Here is another video for you: https://youtu.be/DGjj7wDYaiI . Locals are experiencing higher rates of electricity, almost double because of the data centres. And this is ongoing. I don't think these power companies will rollback rates any time soon.
I was trying to remember where I'd heard of "More Perfect Union" and then I realized they were the outfit Andy Masley specifically called out for misleading people on AI data center use a few months ago: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/more-perfect-union-is-dece...
I totally identify with Rob Pyke's reaction, because that's how I feel about generative AI every day, especially when more and more articles are published about the negative impact generative AI has on the normal people and especially kids who are very vulnerable to manipulation detrimental to their very own existence. The tech bros don't give a rats tail about us. You can reason and analyse all you want about who does what and whose fault is it, but at the end of the day it would not have happened if this technology didn't exist or it was not pushed so aggressively by all the big corporations. Personally, I hope the bubble will burst and generative AI will crawl back into the hellhole where it came from.