It’s reaching the point of absurdity in my area. People are bringing “All data centers are flammable” signs to city meetings.<p>A plot of land that’s already zoned for the heaviest of industrial activities, is across the street from a dump, 3 miles from an airport, 16 miles from a nuclear generating station, and in a region with good climate, and no water crunch is a pretty good place for a data center.<p>Facts don’t matter, it’s a religious fight. Even if you provide numbers specific to the local area there’s no way to pierce the rhetoric.<p>Too much land? I added up lol the land used by the 10+ golf courses in the area. Dwarfs the proposal.<p>Too much water? I called the head of the parks department and asked them how much water the golf courses that they operate use each year. Massive.<p>Regional electricity costs going up? Our nuclear generating station already sells 80-85% of all power generated wholesale to other markets.<p>Data centers are loud? I measured the noise outside of my house. I live on a busy street. It was much louder than the viral videos going around Facebook with titles like “Data center noise from my porch SCARY MUST WATCH”.<p>I don’t know about all proposed data centers everywhere, but the they’re eyeing to build in my backyard is fine with me.<p>I lived in Northern Virginia for years. Data centers are everywhere.<p>It’s really hard to explain that centers aren’t bad and are more efficient than the alternatives. Just don’t run them on coal, natural gas, or the souls of orphans. And don’t rely exclusively on evaporative cooling if it’s in the desert.<p>They’re having fun treating tech people like villains. It was the same or worse with bankers back in 2008-2010. Anything I have to say, any data provided, any comparisons made, are biassed because I “use data centers”. When I explain that they use data centers as well, I get the finger.<p>When I talked to an anti data center family member who runs a local Facebook news group with 5,000+ subscribers, they just kept sending me Google AI summaries as counter points… My god. I don’t even use gen AI.
I can tell you, based on local examples, that politicians are setting up deals to bring in data centers without trying to build community support first. Not only that, they are often signing NDAs that prohibit them from telling voters what they have agreed to. It's no way to operate in a democracy, and voters are right to be angry.
I’m a voter who prefers we establish rules that be followed rather than encumber every project with a lengthy community dialogue.
Are those NDAs enforceable? That’s a major governance gap and problem if so.
Voters also have a right not to be misinformed by Chinese government propaganda: <a href="https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-debates/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-...</a>
And on the other side this is the foreign adversarial way to hinder US AI progress, develop and encourage anti-datacenter sentiment which this kind of secrecy and antidemocratic behavior plays right into.
A few months ago the founders of the top AI companies walked into Capitol Hill. Tried to explain to a room full of elected representatives exactly how their technology was going to put almost half the working population into under/unemployment and they should consider UBI [0]. Then they went back to the airport, got on their corporate jets, and went home secure in the knowledge that they really showed them. That they were the smartest people in the room.<p>BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.<p>[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage.<p>They do when the knowledge of the resource consumption is paired with "Which will directly lead to your electric/gas bill going up."<p>People are also paying attention to the fact that the politicians aren't paying attention to the people. Nobody is even trying to sell the benefits of a datacenter in people's backyard. Instead, politicians are bending over backwards to eliminate any possible benefit by giving these datacenters permanent tax breaks.<p>When you have politicians clearly bought by businessmen who don't care about the communities that elected them. It's a bit of a no brainer that they'd be voted out.
I think it's less about what data centers <i>are</i> and more about what they <i>represent.</i><p>* The lack of care of governments of the people's will: they're opposed nearly everywhere but city governments get them done anyway, oftentimes while ignoring more important local problems<p>* The intrusion of the wealthy/big tech into people's lives. Large tech companies tend to be like insurance companies: they just appear out of the ether of daily life, and make your life worse.<p>* The ongoing selling out of America to the wealthy: the rich can do, buy, or build whatever they want. Regular people have to just deal with it.<p>I'm just saying a lot of these I expect we're going to start seeing more direct opposition to from local activists. And a lot of these areas have high rates of gun ownership.
There needs to ANTIARCHY AGAINST AI!<p>ALL PROGRAMMERS and VIBE CODERS should use AI against itself ... vibe code systems that forces AI to pay all of us humans for our content! Without our content AI is irrelevant! Why are we giving our content/souls to it freely now so it thrives and we do not??
Construction jobs, yes. After that, a skeleton crew and a bunch of people in far off places, possibly outside the country.
> They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area.<p>The answer to that is so obviously "no" that I wonder how much attention they've been paying.
> ... refused to answer ...<p>It's a "no." Why does anyone expect an explicit, vocalized response? It's "no" until they provide proof and guarantees otherwise. You don't need to hear them say "there are no jobs" to act as if (rather, to <i>know</i>) there are no jobs.
The people doing the voting are mostly talking about how much water datacenters supposedly use.
More electricity than water around here—rates going up gets everyone’s attention—but there’s nothing supposedly about the water use: data centers don’t consume the water permanently but they still put stress on systems which weren’t designed for the extra volume, pushing requests for expensive expansion projects, and there can be other problems: a colleague mentioned his family back home recently learned that the extra water circulation was spreading a groundwater pollution plume substantially faster, affecting well water users in the area. Since these things tend not to contribute many jobs, there isn’t much to balance out the bad news for communities.
Most people I know (in Utah) are predominantly concerned with the pollution and water use. Water is the most ubiquitous concern across politics in Utah. No matter what political ideology you adhere to, water rights and water conservation are a core topic. If you watch local news for more than an hour or two, you will see propaganda to "slow the flow". One of the most common criticisms of our Governor is that he publicly prays for rain, while using an incredible amount of water on his own alfalfa farms.<p>The sheer sense of scale on this particular project is mind-boggling.<p>> 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses<p>In a community where conservation is at the forefront of everyone's minds, planning something that big is like a slap in the face.
I'm local-ish to Box Elder county in Utah, here people absolutely give a shit about the environmental burden to the region. It isn't just about water consumption, but other things. I think the "We need to win China is AI" narrative is (appropriately???) falling of deaf ears. Obviously I don't have the numbers, but even lay-people in my circles have asked how these alleged AI_driven benefits (fighting cancer, stopping climate change, and whatever) are really going to come to fruition, when what they really observe in their backyards are data centers being generated so we can fill our lives with AI slop.
Box elder is particularly egregious. 9GW of new natural gas burning power concentrated in 1 location in a state that already suffers from poor air quality.
(I'm also in Utah)<p>I'll second this observation, as well as add that apart from AI slop most people around here associate the data center push with the sudden proliferation of Flock cameras at every major intersection and along every highway. Provo defeated a major data center project that was going into an empty industrial park, arguably the kind of place that would fit that sort of development. The actual cost-benefit calculation for most people is heavily weighted towards the negative and this should not continue to surprise people. The perceived downside with no upside is just going to get worse if the government gatekeeps the most useful models.
Out here in the US southwest, we absolutely do care about water usage as well as the potential for higher electricity prices. We also care about jobs, which in the case of data centers are only going to be boosted temporarily until construction is finished.
Plenty of people care about their power bill. Water in some regions is a hot political issue. Data centers don’t create jobs of course, we don’t need anyone to answer that.
Why do people want to work if AI can do the job? What's up with the data center hate?<p>Why worry about marginal data center costs if there is UBI? Why aren't more people demanding UBI instead of demonizing data centers? The corpus they are trained on belongs to humanity. It's humanity's data. The gains belong to all of us. Is it just American hatred of anything that seems socialist? Imagine if in the the optimistic sci fi stories someone interrupted to complain they wanted to unplug the AI so they could be the one to fill out the spreadsheets.<p>Like who wants to have to work at a desk anyway? Isn't there more than enough excess in this economy for all of us? Why use government to turn off the spigot rather than redirect the flow?
We have a higher chance of the world ending than getting UBI in America. This is a country that can't even get basic universal healthcare going. Even if we did somehow get UBI, with who's controlling the country, there's almost no chance it wouldn't be abused to control people.<p>Losing your job means losing your livelihood and often your life for the vast majority of people.<p>That's not even getting into any loss of purpose or identity it might cause people. For better or for worse, working and jobs are a major part of the social fabric of society, and it would take a non-insignificant amount of time for that to change. Trying to abruptly shift that would not go well.
This is fair but I mean as long as people are agitating politically it seems like going after the data center is going after the wrong end of the equation, with similarly difficult odds of success.<p>If you are trying to take on the hyperscalers why not push for UBI vs trying to stop the buildout? Is the former really that much more difficult than the latter? Is it even good policy beyond not wanting something in your own backyard?
> This is fair but I mean as long as people are agitating politically it seems like going after the data center is going after the wrong end of the equation, with similarly difficult odds of success.<p>I don't see why you think that. Its something that:<p>1) These CEOs and people with power want<p>2) The populace has some degree of control over, since its local politics vs national.<p>That makes it an attractive way to push back against powerful people that they see as operating in bad faith. It seems like their chances here are much better than trying to go directly to congress and advocating for UBI.
This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people. A world in which you can actually stop the buildout is a world in which lobbying Congress is much easier.<p>You have control over who you vote for. Congress is not elected nationally. Sorry I just don't see how your points make sense. You might have better success of pushing the data centers off to your neighbor. But this doesn't stop the buildout, it only gives certain neighborhoods temporary protection while economic conditions for most continue to deteriorate. Aka a false sense of security and therefore a bad idea.
I'm not sure why this is relevant:<p>> This doesn't make sense. The reason Congress is difficult is because of those same powerful people.<p>Its much easier to put someone who is aligned with your values into a local political position than congress. And its much more likely that your neighbors will vote in a way that aligns with your interests. And you won't get overridden by a congressman from several states away that has different incentives.<p>Yes, people building data centers can just shop for a new location. But resistance to data centers appears to be pretty correlated with living in communities that are good places to data center, at least anecdotally.<p>The world I'm looking in is one where citizens pushing back locally has seemed to get at least some measure of success, albeit spotty, whereas attempts to lobby Congress about AI has been screaming into the void. Frankly, I think your position here is completely divorced from what is actually happening in reality.
> If you are trying to take on the hyperscalers why not push for UBI vs trying to stop the buildout? Is the former really that much more difficult than the latter?<p>I'm really not trying to be rude, but have you followed US politics or history at all? Is this a serious question? Yes, it is incomprehensibly harder to fundamentally change the fabric and structure of society, especially in a way that involves giving "free" money to people, than it is to prevent something from being built.
I'm really not trying to be rude, but have you followed US politics or history at all? Is this a serious question?<p>Trying to control something by merely protecting your own backyard never works. America has reinvented its own social contract many times, it's why we are still here 250 years later. What side would you have been on in the lead up to the civil war? The nothing ever happens side? Or civil rights? Or the New Deal? The world wars?<p>America has changed profoundly since the founding. Yes change is hard. So is a nation surviving for 250 years. The point is why politically agitate for a mid outcome. American politics is frequently defined by its aspirational nature. Have you read the founding documents? I mean I don't mean to be rude.
> if there is UBI?<p>At least in the US, the public simply does not trust that the United States government will consider such a thing. They won't even consider universal healthcare. No-one is going to go "OK we trust you, you can build your data-centers now and we'll talk about UBI once you've 'disrupted' our jobs."<p>Yes, a bunch of CEOs are making the rounds talking about it, but talk is cheap. Even if that talk is directed at congress. Have any of them even cleared the flow bar of funding research into how it'd work and what the policy would look like?
Which country do you live in that you have such a positive outlook about redistribution of wealth?
How confident are you that the UBI hand out is going to be anywhere near what you made while working?
0.<p>It doesn't have to be. Social cohesion and not having to work are already major benefits.<p>UBI is already premised on the fact that top earners will have to give something up if UBI is going to make sense. I've been relatively blessed, but I know no one's future is guaranteed. Thinking one has to only best accrue their own pile in a world of disruption doesn't make sense. Eventually the Bastille gets stormed. Why not get ahead of it and avoid the terror? Why burn the data center?
/me looks at the history of wealth distribution following new labor saving innovations
I would say the distributions from automated water heaters/boilers, washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators replacing “ice boxes”, looms, assembly lines, farming combines, electric starter motors, and automated PCB assembly have been overwhelmingly good for people across a very broad spectrum of society.<p>Is that what you’re also looking at? Or objecting to the rewards rightly earned for bringing such advances to so many people’s lives?
It's hard for people to see a socialist benefit when everything about the current version of AI seems like it's going to have an intensely focused capitalist outcome throwing us all simultaneously forwards <i>and</i> backwards into technofeudalism.
> no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage<p>the environmental impacts is the only thing people actually care about, you are quite off base here. noise, proximity to housing, water usage, energy prices going up in the area. this is the core issue. not "will ai replace my job"
You can talk about UBI if you want to appear nice but people on UBI are also rather useless. Of course the real solution to the problem will be the change of carbon based life into silicon based life and the extermination of the former kind of life. Which is not the elected representatives problem if it happens to happen more than 4 years into the future.
> people on UBI are also rather useless<p>UBI is going to get us a lot more artists of all kinds.
You kid, but Bezos said practically the same thing. That human need for water shouldn't hold AI back.
I agree with your point broadly, even the cynicism, but the following sticks in my craw:<p>> people on UBI are also rather useless<p>The point of life is not “that you be useful to the wealthy”.
What the comments fail to point out (and I haven't read the article to find out if they address it): the number of data centers being built is based on speculation of need and is a dramatic over-estimate. It has to be. What, other than AI has happened in the last few years that would warrant that many new data centers? How do they know there will be customers for that capacity? There will not be advances in algorithms, etc that do AI much more efficiently? (We know China is making strides in that!)<p>It's complete speculation! It's the new gold rush and everyone wants a data center. Most of these data centers might not even be built! And the ones that are, might never make any profit.
Ah the power of Social Media manipulation. <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/06/05/china-fueling-us-data-center-resistance-ai-groups-claim" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2026/06/05/china-fueling-us-data-cente...</a><p>Allegedly.<p>Another groups claims false flag operation. Ain't it great?
<i>Nothing</i> this technology offers is, to me, worth the noise pollution or increase in water and electricity rates.
In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers. I'm sure there are market failures going on here in many places but it's not necessarily the case that you and the companies be on opposing sides. There are positive-sum solutions to a lot of these problems, if people are willing to consider them.
The problem is that we don’t correctly price pollution: it’d be one thing if this boom meant acres of solar panels and wind turbines getting greenlit but in practice it means keeping some dirty plants online and building out new pollution capacity, sometimes completely illegally like what happened in Memphis.<p>All of this would go away overnight if we taxed carbon.
> in the long term<p>being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.<p>for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.<p>so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.<p>effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.
It's quite amusing how easily people fall into the trap of Malthusianism when talking about water/electricity consumption of certain industries.
Don't all states have public utility commissions that regulate electricity provisioning? I don't know if the market has much to do with anything since it's all government regulation.
I don’t think you’ve been near a data center if you think noise pollution is a problem.
Technology evolves and your opinion will evolve with it.
You're right, but that doesn't mean opinions will evolve towards viewing the technology more positively. With AI, it's increasingly the opposite.
"The beatings will continue until opinions evolve."
Not to mention the tax breaks they're given for no material benefit to the community.<p><i>Future Illinois data center tax breaks on hold</i> - <a href="https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/future-data-center-tax-breaks-on-hold/" rel="nofollow">https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/future-data-center-tax-br...</a> - June 25th, 2026<p><i>State Data Center Policy Shifts as Governors Impose New Restrictions</i> - <a href="https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/6/22/state-data-center-policy-shifts-as-governors-impose-new-restrictions" rel="nofollow">https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/6/22/state-data-cente...</a> - June 22nd, 2026<p><i>Gov. JB Pritzker suspends tax breaks for data centers, urges more discussion</i> - <a href="https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/gov-jb-pritzker-to-suspend-tax-breaks-for-data-centers-urging-more-discussion/" rel="nofollow">https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/gov-jb-pritzker-to-susp...</a> - June 5th, 2026<p><i>Which States Are Banning Data Centers?</i> - <a href="https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-centers" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-ce...</a> - June 2nd, 2026<p><i>US tax incentives for data centers by state</i> - <a href="https://knowledge.sdialliance.org/8d367baa340046029912b1e04cc89ec2" rel="nofollow">https://knowledge.sdialliance.org/8d367baa340046029912b1e04c...</a><p><i>Tax Incentives for Data Centers 50 State Survey</i> - <a href="https://hbfiles.blob.core.windows.net/webfiles/TaxIncentivesforDataCenters50StateSurvey.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://hbfiles.blob.core.windows.net/webfiles/TaxIncentives...</a> [pdf]
Datacenters are needed regardless of whether or not AI -- "this technology" -- is what will be deployed there.
Think of the corporate profit gains which won't benefit you at all bro. It's all about the value proposition.
[flagged]
Something is mentally wrong with you to be _this_ level of excited. I get the ability of it to be a work multiplier, but this reply smells like a plant. No one would be this level of enabler for the damage AI, datacenters and job loss has done.
Can you share something you’ve made with AI?<p>I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.<p>I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.
<i>> The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.</i><p>Right, <i>everyone</i> can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.<p><i>> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.</i><p>Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."<p>Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.<p><i>> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs</i><p>Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.<p><i>> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast</i><p>This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.<p><i>> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.</i><p>Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.<p>But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.<p>I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.<p>The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have <i>an actual person</i> to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.<p>Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.<p>It's <i>human connection</i> that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.
> Hopefully you can find parking.<p>One of the supposed benefits of true self driving cars is that you never have to find parking near where you're going ever again. Get out, send your car off to park somewhere 5 miles away.
discovery has always been the problem with art. many people are instrinsically motivated to create, that's why we have so much art<p>AI is orthogonal to human connection. people like people
<i>> AI is orthogonal to human connection.</i><p>No two things are truly orthogonal when you have to spend time to use either of them. An hour conversing with ChatGPT is an hour of your life unavailable for talking to a human.
And now discovery is becoming exponentially harder, because every niche can get flooded with AI slop by companies trying to extract profits from real people's creativity.<p>Even if you use these tools to create something amazing, what keeps hundreds of variations "inspired by, but totally not copied" of your creative work from popping up? As these models get cheaper and more powerful, this issue will only get worse and worse.
this is the same argument against the printing press, photography, home printers, youtube, etc<p>it is a bad argument. more accessible tools consistently lead to more creation in a positive way
Okay, now produce something meaningfully more appealing than everyone else with the same tools - when you do <i>that</i>, then you have the start of a leg to stand on to claim that it’s worth the cost to everyone.
Enjoy it until the subsidies end and the economics catch up. You can afford it now with broad subsidies, but likely not the true cost.<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-agents-could-soon-cost-more-than-the-developers-using-them/5260864" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-a...</a><p><a href="https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover" rel="nofollow">https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover</a><p><a href="https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companies-didnt-get-the-roi-from-ai-they-wanted-to-see/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companie...</a><p><a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...</a><p><a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trillion-ai-bill-comes-due-chart-of-the-day-100000100.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trill...</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY</a>
If you only ever want frontier model performance then sure, you have to pay to play. But as it is now with open models, some of which I can even run from my gaming PC at home, we're only about 6 months behind frontier performance. Even when the money starts drying up for those at the forefront, the genie is out of the bottle.
And yet, the productivity increases with existing models are meh (ie not 0 but certainly not worth what is being spent) based on the data. Enjoy the tulips while they bloom.<p><a href="https://www.bok.or.kr/eng/bbs/B0000354/view.do?nttId=10098400&menuNo=400409&relate=Y&depth=400409&programType=newsDataEng" rel="nofollow">https://www.bok.or.kr/eng/bbs/B0000354/view.do?nttId=1009840...</a><p><a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/ai-intensifies-work/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/ai-intensifies-work/</a><p><i>AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955703">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955703</a> - February 2026 (306 comments)<p><a href="https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...</a><p><i>AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755</a> - February 2026 (172 comments)<p><i>AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337253">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337253</a> - September 2025 (171 comments)<p><i>Seven Myths about AI and Productivity: What the Evidence Really Says</i> - <a href="https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-productivity-what-the-evidence-really-says/" rel="nofollow">https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr...</a> - October 16th, 2025 ("Despite widespread enthusiasm for generative AI, empirical evidence reveals inconsistent productivity impacts contradicting popular assumptions. Based on recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews, we debunk seven pervasive myths about AI's workplace benefits. AI's productivity gains are highly context-dependent, varying significantly by user skill level and task complexity. Contrary to expectations, human-AI collaboration often underperforms either agent working independently, except in creative tasks. While AI can accelerate individual work, meta-analytic evidence finds no robust relationship between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains. We call for research on context-specific organizational deployment strategies to capture genuine value.")<p><i>The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025</i> - <a href="https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/ai_report_2025.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploa...</a> - July 2025<p>("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence")
Productivity is typically a broader scale measure against the economy. I 100% agree that the shoehorned adoption of AI into general company processes is more of a negative than a positive. Most people here would agree that AI has only really affected productivity positively in the past 6 months-1 year. So obviously there wont be much general uplift across all industries yet, and obviously that would mean there's not really enough data to go off of empirically yet.<p>Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.
With the most politeness I can muster, show me the data. “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” If the data doesn't exist supporting the productivity improvement assertion, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The cost argument is wrong. Compare Gemini 2.5 Pro to Gemma 4 31B.<p>Released only 10 months later, a tiny open-weights model outperforms what was once SOTA. Fable and 5.6 Sol will be outperformed by laptop-class models next year.
And that's why I pivoted at the beginning of this year to LocalLLMs.<p>I can afford the hardware I already have. And I can run jobs on it as I see fit. Sure, its slower than the corpo LLMs, but we're already seeing lying, silent downgrading, and advertisements, even when paying for tokens.<p>When your systems goes tits up or priced out, mine will still work.
>Stop grandpa-ing and shaking your fist at clouds.<p>God forbid people have concerns over companies out in the open talking about replacing their jobs with AI.
> In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.<p>> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.
This goes to every LinkedIn brain idiot spouting recycled nonsense about the new Industrial Revolution and that white collar jobs are going away. These blabbering idiots never read a story book to understand the time period, that people displaced by industrialization were uneducated illiterate farm workers in a period in time before democracy.<p>Jump today most countries stable enough to build infrastructure are democracies and the white collar people you are demonizing do vote and that immense investment in infrastructure is not really easy to relocate.
The rhetoric around AI has been insane for years now. AI will kill us all. AI will take all our jobs. SaaS is dead. AI is too dangerous to even release.<p>It's really no surprise at all voters hate data centers, no matter how useful they think AI might be.<p>But I don't think the rhetoric will end any time soon. The people saying it seem to really believe it.
even if datacenters aren't good for the communities there are in, it would be much worse if China advances in AI faster.<p>this is one of the core flaws in democracy, while the popularity contest generally curbs blatant abuse (also note how even that fails miserably when the electorate groups start to hate each other), the vast majority of people have no real way to judge the impacts of non-trivial decisions and judgement doesn't even need to come with certainty, just knowing which risks are worth it. voters will never get it right.<p>and in the information age, democratic sabotage is many times easier than informing a public that in most cases has no interest in being informed when the group think/herd instincts are triggered.
What is so objectionable about data centers anyway? That they consume utilities without employing a substantial amount of people? Compared to actual manufacturing like fabs the pollution concerns are laughable. The water use issue seems to be a wedge.
I know I’ll get downvoted into oblivion but I can’t help but think data center and ai backlash manufactured or is a psi-ops campaign by Russia or China<p>It doesn’t make any sense to me as the externalities are future not current and at no other point in time has the public cared about the future without first seeing concrete examples of harm. That hasn’t happened yet for data centers nor AI. It’s all “if, maybe, sometime in the future”<p>People will claim real harms but the connections are spotty at best. So it feels like people are stirring the pot. like if not Russia or China then just influencers doing it for rage bait for likes and subscribes<p>I’m not saying they are wrong, I can’t predict the future, I’m only saying it feels unusual for the reasons mentioned above
Almost every major issue has bot networks from hostile countries playing both sides of any issue to intentionally cause chaos. I completely agree that russia, china, or some other country is fomenting anger here.<p>That and the other issues aside, I think AI companies have done this to themselves. They've gone around talking about replacing all human labor and becoming the companies that control robot god's that swallow the entire economy and put everyone out of work and might destroy man kind. Well saying that is gonna make people hate them and that will find an outlet somewhere
From folks I've talked to in real life, it really does seem that way. They're getting their information from Facebook but it's mixed in with the "5G towers are killing all the bees" and the usual anti-vaccine rhetoric. Seeing that erin brockovich has jumped on the anti-data center bandwagon makes it even more suspicious to me.
OpenAI literally found Chinese accounts trying to use ChatGPT to generate anti-datacenter propaganda: <a href="https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-debates/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-...</a>
"Voted backlash", nothing will change.
This is a pretty predictable reaction to the underhanded tactics being used to try to force these projects through either before citizens know they're happening and often, when citizens are aware, against their will.<p>As a side note, I wish we could muster this kind of vigor for just about any other type of public infrastructure project… nuclear/wind/solar power, fiberoptic internet, public high speed rail, new cities built around human-centric principles… you know, the things that the better part of the population stands to benefit from so at least the initial unrest is somewhat justified.
You get the same vigor <i>against</i> all of those project all the time. Windmills, solar, nuclear, rail, etc. There's a stronger will to oppose than to build.
We do muster this kind of vigor. The problem is that coverage decisions shaped by negativity bias ensure you're much more likely to hear about the projects people don't like. Did you hear about the huge New Mexico wind farm, largest in the US to date, that came online two weeks ago?
That's true, but I also see a lot of infrastructure projects that get gummed up or even canceled by NIMBYs, industry incumbents, and general obstructionism that would've happened had they been undertaken with the same bull-in-china-shop approach these datacenter projects tend to take.
Honestly, voter backlash occurs for every reason. Build more homes? Backlash. Build more wind? Backlash. Build more solar? Backlash. Build more geothermal? Backlash. Build more urban subway? Backlash. Build high-speed rail? Backlash. What I can conclude from this is that what is right to do and what voter backlash occurs in is orthogonal. I think it is right that we build all these things and more nuclear power, and more residential super towers, and more datacenters, and the other things for the same reason we climb the mountains, fly the Atlantic, and Rice plays Texas.
Agreed. Change makes people uncomfortable. The nature of the change doesn't matter; the transition itself is the root of the discomfort.<p>When things are stagnant, we gradually optimize our lives towards a low energy state and overfit to our exact circumstances. When a change in circumstances reveals past optimizations to be wasted work, it kick-starts the four stages of grief over the loss of that low energy state.
How does a new datacenter help the voters? All they see is that their electricity prices are going to go up.
It's not really about AI, data centers, water consumption, or energy. Those are real issues. But I don't think that's what gets people so riled up.<p>Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.<p>I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.<p>But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is <i>inequality</i>. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.<p>The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
> The rage that Luigi Mangione felt<p>Luigi is an interesting case because he is not who you think he is. He is definitely not a luddite or populist. I know this because I read a social deep dive on him. His interests, the books he read, the accounts he followed all point to a level of sophistication that indicates he was well above the simplistic "us vs them" Marxist framework.<p>I also disagree with your overall point here: its not (just) about inequality. AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately. What one should definitely acknowledge is that AI is raising the floor and is not _taking_ something from poor people and giving it to the billionaires which is again applying the Marxist framework. What is true is that, even if people are overall benefitting from AI, they are feeling powerless and sense a lack of agency where they see a big societal change happening in front of their eyes and they don't have any say in it. Having no say is kinda the default so you see the backlash from the educated elites who always thought they had a voice - until the AI technology boom came.
> AI benefits everyone while also benefitting the billionaires - even disproportionately.<p>Source?<p>Also, you seem to be (probably intentionally) mixing up who's an elite and who's not. The people controlling and profiting from AI companies and their ilk are elites. The average person who's livelihood is at risk is not an elite, not matter how much you may try to spin it.
AI is hated far more than crypto.<p>No other technology gets as much hatred as AI is getting as the public see that as a threat to their own jobs.<p>Of course techies here are having trouble understanding this backlash. Maybe they should read up a bit on the Unabomber Manifesto to draw parallels on the motivations of the awful attacks against CEOs recently.<p>Just like crypto, you cannot use it to solve social problems with technical solutions. The same goes for AI as it still requires humans and trust to use it effectively.<p>The more AI data centers
get built, the more it is hated and the worse society gets with this loss of trust as more people read about more mass layoffs.
I've never seen the level of anti-scientific, straight misinformation as I have with data centers. I genuinely think it's to the point where the antivaxxers have a stronger scientific backing for their stance.<p>It did not feel organic at all. It's to the point now where that initial seeding of ideas has gained legitimate traction, but the initial burst of anti-datacenter content was wild to see in real time.
The US needs to build out energy infra like China, already >2x more total generation capacity (~1/3 of world total). Putting data centers aside, if America wants to bring manufacturing back, it will need energy to build things. RE: data centers, we do need to be more mindful of where they go and the resources they consume. We should force them to use water efficient cooling (more expensive for them) and support the buildout of the required energy gen. Utah does not seem an appropriate place for such a large data center.<p>The question is do we want to be a Petrostate or an Electrostate<p><a href="https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?is=CHj3J-ARp0iBq_NB" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/gLnxzkiB-GI?is=CHj3J-ARp0iBq_NB</a> (Adam Tooze prezi)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...</a>
Generally, I'm glad that "the people" appear to be pointed in the IMHO correct direction, even if for imprecise, or maybe even wrong, reasons.<p>Regardless of what they are used for, we do not need more "data centers." This is true even outside of AI.<p>Putting so much of us into "the cloud" is generally harmful; encouraging people to learn about, and to do more "computing" at home -- on local machines they, or someone who cares about them, control, is better.
This is because there's a new political divide that makes the old left vs right obsolete: it is neo-luddites vs tech optimists. It cross-cuts against the old and outdated political compass.<p>Neo-luddites are usually the educated elite and genealogy is from old green or left politics but includes nationalists and social conservatives.<p>I think media is broadly failing to recognise this new clan.
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When I look at the total number of acres in a state and the number that may get taken up by a data center… not that we should even have to look at this spec but still not sure why people are so focused on data center construction as an issue unless it’s literally going to be next to your house, is there anything more than FUD going on here? And perhaps people taking advantage of it specifically as a talking point given election season.
You can't look at the total acreage of the state as a metric when 64.4% of the state is owned by the federal government.<p>The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.<p>They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.
Water usage concerns in a desert, perhaps?
I think part of it is the perception that real environmental and public health damage is being done for totally trivial and indefensible causes. A data center is not like an airplane parts manufacturer, which has lots of ugly pollution but provides a necessary national service. Most people use generative AI recreationally, and the productivity gains among white-collar workers are awfully ephemeral. And if you're less pessimistic about the economics of generative AI... that makes it worse!<p>"We get a ton of money, you get increased natural gas emissions, increased unemployment, your electric bill is going up... oh and guess who's bailing us out when the bubble bursts?" Pretty rotten deal!
Misdirected outrage. DCs are an easy outlet for people's AI frustration.
> the Stratos development would have spanned tens of thousands of acres in Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley. The project would ultimately require up to 9 gigawatts of power—more electricity than the entire state of Utah currently uses<p>Did you even read the article? This is proposed to be larger than Manhattan. The amount of power will almost certainly burden Utahs grid in ways that locals will be on the hook for. So much of this build out will be the typical "privatize gains, socialize losses" playbook that yes it is an important political issue, and yes you have to "look at this spec" to understand just how insane some of these project proposals are.
"Privatize gains, socialize losses"<p>This pretty much spells out exactly my big problem with datacenters.
I don't care if you build a huge datacenter several miles away from my home. What I do care about is utilities cranking up the price 3x because of "capacity issues" afterwards because said datacenter now uses more power than the entire district I live in
When people hear datacenter they think ai-almost universally subsidies by the many for the few. They drive up electrical costs, increase carbon emissions, and are designed to make money by stealing and repackaging the fruit of human labor and thought, with the goal of ultimately replacing it not for the benefit of all, but for the benefit of the owners of that datacenter.<p>What's not to like?
The problem is not the center per se. The problem is the power. And, all too often they make up for the lack of utility capacity by putting in their own noisy generators.
That's because this iteration of robber barons is chock full of absolute morons. You can see it in the way they have all followed-the-leader to fire larges chunks of experienced engineers to initiate token bonfires that are going to sink their companies. They're barely smart enough to capitalize on their ruthlessness, and clearly not smart enough to navigate politics.