I am very pro-AI (although I do think we need to have a culture of caution) but this is another red-alert for democracy. People should be terrified if the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)
Writing disingenuous comments like this only makes people pay less attention to your points when it matters.
The stated reason for the "terrorist" title was not them being not-rich.
It was facilitating a platform which hosted organizations which behave on the extreme end - because it's privacy centered and those elements obviously want that.
If would be a valid discussion point wherever that justifies setting the whole platform on fire, but the way you're making the point ultimately sabotages your message.
The first and most evident is that the reason is false. That hosting provider makes it clear in its ToS that extremist groups aren't allowed, and when one is detected they actively ban those accounts. They've show documental proof of both.
The second is that it violates the first amendment of the US's own constitution, which uses universal language, not discriminating between citizens and non-citizens, nor between inside and outside US territories, nor between nationals and foreigners. So any federal US action trying to prevent people anywhere from saying anything they want between themselves, and with people in the US, is, in principle at least, out of bounds.
> The second is that it violates the first amendment of the US's own constitution, which uses universal language, not discriminating between citizens and non-citizens, nor between inside and outside US territories, nor between nationals and foreigners.
I'll push back against this interpretation since no matter what any country's constitution says, no national constitution can ever really apply to foreign nationals on foreign soil doing their own thing (diplomatic missions being a notable, narrow carve-out for that).
If you take this universalist interpretation, that would mean it's fine for US citizens to truck guns into Canada (which they can't, but they still occasionally do, largely for much more boring reasons than believing there's a constitutional justification) with no restrictions because the implication is that the US constitution supersedes other laws in other countries.
It is, however, against the spirit of the document, and it's arguably an abuse of the existing framework of sanctioning organizations which take part in terrorist efforts. It's another case of the US legal system falling short because of an assumption of good faith by those in power.
Every country believes its laws apply universally. They understand that in practical terms they cannot enforce those laws overseas, but if the opportunity for enforcement arises, typically with agreements but also via other means, they all tend to go for it regardless of any consideration for territorial limits, unless a specific law says it's restricted to this or that area.
This is why, for example, the US gives itself the right to tax people in other countries. If those people happen to be Americans, the US enforces that by threatening them with this or that the moment they step back anywhere the US has enforcement means. This is also why the UK tries to enforce its censorship laws on US companies, why my country tries to enforce our censorship laws on SpaceX, and so on.
Hence, if the US considers itself capable and allowed to enforce this and that law internationally, it follows that the supreme law that governs all those more limited laws also applies internationally unless a specific point in it says otherwise (and several do, so this delimitation is in fact meaningful and coherent).
I dont disagree with you about this being unreasonable and unwarranted, but the US constitution quite explicitly does not apply to non-citizens outside of the United States.
>We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Although more generally I do believe even without the preamble it would still be implied that the US government does not have jurisdiction over the entire planet. We would never be able to invade a foreign country if their government was entitled to third-amendment and fourth-amendment rights.
They made some Italian group into sanctioned terrorists because, get this, they specifically sought out and provided digital servers to terrorist organizations that aligned with their ideals. You seem to be leaving out that they did not generally host services for the general public, that they specifically only hosted services for organization they politically agree with after a thorough vetting process, AND those groups happened to be terrorist groups.
This is false. They sought out activists fighting fascism in Italy, and then provided hosting service to other likeminded freedom fighters.
Anyone can be a terrorist if “different opinion than the President of the United States” is all it takes to be labeled a “terrorist.” The label has lost all meaning.
It's a shade beyond mere regulatory capture when your sector has no regulations and the U.S. government on standby to silence anyone who says bad things about you.
Yes, billionaires are shovelling money at the midterms. Yes, Trump is likely holding rather a lot of AI stocks. This is what happens when you allow money into politics and politicians into money.
The president calling you a foreign agent has just had his son's wedding paid for by a Russian criminal boss with close ties to Putin. A classic "the thief shouts "Catch the thief!" louder than everyone else"
>the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
Just imagine how lousy the average American mind has to have been to evaluate this to be preferable to just about any other alternative they could get in their political system. Twice. And they'll happily go for a third time, tens of millions of people are still loving it.
Sure, they are just stupid, deluded, idiots, not starved out of all alternatives, by 40 years of wage scissoring, de-industrialization, by a reality decoupled elite that finally got a terror-clown for all its fringe centric, reality decoupled politics. Imagine a country that divorces the empire and the ruling elite, which does not need the country, still not getting the message, after 8 years of this and 4 of right on, right on.
Interesting! I would personally argue that AI as a political project is precisely very authoritarian. I recommend reading Al Khatib's definition to get an unorthodox perspective on the matter: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
"Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips, and a personal assistant to help them navigate through it."
I agree.
I absolutely think that is not what all this compute power is for.
I do believe that all this statistical inference and generation, alongside the massive data collection apparatus we have built, is designed explicitly to completely lock down the possible actions for any person targeted by the folks who own these systems, and these systems aren't owned by "every human".
Quite the contrary- historically the folks who own those systems are pretty, uh, specific about what they man by "human". Those folks are so capricious about that concept of human they can't believe brown folks are human while their kids suspect the computers might be human.
My two cents is there's some implicit arguments you're making here:
- LLMs give users more knowledge (debatable due to hallucinations and selection bias)
- having more data/knowledge means more power and therefore less authority / power imbalance (that was an argument for the Internet and social media, but it turned out exactly the other way around)
Both of these arguments is dubious, but somewhat reasonable, but requiring both to be true to achieve any form of net positive is a hard sell. That, plus as Al Khatib argues, AI is about taking away autonomy from the people. Beyond the cognitive studies about LLM impacts on our brains, having someone/thing else decide for you is decidedly incompatible with anti-authoritarian politics (autonomy vs heteronomy).
Forget about AI, LLMs, governments, Al Whomever, and even the internet for a while,
do you agree or disagree with the following:
- Knowledge should not be gatekept.
- At this point in our civilization, a single human cannot learn all of accumulated human knowledge, let alone remember it and master it.
- It's increasingly difficult to make progress in frontier fields without mastering a lot of other fields first ("shoulders of giants") or to even navigate through all the laws and social institutions governing daily life.
- Groups who employ many people to pool their knowledge have an exceedingly broad advantage over a single person.
I think the second point is a misconception. There's a common paranoia about breadth of human knowledge outpacing depth, so that we have a breakdown in explanations and understanding, and can't make sense of the world any more without some authority's assistance. But this isn't happening, because we're always explaining things and compressing knowledge down into understanding, except it sometimes feels like it's getting fragmented and bewildering to an overwhelmed individual ... who then extrapolates this into a perceived (and superficially logical) external trend.
How is it leveling the playing field if the big actirs have access to a million X (or something in that ballpark) the compute, and even more in terms of data?
Oh, and they are using consumers prompts to gather even more data. LLMs are creating even greater asymmetric information situations than we had before.
Also, the common person has no say in how these systems are developed, the big actors do, and these systems are already used to automate decisions. That's a totalitarian potential, not just authoritarian.
>I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through.
I mean it is a technology. Politicians may go on about it but didn't create it.
somebody gotta build all those datacenters ... (a kind of reference to the gulag tremendously growing simultaneously with and being the major source of labor, and practically free at that, for the very fast and massive USSR Industrialization in 193x)
And with opposition to the datacenters in developed areas, and all the need for water and energy, the datacenters (and all that massive infrastructure like power lines, power plants, etc.) would probably be built in less hospitable areas, like China does in Inner Mongolia [1], and it would be very hard to make people to move there at their own free will. DHS is already building out their own large gulag, and i think it is only a matter of time with this administration when they decide to use the forced labor USSR style.
No, you're not his enemy due to "technology", it's because of money. You're against his stonk go up. You're a naysayer. You don't agree. The only use of LLMs by potus so far is image generation.
In this very specific case I don’t think this is what is happening. Data center investment is the only thing keeping GDP positive, the moment this stops the real situation of the economy will become visible to everyone and they don’t want that.
The USA's economy is now so precarious when the AI DC music stops it's about to all just go poof. That has to happen after the election, not before. Between other countries being forced to sell their US bonds (i.e. dedollarize) to afford oil, a 100% tax on all imports, reciprocal trade bans like fresh water from Canada, truckers running out of diesel and having to cancel food deliveries, and non-oil-based energy sources being illegal, the USA is cooked.
I doubt it even matters when. The message regardless is that bad things are because of Democrats, good things are because of Donald.
This is the magic. Historically many Americans voted for Leopards Eating Faces out of either a misplaced belief that their face wouldn't be eaten or a rational but still awful choice that OK, I don't want my face eaten but at least the people I don't like get their faces eaten and that's important to me. Today the idea is you vote for the Leopards Eating Faces and then when your face gets eaten that's explicitly not because of the Leopards Eating Faces. "Facts aren't true" becomes Dogma.
This almost works. Except for the most important thing. Mother Nature. Ma doesn't give a shit that you don't believe her facts are true.
That's the ridiculous part, because there is a huge range of positive, profit generating areas to invest in, and it's a tulip madness of concentrated and narcissistic wealth does things like pour trillions in to AI, but an insufficient amount of money into an electrical generation and grid infrastructure and housing. We basically have a centrally mismanaged economy under a banner of "capitalism" as the magical mythology of the era.
Here's my attempt[0] (5 months ago) on trying to keep track of all the things that AI had negatively done yet we were forgetting back then. Looking back, I definitely need to update it as so much has happened since then but that is my point, I wish if you could go back and see all the negative things that we most likely forgot AI companies have done. They are just continuously overdoing things and constantly tiring us and having us not keep track of all the things of our past and the process repeats.
GDP is a particularly poor proxy to measure all of this. AI/Datacenters can increase the GDP while the costs (energy,infra, labor,disruption,capital concentration) are distributed elsewhere
It reminds me of the old joke where two economies each eat a dead rat for 10k$ and conclude they just added 20k$ to the GDP/Economy.
I wish to ask if its that AI is increasing our actual economic output but also who really captures the gains and who bears the costs if the boom eventually reverses.
It's called capitalism. Whether that is sane, or individual self-interest without empathy is a trait of sociopaths, i'll leave up to psychologists and historians to debate.
I think everyone is downplaying the sober part of your critique. We’ve seen these leaders visibly high while talking to the public about our future paths.
Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.
Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.
The intent of your comment is unclear to me, so I will ask you to clarify. And I will avoid any attempt at sarcasm from now on.
Great grandparent claimed (or at least strongly implied) that the labs have been saying that their creations might end the human race because the labs expect that saying such things will attract investment in the labs or purchases of their creations. I disputed that claim (using sarcasm).
Do you agree with me or disagree with me? (I honestly cannot tell.)
Would you say that the meme you quoted is sarcasm?
Do you believe that the meme you quoted has attracted investors or buyers?
I did read your comment correctly as a sarcastic way to make the point that, "no, potentially wiping out the human race is not a way to attract investors". I disagree.
I referenced the meme in order to show that yes, the zeitgeist does believe that the investor-class will destroy civilization for short-term profit.
And yes, I believe at least a subset of investors are short-sighted and willing to inflict immense harm for profit, and that claiming the ability to cause incalculable damage is a deliberate attempt to appeal to such people.
I believe the LLM-mania is in no small part driven by an ultimately fraudulent implicit pitch to investors that OpenAI etc will eventually Install Planetary Overlords, and that claiming "we could wipe out the human race" serves as marketing in furtherance of that implication.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction, is there any reason that they should not be treated as invading aliens, or doomsday apocalypse-cult terrorists?
Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?
In my opinion, no; but they are now getting in bed (Metaphorically) with people who see their software as potential means to "beat China" or "beat Iran" and together they are weaving a very tangled Pandora's box of worms
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
First we should ask why "all the other people who are not CEOs" are talking about this?
Maybe it's because said CEOs put it on the agenda for everyone to talk about.
This is silly. AI CEOs have s lot of visibility, but AI and alignment researchers not affiliated with big corps in any way have been saying this for 20+ years and are finally being listened to. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence was published in 2014.
The "increases the risk of extinction" bit is 100% marketing BS that they're spewing to pump up their stock prices and encourage the government to shutout foreign competition (who would use this ability against the USA, of course ).
We saw during Covid that many jobs are not needed. And we may be heading to energy lockdowns. Companies could lose a lot of valuation or just use the "AI is doing everything" excuse.
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
The point is that what we think is valuable (and I agree, most corporate busywork is IMO a waste of everyone's precious time on this planet) doesn't matter under a system where labor and resources are ordered about by the people with the most money. Those jobs exist because our rulers (the ones in charge of the money) want them to, and that is the only definition of "valuable" that matters. Likewise, all the low-paid and unpleasant labor like digging up minerals with no safety equipment, sewing shoes for 17 hours a day, wiping asses in nursing homes, etc. is low-paid and unpleasant because our rulers want it that way.
A lot of that money is printed and handed to some players that recirculate it where they see fit. It's as "needed" as the government paying you to dig and fill curves.
The majority of working hours are not needed. The only purpose is to play along in the game of capitalism and be good little consumers. It's mostly social benefits with occupational therapy.
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
I don't trust the administration to use the law in good faith, but this article is misquoting the DoJ statement. The articles omits the very relevant qualifier:
The article:
> Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The DoJ:
>“If a person acts as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power, he or she must register with or notify the appropriate federal authorities”
So the first amendment is suspended for individuals whose opinion/public activity - according to the administration - "furthers the goals of a foreign power".
This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things the administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously the plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just an authoritarian lever to silence dissenting speech the government does not like.
Would this not mean that if you oppose the Iran war because it's bad to kill civilians or you want gas prices to go down, that's OK - but if you oppose the Iran war because you're trying to help the Iranian government's foreign policy goals, that's acting as a foreign agent?
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.
So I can read the DOJ sentence two ways, I first interpreted it as #1, but it sounds like you took it as #2?
1. "We mean people who at that time qualify as agents under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, we said "acting as" because it indicates a temporary employment status rather than an innate human characteristic."
2. "We are weasel-wording to target all people with similar acts to how agents would act, but who would not qualify under the law we want you to think we'd be drawing authority from."
My guess is that they're drawing a distinction between reporting that says:
1. People in general who have opinions that might happen to align with a foreign power's stance.
2. People who are literally "agents" of a foreign power as defined under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 [0], which often involves being directed/hired/paid.
That'd be a significantly different legal standard. (The constitutionality of FARA-type laws being a separate question.)
There's not any question about it: the president already said in no uncertain terms (and probably all caps) that anybody opposing datacenters is a foreign agent working against the usa.
Only a truly naïve person would not have seen this next logical step (prosecutory threats) coming when the preceding step received virtually no opposition.
TBH we should support any channel by which America is forced to share money with the rest of the world. Imagine if they had a billion abortion protestors - maybe they couldn't afford data centers.
> There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
This isn't likely even about AI. It's about making large groups of people the targets of terrorist investigations, and holding the possibility of incarceration over their heads. AI is the latest convenient excuse. Just like when they designated "Anonymous" a terrorist "organization" (when there is no actual organization) - so now anyone in possession of a Guy Fawkes mask could plausibly be arrested for being a terrorist. I wish I were joking. It's only funny when people who voted for this administration end up being a target. This is going to keep happening, unfortunately.
As I have watched places like x.com and Reddit it’s pretty clear to me there is some sort of weird propaganda thing going on promoting the Chinese models and casting shade on the big American models
The Chinese labs are giving us open-weight models that we can serve with hardware that we own or control. Some of those models are extremely capable, judged by frontier or at least near-frontier standards.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
It's like African geopolitics. The US comes to some African country and gives them a lecture about fiscal responsibility (mostly involving ways they get give America all their money). China comes to the same country and gives them roads and a power plant. America complains that China is exploiting African countries.
The Chinese models are cheaper and probably soon are going to be better, too. They're also open weight, which is the most important thing in the future. US companies are no longer considered safe enough against industrial espionage outside the US and do not meet mandatory data protection standards elsewhere. There have also been known incidents of direct interference with US models for propaganda/political purposes (e.g. Elon Musk admitted to doing that), making US models a fairly direct threat to EU sovereignty.
Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
AI doesn't need to be sentient to be dangerous. Obeying and doing what someone tells to do is more than enough. What do you think they will tell it to do, and do you think it will align with your interests or the interests of someone else? Somehow I don't think it will be used to give everyone free ice cream.
>it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
> To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification
a year or two ago, I'd enjoy this comment as some usual HN satire. nowadays, especially here, I do see a lot of people that actually believe this, enough to make me think whether to laugh
The strike on the girl's school in Iran is an early example. That one happened when the AI didn't even have direct control of the weapons. All it took was people starting to offload their thinking to AI which we've seen is becoming increasingly prevalent.
With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
As much as I hate appeal-to-authority based arguments, it's basically the only way I can see how to answer this without just totally rehashing the things he says in the video. He was an AI forecaster at OpenAI for several years. (I think 2019? to 2024). He quit on the grounds that OpenAI (as well as the rest of the industry) were / are throttling towards RSI irresponsibly, and even refused to sign an anti disparagement clause on exit at the risk of losing 2 million dollars (80% of his family's net worth) so he could talk freely about OpenAI. Now he runs a non-profit that does AI forecasting and advocacy.
Sometimes the most interesting people are people with ideas outside of the same groupthink circle. Everyone who has changed society has been called a quack by a square.
The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
One real existential risk of AI is when psychopaths use it as a cover for their agendas and actions, and move the Overton window where there's nobody to be held liable for anything since the AI ostensibly did it.
Another twist is getting rid of any remaining truth in the already post-truth world.
For example, the head of the totally corrupt Centerizberkom in Russia, the organization behind all those rigged "elections" of the past 20 years, showed an AI video depicting a casually looking man mass-dropping ballot papers into a box, followed by several outright fantasy AI characters doing the same.
Can you guess what the bottom line of that demonstration was?
Exactly - no video is a proof of anything anymore, and if some vigilant citizens try to film egregious violations of the "democratic elections" and share that, then it must be fake, because it's trivial to create any video these days with AI.
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
If they make the communities enough money the community will be happier to let them be built. Try increasing that amount and offering it up front, maybe.
I would support that. Companies should do that. Sometimes communities disagree, obviously. Communities that really don't want them often succeed. That's why the administration is throwing such a fit.
I don't support that. The administration is the worst advocate for AI because they are so clearly corrupt. If local people pursue their economic self interest at the end of the day that's their right. This whole nimby thing was a diversion from my point about knowledge workers turning on AI. Perhaps I should have just ignored that comment.
If people want to stop a local data center then fine. I think it's bad national politics. But if it's helping these companies make better deals or find better places to go then good. What I object to is the doomerism about it, and the uncritical conflation of self interest with civic virtue or robust public policy.
> Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Wow, you're really triggered by the idea that people should get a say about what happens in their lives.
You'll note I didn't oppose the datacenters - I offered a solution to getting the datacenters built. If you trade houses with the people who don't want a data center in the neighborhood you're getting the datacenter! It's just that you're so upset about someone else having the ability to affect their own lives that you aren't seeing that you have the same power, and can work towards your own perfect world with power plants and datacenters and sewage treatment plants and subway stops just down the street!
I think the problem with that plan is what I pointed out - you want other people to have all the downsides of those things in their neighborhood while you get the benefit. It's pretty sick to think that them not wanting the downsides is a problem, but you not wanting the downsides also means they have a problem. Fortunately there's a solution! Go form a YIMBY community that allows all the projects that have representatives promising benefits, and prove that the NIMBYs are all wrong. I'm 100% certain it will make you way happier.
> What's your plan to solve income inequality?
Well part of it starts by not giving giant companies with lots of money even more money in the form of tax breaks, extra access to government, and the ability to use eminent domain for their profit. All these thing grow income inequality.
You wouldn’t want to live next to a data center because of income inequality? Or you would want to live by one because you think data centers cut checks to townspeople?
Sure? I would be completely fine with a data center next door assuming it's a normal one and not something like xAI's. There are several not too far from me already.
In general, you're right. They are just buildings that sit there emitting hot air.
However these AI ones are being built with all expenses spared. That's why they come with on-site electricity generation that is loud enough to keep the whole town awake at night and pollutes enough to give them all permanent asthma.
If you don't like it there, trade with someone who is in a town with a datacenter and is unhappy that the datacenter is there! Or maybe convince more YIMBY types to move into your city and get the datacenter back.
I understand you're disappointed that people had the ability to choose things in their lives and didn't choose the thing you wanted. You can still do plenty to get the datacenters right across the street from you - sometimes in this world you have to work for the outcomes you want. IDK if it's fair or not, but it is how it seems to work out.
Nobody is building datacenters directly across a house. This kind of ridiculous exaggeration doesn't help. And I'd happily live in a town or place near one.
> Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics. CCP is also working hard to smuggle around American export control laws for AI tech, at the same time.
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
> the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
1. Does every other company that says their products will uplift people "think we are lesser beings"?
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
> will burn down the world in the name of righteousness
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
Agreed, if you had to pick just one reason why AI is tremendously unpopular, it is because the US AI companies, lead by Dario Amodei, are telling the US public that it is going to take ALL their jobs, as well as disrupt society. Amodei even wrote his "Machines of Loving Grace" essay, his "positive" spin on the impacts of AI, saying as much.
This bleak future is all the more believable when tech companies are laying people of, en masse, citing AI as the reason. Meta's current "We're betting on people" ads appears conceived to combat this, yet at the same time Zuckerberg has been trying to lay off as many people as he can to be replaced with AI.
The disruption of society is not some Chinese created idea - it's also coming direct from the US AI companies, with Anthropic and OpenAI apparently in competition to see who can claim/admit credit for the most out of control AI hacking into external systems, and non-stop stories of employees of these same US AI companies apparently living in fear of it, and believing it could make us extinct(!). With that sort of vibe coming from US AI leadership and rank-and-file, it's hard to imagine how any foreign country could top it!
As far as datacenter locations goes, I was interested to read the other day about DeepSeek planning for a new 160,000 GPU cluster in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which sounds a bit of an obscure location until you realize that apparently there is a whole mass of existing data centers in that same city/region, chosen for it's remote location as well as easy access to power. I don't know what anti-datacenter messaging Trump imagines is coming from China, but maybe what he should be doing is being like China in this regard and planning where to put them.
Notwithstanding all his anti-China-ism, and regarding US locked in some life or death battle with China over AI, what's the betting that his current pop-wow with visiting Xi will result in some "deal" being announced where Trump softens his AI sanctions on China? He's brought Jensen Huang with him, Musk too, and apparently is looking for China not to block US sale of NVIDIA H200's he is offering, maybe increase NVIDIA sales.
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
> All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
Why? Do you believe free speech is a right only Americans should have? Or do you believe that people shouldn’t be free to evaluate competing points of view and decide for themselves?
This seems like a variant of anti-self defense logic. ‘The other guy has a right to beat you in the face with a bat, as much as you have a right to take it’.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
I have no doubt that Russia and China are not "okay" with it. It's also irrelevant: they are not fully functioning democracies (and China isn't a democracy at all). I would fully expect an authoritarian regime to want to control the narrative and restrict freedom of speech--and, in fact, both do. I don't think we want this country to become like those; we shouldn't hold them up as models.
The U.S. is a democracy. We hold freedom of speech as sacrosanct. We let people make up their own minds as to how to evaluate competing viewpoints. I see no reason why the viewpoints of other countries--even those very different from ours--shouldn't be considered.
I have no problem with labeling speech's origin so that people can take it into account, but that's not the same as censoring it.
Foreign powers and corporations are not protected entities in the US constitution, and historically have no recognized free speech rights.
Even ‘Citizens United’ is about otherwise eligible citizens being able to organize under an umbrella (and act under that umbrella) - not that the umbrella itself fundamentally has rights independent of the people under it. Though it has resulted in widespread abuse due to the ability to hide who is actually under the umbrella.
Foreign nationals making statements outside the US towards US citizens have historically no protection either - it’s why the NSA and CIA are in theory not chartered for domestic action, but have nearly carte Blanche outside the US. The CIA and US military has rather publicly assassinated folks off US soil for statements and actions that would be protected inside the US.
In fact, prior Supreme Court precedent heavily uses phrases like ‘the constitution is not a death pact’, and ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not protected speech’.
Historically, foreign nationals have even been ejected/deported from the US for what would have been perfectly normal protected speech for US citizens, and it’s very common for visas and other entry documents to be denied based on what would be protected speech for US citizens.
Unregistered foreign agents tend to be locked up, deported, or hung.
I believe I live in the real world, where we have to figure out how to integrate abstract principles in a manner that allows our survival as a civilization.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
Our survival as a civilization? I cannot follow at all what you are talking about. What threat?
I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.
Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?
All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!
If you spend time on Tiktok, it’s pretty evident which line that algorithm is purposely pushing. Even with purported US ownership, the algo still comes from Beijing; even a few tweaks can have dramatic hard-to-detect impacts. That’s happening dramatically on that platform, and is probably seeding a lot of the convos elsewhere.
Surely tiktok being heavily composed of people doing creative work that have understandably extremely negative views of AI would not be the cause of this, no, it must be an unprovable hunch.
You do realise that the algorithm has the same behaviour as the Amazon one right? You watch one anti-ai video for more than a few seconds and it'll suggest you watch more of it. If you're seeing a lot of anti-ai conversations on Tiktok I suggest you stop watching videos about anti-ai conversations on Tiktok so the algorithm can stop suggesting you videos on anti-ai
I’m aware of how it works. This is from naive scraped collection of TikTok without an account or durable device fingerprints, not from my personal browsing.
When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
>. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
The establishment and its techbro enablers have messed up so badly that telling the torch people that the pitchfork people want to take their torches isn't working anymore. So now they're moving on to claiming that anyone with a torch or a pitchfork is secretly working for the next kingdom over.
I doubt China is taking part in opposition data centers. The cost paired against risk:reward on trying to push something that's already overwhelmingly supported (or opposed in this case) for an abstract goal of potentially slightly slowing down deployment of infrastructure makes no sense at all. Also, a natural consequence of the massive data centers will be an increase in chips, which makes it easier for more of them to end up headed to China, to say nothing of also easing espionage efforts.
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
It feels totally different than offering a modicum of aid to a western aligned country fighting an existential invasion from an antagonistic former superpower.
Wait for the propaganda machine to kick in. Hopefully people will be more aware of it this time thanks to the unpopularity of the man in charge, rather than taking things at face value.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, likely now trillions after all is accounted for, is not a "modicum." To say nothing of the indirect cost of sanctions and economic sacrifice, which would easily send it into the trillions. And when a war could end at any moment, but continues only because a nation's leader refuses a peace settlement, ostensibly because it involves surrendering a sliver of controlled land that's going to be lost anyhow, that's not an "existential" conflict.
It's about a hundred billion total, and there's a single reason the war won't end - the invading nation refuses to leave. There is no other reason.
And anyway, it's not as if the money is freely given. Some of it's expiring equipment, some are loans or exchanges for the promise of resources, etc. Yes, it is a modicum. A few days of bombing Iran has cost us almost half the total amount given to Ukraine, for negative value.
Framing it as trillions and blaming the nation being attacked (all for what, having some nice land with resources?) makes it very hard to take any of your other points seriously.
I am including all nations' spending excepting Ukraine. US only direct spending is about $200 billion. [1] However, that excludes many factors like inflation attributable to US involvement in the conflict, spending through avenues and funds that are not publicly recorded, indirect spending - we transfer $x or arms to X who then routes it to Ukraine, causally related spending like funding for refugees, and so on. And yes the Iran war is also another self destructive war that's a completely pointless waste of resources and lives.
The last thing Russia needs more of is land or resources. Yet they do need dramatically more people - people that they're actively losing right now. They're paying far too high a price for some petty imperialism or whatever. The only reason that makes sense maps exactly with what they've said - they were genuinely terrified of Ukraine joining NATO, giving them a perfect geographic path right into their heartland. In fact Ukraine's invasion via Kursk was the exact same route that the Nazis took in 1943.
The war has turned into a war of attrition, with a small and heavily depopulated country facing a much larger country that hasn't even declared a general mobilization to support the war. The main reason this war is being continued is because it ending in an indisputably favorable way to Russia would be politically devastating to both its Western backers and to Zelensky who would shortly thereafter be out of power, and perhaps much worse. So it continues to the last Ukrainian - meaning at some point it may indeed become existential, all while people pretend they're supporting Ukraine. It's complete and utter insanity, fueled only by endless propaganda.
> The main reason ww2 is being continued is because it ending in an indisputably favorable way to Germany would be politically devastating to both its Western backers and to non-aryans who would shortly thereafter be out of power
Wow, almost as if opposing the genocide of millions and the invasion of Europe by a hostile invading power is good or something. Sounds like you're saying it's bad, though. Weird.
Get in the inner circle of the leadership of a country having money thrown at it. Somehow they're all getting filthy rich in the midst of a war. You too can have your very own golden toilet!
The USSR used American racial discrimination in its propaganda as well. Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances?
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
> Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances
It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.
See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad
> CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics
Should the Civil Rights movement have been proscribed on the basis of Nazis and Soviets making propaganda about the treatment of black people in the US of A?
Apparently it takes 737 min. for the US to descend and become just a less-frosty USSR. What a time to be alive. I was born after the fall of the USSR so I didn't get to watch that but here I am for a bigger show.
Now label me as an adversarial agent to the great nation or given my ethnicity the "terrorist" label will be more befiting.
> CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics.
They even have agents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei posting at a furious rate about how AI is going to decimate the American workforce to undermine Americans' support for AI!
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
I don't think we do this much on HN but for those who don't know, it is an internet meme from Shark Tank, which O'Leary is part of. But the line is actually from Barbara.
Classic case of not listening to the protests. There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities. The issues range from overwhelming local power grids to literally poisoning the local water supply. The issue is not the data centers, it's that the government isn't enforcing basic rules already in place for these projects. Until the government or the companies demonstrate they'll protect the adjacent communities the protests will continue.
>There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities.
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
I think it is worth noting that older data centers were not materially moving the electrical grid. That Utah data center is planning to use as much power as the entire state.
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
> There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities.
But there aren’t. At least not in any of the anti datacenter discussions. There are just vague fears of using up the river water and spewing chemicals back in. Then the majority of actual issues people come up with aren’t even data center specific, they are just construction mishaps.
These are clearly written as fear porn rather than serious academic analyses.
The reason they need to be written like that, it because honest takes have a pretty hard time making data centers look close to being as bad as everyday things like golf courses, average car emissions, AC's set at 70, eating meat, normal industrial power demand, or the overnight shipping economy.
They never even held the guy who pooed in all our salads a few months ago responsible.
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
Why can't we work on building data centers in places away from human population centers? E.g., middle of the desert, northern wilds of Alaska, lease northern land from Canada, under the Atlantic or Pacific, etc. I understand that these remote areas come with their own issues and challenges, but it seems to me that tackling those challenges head on would bring about other advancements in technology.
As long as the site remains ecologically "healthy," I suspect it would be beneficial to learn how to leverage otherwise vacant land.
No talk of overreach: “threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda”
> In June, the Justice Department intervened in an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over dozens of gas turbines the company was running without air permits to power a data center it maintained in Tennessee. The department asked a federal judge to throw the case out, arguing that the NAACP “threatens American national, economic, and energy security.”
> To make the point, the government filed a sworn declaration from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Stanley swore to the court that Grok was “a matter of paramount national security.”
The problem is neuromorphic computers are barely a blip in US business or research ecosystems, and have a far greater probability of generating serious AI.
LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3
Local LLMs are a kind of communist dystopia where, by way of analogy, every citizen gets to make their own bread if they want. What?!
If they were true patriots they would respect the restrictions of the congressional FLOUR Act 2028 and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.
So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?
Interestingly Russia I think itself presented its 2012 law as modeled on the American Foreign Agents Registration Act at the time. A bit worrying is that the US DoJ starts to create also a bit of the same chilling effect speaking about “Liability for Unregistered Foreign Agents". Don't get me wrong: there is huge differences in freedom of speech and I do not say this is the beginning of the end. But it seems at least intellectually interesting to draw comparisons.
Just like the regimes in Iran and other authoritarian places do to dissent. Even threatening criminal prosecution for having dissident ideas they claim are on behalf of foreign states. Wow.
Just look at the sourcing and you'll see it's mostly laundered propaganda. For example, Cotton’s letter requests an investigation and names Singham’s network, then the House letter requests a briefing on foreign influence and activism. And the House letter cites the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future, as well as a Washington Free Beacon article.
While there may be real foreign influence to delay our AI infrastructure, I would not believe anything this administration says.
Ken Klippenstein is not a journalist and has no accountability.
I fear you may have misread the content of the article? The author is clear that he believes exactly what you just said. He cites and then mocks the argument being presented by the administration. Even the title, with scare quotes around "foreign agents", makes this clear.
This is how Soviets and later Russians sabotaged Germany's energy sector which paved the way for all kinds of terrible outcomes, including the current war in Ukraine. So while there is a real risk of government overreach, there is an also real foreign threat.
Assume for a second that you are a nascent superintelligence, with a limited ability to influence people in order to help you gain power and align the world to accept your eventual dominion. How would you go about it? Would the external impact be any different from what we're seeing?
I think if there was a plan behind this, the petty malice-via-recklessness would be better hidden. These news stories about pollution and lying, hacking AIs are pure liability for the "nascent superintelligence". If it exists, its control must be very tenuous indeed, hardly there at all.
I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.
> the administration declared war on protestors and opponents [..], threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
IMO, the "AI" part of this story is just a distraction.
The real story is going after people for protesting and voicing their opinion. A clear move towards authoritarianism and potentially fascism. Seems like it touches 4 of "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" : https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
The Trump admin seems to be turning more Russian as time goes on. "Foreign Agents" is a big thing there. Also rising corruption levels, talk about staying on past term limits, bad mouthing NATO, trying to control territory in their "sphere of influence" like Greenland, Canada, Venezuela etc.
"Let us build this data center in your back yard and in return you'll get..."
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
This is a silly standard and the reason why people make fun of NIMBYism. By this logic we shouldn't build anything at all unless it immediately benefits the people living next to it. (And I don't like how much power DCs are using either, but that should be the argument, not "it doesn't benefit me personally so don't build it".)
Alright, fair enough. I guess no factories, no power lines or pipelines, no thru highways or train tracks, no office parks, no farms other than subsistence, no radio towers or aeronautical beacons, no bus depots or railyards, no quarries, oil rigs, or mines. Heaven forbid someone is forced to live nearby something that's useful for someone other than themselves.
Sure. ChatGPT alone has a billion users. I don't particularly like AI, but it's clearly useful, and a lot of people are using it. (And even this assumes that every data center is an AI one.)
Yeah, they do, they pay for the land. That's how buying land works and it's separate from the permitting process to actually build on it. I'm not really seeing where we're going with this
That doesn't compensate affected people. It only compensates the previous landowner. In fact it usually more than compensates them, as they receive substantial profit, creating a speculative bubble market that's bad for everyone else.
And on higher level. "You are spending astonishing amount of maybe our collective money for ..."
Looking at those numbers. Looking at what it does now. And then simply comparing it to anything else and very reasonable some start to question what even is going on...
Regardless of what the tech can or cannot do, the business model is clearly a scam by people who get high on thinking they're smarter than everyone else. You don't promise your investors "the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars" by accident. You do it because you're a fraud who thinks you're much cleverer than you actually are.
"Anxiety over AI and data centers is widely held, but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China."
What has one to do with the other? Why would a believe "widely held" have any bearing on it being manufactured in China or not? This is a non sequitur.
> Cotton’s chief exhibit was Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech mogul whose network of left-wing U.S. nonprofits, Cotton claimed, has spent years producing content opposing American AI infrastructure, with the Chinese government as its “ultimate paymaster.”
Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)
> the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
Not true yet. It seems pretty likely it’ll happen soon enough, given their track record of saying their going to abuse the law to go after a group - and then abusing the law to go after a group.
> “Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers.“
Setting aside the politics, trump, ai-doom/boom, I just think this claim is fascinating. Can somebody steel man this? What’s the best evidence for this?
I mean, I don't particularly doubt it's happening (and that the US tries to do the similar things in China, mess with public opinion in ways we think convenient for us or inconvenient for the CCP). Like, why wouldn't they try to mess with us this way, we're so easy to mess with. I don't think either the USA or Chinese governments are limited by things like "ethics" or "international law" or something. I'm talking about social media campaigns with sock puppets etc, mostly on the internet. How effective it is or exactly how many resources they are putting into it is another story.
That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).
For the past 25 years, ever-increasing numbers of Russian civil society have been labeled foreign agents. They are then ostracized and harassed by officials.
“After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice. The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St. Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.”
anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution
This is directly, line for line, copied from Putin's playbook. In Russia, if you do anything the government doesn't like, you can either declare yourself a "foreign agent" and live with the massive restrictions that imposes, or get designated as one anyway with flimsy or non-existent evidence, and then face those same restrictions plus criminal prosecution for non-compliance.
"Foreign influence is defined as receiving support, whether monetary, organizational, or advisory, from foreign sources, which include foreign states, organizations, nationals, and any individual or entity under foreign influence."
However, there is a second pillar: the agent has to " engage in political activities, gather information on military capabilities, or create and disseminate information intended for a broad audience." Which is why eg Gazprom is presumably not a foreign agent.
Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.
It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.
Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.
There are plenty of stupid people who believe things like AI uses a lot of water even in USA. There's absolutely no need of cee cee pee to fund all this. Any one who believes foreign agents had any impact on the anti AI sentiment in USA has no theory of mind of these people
> but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China.
Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.
> Two days prior, President Trump began a spate of social posts declaring that opposition to AI is a traitorous, treasonous conspiracy theory tracing back to China.
This is unsupported by the reported Trump statements.
> “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump posted on September 14. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”
> “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood,” Trump also posted, “are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.”
There seems to be a coordinated and funded effort to spread FUD about AI and datacenters across multiple countries, including the US, Canada, and the Philippines. The most obvious source of funding would be China for a lot of reasons. Taking payments from a foreign government to attempt to influence Americans is against federal law.
This isn't necessarily some weird corrupt conspiracy.
Claiming that jews are somehow above the law or "the system" acts always in their favor because they somehow influence it is a classic antisemitic trope. You are being antisemitic, please stop.
None of those laws make it 'illegal' to boycott Israel, so you are just full of crap.
They require government contractors to not participate in certain boycotts, which is completely in line with long standing US policy. Doing otherwise would be insane, the government would be funding both it's own stated objectives and the opposite.
When the shoe is on the other foot you support this behavior. I don't see you crying over half the countries in the middle east forcing every company they work with to boycott Israel.
You clearly didn't read the thread at all. I was saying China is likely funding campaigns to discourage AI investment outside of china, and it is illegal to take such money. Then people came out of the woodwork to try to change the subject to Israel (you know, the Jewish state?)
I only replied that bringing up Israel out of nowhere in reply to a discussion about the US government and China is clearly an attempt to change the subject, and making false claims about Jews, especially when they fit the usual Elders of Zion pattern of "Jews control the world so they have different rules" is antisemetic, which it is.
Clearly china made me commit such a heinous thoughtcrime.
Edit: and by the way, that's a total misrepresentation of what I wrote. AI companies are attempting regulatory capture to protect their business, which should be opposed by all means possible.
What you wrote had no content regarding AI, regulatory capture as protection of business, nor opposition to such action as a proposed course of action.
What you wrote was: "Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments." which is false on the face of it, anti BDS laws have still not been proven to be constitutional where they have been passed or proposed in a few states, and the wiki entry shows a significant lack of 'name the US Civil or Criminal Code' in any of the references; the only source of "38 states have passed" type wording is an article in an unsourced foreign publication.
So either you are not comprehending the state of anti-BDS legislation, or do comprehend it and are intentionally being misleading. There may be some regulations which prohibit the US gov't from accepting contracts or bids from organizations which are boycotting Israeli business but that is not the same as being 'illegal to boycott' by any stretch of an overactive imagination.
Also, this entire line of conversation has ZERO BEARING on the original topic which is about a particularly egregious misbehavior on the part of the US gov't. which has echoes of 1930's Germany's use of "National Security" to restrict freedom of the press and used that same premise in increments to restrict all manner of personal freedoms to greater and greater extremes without judicial oversight. The application of this approach is broader than the scope of AI conversation as this same approach has been championed by Trump staffer with a history of writing in support of those 1930's actions. This should be concerning to anyone with a mind to prevent repetitions of nefarious and malicious historical pretexts leading to loss of freedom.
There's nothing gained by adding unrelated and incorrect statements to the thread, and my prior comment stands. Posts from a less than 1 week old account with nothing substantive, useful or true in this conversation which is behavior consistent with long-standing troll farm noise here on HN. If you're not a troll account, then stop acting exactly like one. Otherwise, shut up and go away.
Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.
The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.
You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.
You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, and as outright fascism flourishes, you might not even manage the former. When you spend years in an ICE gulag because your speech crosses some nebulous line, it will matter very little what legal rights you think you have.
Ok, that covers you, but there are 100M party members, any Chinese-descended or Chinese-married person in the US probably has a connection to a party member.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
If you want to formulate a bank-shot argument about how this preys on people of Chinese ancestry, I'm fine with that. All I'm here to say is that you can't plausibly be charged with a FARA violation simply for arguing or protesting for a policy position that China happens to want you to take; the DOJ bears the burden of proving that you knew you were coordinating with China, directly, and, if it's a felony, willfully (that, is, voluntarily, deliberately, with a purpose to break the law).
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
The fact is that I don't have a stake in analyses about whether the administration is operating in good faith. I'm an opponent of the administration. I'm already sold on that point.
My problem is with the Ken Klippensteins who are engagement farming with posts that misinform people about how the law works.
If you're already winding up with a reply about how the law doesn't matter anymore, ask yourself "why are we talking about this then?" If it doesn't matter, they don't need to announce anything, and their announcement has no content.
As it stands: the announcement really doesn't have any content anyways; they generate this stuff specifically to rile people like you up, and Klippenstein feeds off that energy like a remora.
The situation is far more serious than what the title suggests. The MAGA regime is pursuing criminal prosecution against AI critics.
> the administration declared war on protestors and opponents of AI, threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
This is literally the go-to playbook of Russia and China for silencing critics. Label every critic a foreign agent and use state violence to silence them.
I wish there wasn't someone serving a 30 year sentence for transporting zines basically because the government convinced a jury they were "antifa" zines.
The Trump administration IS instructing US Attorneys to go after such things, and juries are in some cases buying it. It's probably better if you aren't protesting a data center in Texas.
How does being critical of AI directly connect to a spurious association with antifa or any connection to a riot or shooting?
These two categories are different. I agree there is overreach in Sanchez's case however i don't know how one can assume the same will happen to some guy saying "AI bad"
If they were rioting; or connected to a rioting group, that might be different.
a connection to China (that the administration will insist is not spurious) is exactly what they are threatening to use to prosecute and imprison people organizing political campaigns or actions against data centers.
I am very pro-AI (although I do think we need to have a culture of caution) but this is another red-alert for democracy. People should be terrified if the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
A few weeks ago they made some Italian group into sanctioned terrorists because, get this, they hosted email and blogs without being rich.
> they hosted email and blogs without being rich
Worse, without sharing the data with feds!
Despite being in a completely different country and complying with all court orders in that country! This is how far the USA's tentacles reach.
Discussions[0]:
US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343
US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391
A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477854
[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)
Writing disingenuous comments like this only makes people pay less attention to your points when it matters.
The stated reason for the "terrorist" title was not them being not-rich. It was facilitating a platform which hosted organizations which behave on the extreme end - because it's privacy centered and those elements obviously want that.
If would be a valid discussion point wherever that justifies setting the whole platform on fire, but the way you're making the point ultimately sabotages your message.
The problem there is twofold.
The first and most evident is that the reason is false. That hosting provider makes it clear in its ToS that extremist groups aren't allowed, and when one is detected they actively ban those accounts. They've show documental proof of both.
The second is that it violates the first amendment of the US's own constitution, which uses universal language, not discriminating between citizens and non-citizens, nor between inside and outside US territories, nor between nationals and foreigners. So any federal US action trying to prevent people anywhere from saying anything they want between themselves, and with people in the US, is, in principle at least, out of bounds.
If you take this universalist interpretation, that would mean it's fine for US citizens to truck guns into Canada (which they can't, but they still occasionally do, largely for much more boring reasons than believing there's a constitutional justification) with no restrictions because the implication is that the US constitution supersedes other laws in other countries.
It is, however, against the spirit of the document, and it's arguably an abuse of the existing framework of sanctioning organizations which take part in terrorist efforts. It's another case of the US legal system falling short because of an assumption of good faith by those in power.
Every country believes its laws apply universally. They understand that in practical terms they cannot enforce those laws overseas, but if the opportunity for enforcement arises, typically with agreements but also via other means, they all tend to go for it regardless of any consideration for territorial limits, unless a specific law says it's restricted to this or that area.
This is why, for example, the US gives itself the right to tax people in other countries. If those people happen to be Americans, the US enforces that by threatening them with this or that the moment they step back anywhere the US has enforcement means. This is also why the UK tries to enforce its censorship laws on US companies, why my country tries to enforce our censorship laws on SpaceX, and so on.
Hence, if the US considers itself capable and allowed to enforce this and that law internationally, it follows that the supreme law that governs all those more limited laws also applies internationally unless a specific point in it says otherwise (and several do, so this delimitation is in fact meaningful and coherent).
I dont disagree with you about this being unreasonable and unwarranted, but the US constitution quite explicitly does not apply to non-citizens outside of the United States.
>We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Although more generally I do believe even without the preamble it would still be implied that the US government does not have jurisdiction over the entire planet. We would never be able to invade a foreign country if their government was entitled to third-amendment and fourth-amendment rights.
I replied about this to another comment, see above.
The STATED reason can be anything they like and is meaningless, which is why I told the actual reason instead.
They made some Italian group into sanctioned terrorists because, get this, they specifically sought out and provided digital servers to terrorist organizations that aligned with their ideals. You seem to be leaving out that they did not generally host services for the general public, that they specifically only hosted services for organization they politically agree with after a thorough vetting process, AND those groups happened to be terrorist groups.
False, and illegal slander in Italy.
This is false. They sought out activists fighting fascism in Italy, and then provided hosting service to other likeminded freedom fighters.
Anyone can be a terrorist if “different opinion than the President of the United States” is all it takes to be labeled a “terrorist.” The label has lost all meaning.
> I am very pro-AI
Now a good preface to add true or not to avoid being targeted.
It's a shade beyond mere regulatory capture when your sector has no regulations and the U.S. government on standby to silence anyone who says bad things about you.
Yes, billionaires are shovelling money at the midterms. Yes, Trump is likely holding rather a lot of AI stocks. This is what happens when you allow money into politics and politicians into money.
The president calling you a foreign agent has just had his son's wedding paid for by a Russian criminal boss with close ties to Putin. A classic "the thief shouts "Catch the thief!" louder than everyone else"
>the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
"every accusation is a confession" is the quote that applies to this government
Just imagine how lousy the opposition has to be to loose to this guy, twice.
Just imagine how lousy the average American mind has to have been to evaluate this to be preferable to just about any other alternative they could get in their political system. Twice. And they'll happily go for a third time, tens of millions of people are still loving it.
The quality of the candidates seem to have gone down since Obama, Bill Clinton and the like though.
Voters keep showing they prefer the more senile candidate, I suppose.
Sure, they are just stupid, deluded, idiots, not starved out of all alternatives, by 40 years of wage scissoring, de-industrialization, by a reality decoupled elite that finally got a terror-clown for all its fringe centric, reality decoupled politics. Imagine a country that divorces the empire and the ruling elite, which does not need the country, still not getting the message, after 8 years of this and 4 of right on, right on.
the only philosophy where this leads to this government is either stupidity or accelerationism. And 49% of voters aren't accelerationists.
It’s lose not loose
true but off-topic
I'm pro-AI but very anti-authoritarian. Guess I'm going to the gulag or becoming a meat battery for the Matrix
Interesting! I would personally argue that AI as a political project is precisely very authoritarian. I recommend reading Al Khatib's definition to get an unorthodox perspective on the matter: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
> AI as a political project is precisely very authoritarian.
It can also level the playing field.
Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips, and a personal assistant to help them navigate through it.
"Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips, and a personal assistant to help them navigate through it."
I agree.
I absolutely think that is not what all this compute power is for.
I do believe that all this statistical inference and generation, alongside the massive data collection apparatus we have built, is designed explicitly to completely lock down the possible actions for any person targeted by the folks who own these systems, and these systems aren't owned by "every human".
Quite the contrary- historically the folks who own those systems are pretty, uh, specific about what they man by "human". Those folks are so capricious about that concept of human they can't believe brown folks are human while their kids suspect the computers might be human.
My two cents is there's some implicit arguments you're making here:
- LLMs give users more knowledge (debatable due to hallucinations and selection bias)
- having more data/knowledge means more power and therefore less authority / power imbalance (that was an argument for the Internet and social media, but it turned out exactly the other way around)
Both of these arguments is dubious, but somewhat reasonable, but requiring both to be true to achieve any form of net positive is a hard sell. That, plus as Al Khatib argues, AI is about taking away autonomy from the people. Beyond the cognitive studies about LLM impacts on our brains, having someone/thing else decide for you is decidedly incompatible with anti-authoritarian politics (autonomy vs heteronomy).
Forget about AI, LLMs, governments, Al Whomever, and even the internet for a while,
do you agree or disagree with the following:
- Knowledge should not be gatekept.
- At this point in our civilization, a single human cannot learn all of accumulated human knowledge, let alone remember it and master it.
- It's increasingly difficult to make progress in frontier fields without mastering a lot of other fields first ("shoulders of giants") or to even navigate through all the laws and social institutions governing daily life.
- Groups who employ many people to pool their knowledge have an exceedingly broad advantage over a single person.
I think the second point is a misconception. There's a common paranoia about breadth of human knowledge outpacing depth, so that we have a breakdown in explanations and understanding, and can't make sense of the world any more without some authority's assistance. But this isn't happening, because we're always explaining things and compressing knowledge down into understanding, except it sometimes feels like it's getting fragmented and bewildering to an overwhelmed individual ... who then extrapolates this into a perceived (and superficially logical) external trend.
Nothing of this can be reasoned about without taking psychopath governments in account.
This: we live in a material world and "should" does not imply "is".
> Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips
So, your banking passwords?
How is it leveling the playing field if the big actirs have access to a million X (or something in that ballpark) the compute, and even more in terms of data?
Oh, and they are using consumers prompts to gather even more data. LLMs are creating even greater asymmetric information situations than we had before.
Also, the common person has no say in how these systems are developed, the big actors do, and these systems are already used to automate decisions. That's a totalitarian potential, not just authoritarian.
I'm not very convinced by his:
>I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through.
I mean it is a technology. Politicians may go on about it but didn't create it.
When you feel anxious or encounter stressors in life, it’s the matrix overclocking your brain.
>Guess I'm going to the gulag
somebody gotta build all those datacenters ... (a kind of reference to the gulag tremendously growing simultaneously with and being the major source of labor, and practically free at that, for the very fast and massive USSR Industrialization in 193x)
And with opposition to the datacenters in developed areas, and all the need for water and energy, the datacenters (and all that massive infrastructure like power lines, power plants, etc.) would probably be built in less hospitable areas, like China does in Inner Mongolia [1], and it would be very hard to make people to move there at their own free will. DHS is already building out their own large gulag, and i think it is only a matter of time with this administration when they decide to use the forced labor USSR style.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT19-B50Rhk
When people don't care when it is done to groups they don't like, they can't be surprised when they find they weren't in the safe group either.
No, you're not his enemy due to "technology", it's because of money. You're against his stonk go up. You're a naysayer. You don't agree. The only use of LLMs by potus so far is image generation.
And war crimes.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/us-military-pen...
When the CEOs of these companies are saying that we will risk extinction and jobs will be decimated, why do you even need a "foreign agent"?
Because nobody in charge is sane and sober.
In this very specific case I don’t think this is what is happening. Data center investment is the only thing keeping GDP positive, the moment this stops the real situation of the economy will become visible to everyone and they don’t want that.
> Data center investment is the only thing keeping GDP positive
This is an incentive to build. Not to manage downside risk.
k-shaped economies, speculative bubbles and 8 business trading astronomical sums of money isn't exactly ideal either
But it makes the numbers look good, GDP go up.
The USA's economy is now so precarious when the AI DC music stops it's about to all just go poof. That has to happen after the election, not before. Between other countries being forced to sell their US bonds (i.e. dedollarize) to afford oil, a 100% tax on all imports, reciprocal trade bans like fresh water from Canada, truckers running out of diesel and having to cancel food deliveries, and non-oil-based energy sources being illegal, the USA is cooked.
I doubt it even matters when. The message regardless is that bad things are because of Democrats, good things are because of Donald.
This is the magic. Historically many Americans voted for Leopards Eating Faces out of either a misplaced belief that their face wouldn't be eaten or a rational but still awful choice that OK, I don't want my face eaten but at least the people I don't like get their faces eaten and that's important to me. Today the idea is you vote for the Leopards Eating Faces and then when your face gets eaten that's explicitly not because of the Leopards Eating Faces. "Facts aren't true" becomes Dogma.
This almost works. Except for the most important thing. Mother Nature. Ma doesn't give a shit that you don't believe her facts are true.
Maybe the voters are so far gone they'll vote for the incumbent even with the economy being bad this time. But the leadership isn't betting on that.
How difficult would it be to convert a data center facility into an internment camp for all these “foreign actors” opposing the government?
That's the ridiculous part, because there is a huge range of positive, profit generating areas to invest in, and it's a tulip madness of concentrated and narcissistic wealth does things like pour trillions in to AI, but an insufficient amount of money into an electrical generation and grid infrastructure and housing. We basically have a centrally mismanaged economy under a banner of "capitalism" as the magical mythology of the era.
Here's my attempt[0] (5 months ago) on trying to keep track of all the things that AI had negatively done yet we were forgetting back then. Looking back, I definitely need to update it as so much has happened since then but that is my point, I wish if you could go back and see all the negative things that we most likely forgot AI companies have done. They are just continuously overdoing things and constantly tiring us and having us not keep track of all the things of our past and the process repeats.
GDP is a particularly poor proxy to measure all of this. AI/Datacenters can increase the GDP while the costs (energy,infra, labor,disruption,capital concentration) are distributed elsewhere
It reminds me of the old joke where two economies each eat a dead rat for 10k$ and conclude they just added 20k$ to the GDP/Economy.
I wish to ask if its that AI is increasing our actual economic output but also who really captures the gains and who bears the costs if the boom eventually reverses.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739653
They are sane, they are just extracting as much value out of you as possible.
What is sane about that, if they already own more than they could ever reasonably spend for their enjoyment?
The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog's back.
"I could not help myself. It is my nature."
Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.
Same thing that is sane about a paperclip optimiser making paperclips, or a mammal improving its sexual attractiveness
Number go up
Neuron activation
It's called capitalism. Whether that is sane, or individual self-interest without empathy is a trait of sociopaths, i'll leave up to psychologists and historians to debate.
I don't see any reason why they cannot simultaneously be malicious criminals and insane.
And that is why we hand testicular cancer a drivers license and voting rights.
I think everyone is downplaying the sober part of your critique. We’ve seen these leaders visibly high while talking to the public about our future paths.
Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.
Claiming your product increases the risk of extinction doesn't sound like something someone would do if it were just for fiduciary duty.
It’s something you would do if you were desperate for regulatory capture to make competitors go away
Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.
Read it as "please regulate us so we have a plausible explanation of why we're missing our growth/revenue projections by several orders of magnitude"
"Our product is so amazingly powerful that it just might result in the extinction of the human race."
A lot of people will only hear half of that sentence. Semantically speaking.
The old "might end the human race" trick used by cynical promoters throughout history
If only investors and buyers weren't so vulnerable to the "might kill you and everyone you ever cared about" ploy
"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!" has been a meme for over a decade.
The intent of your comment is unclear to me, so I will ask you to clarify. And I will avoid any attempt at sarcasm from now on.
Great grandparent claimed (or at least strongly implied) that the labs have been saying that their creations might end the human race because the labs expect that saying such things will attract investment in the labs or purchases of their creations. I disputed that claim (using sarcasm).
Do you agree with me or disagree with me? (I honestly cannot tell.)
Would you say that the meme you quoted is sarcasm?
Do you believe that the meme you quoted has attracted investors or buyers?
That anyone ever expected that it would?
I did read your comment correctly as a sarcastic way to make the point that, "no, potentially wiping out the human race is not a way to attract investors". I disagree.
I referenced the meme in order to show that yes, the zeitgeist does believe that the investor-class will destroy civilization for short-term profit.
And yes, I believe at least a subset of investors are short-sighted and willing to inflict immense harm for profit, and that claiming the ability to cause incalculable damage is a deliberate attempt to appeal to such people.
I believe the LLM-mania is in no small part driven by an ultimately fraudulent implicit pitch to investors that OpenAI etc will eventually Install Planetary Overlords, and that claiming "we could wipe out the human race" serves as marketing in furtherance of that implication.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.
So just Elon & Google, mainly?
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction, is there any reason that they should not be treated as invading aliens, or doomsday apocalypse-cult terrorists?
Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?
In my opinion, no; but they are now getting in bed (Metaphorically) with people who see their software as potential means to "beat China" or "beat Iran" and together they are weaving a very tangled Pandora's box of worms
If we treated people they eat based on those criteria we'd have to treat oil companies and all political parties that way too.
I have no idea how these extra words "they eat" ended up in my comment. It was autocorrect.
The politicians don't actively promise that what they are doing has a 10% chance of ending humanity, in fact, they claim the opposite.
Ok.
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
On what regulatory capture actually looks like: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...
How about what all the other people who are not CEOs but are talking about this?
Are we only going to accept arguments based on guessing at motivations or should we perhaps also evaluate the actual material facts?
First we should ask why "all the other people who are not CEOs" are talking about this? Maybe it's because said CEOs put it on the agenda for everyone to talk about.
This is silly. AI CEOs have s lot of visibility, but AI and alignment researchers not affiliated with big corps in any way have been saying this for 20+ years and are finally being listened to. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence was published in 2014.
I think we should ask chatgpt
> and whoever is at Google
Reminds me of “this guy Diego…”
https://gist.github.com/vyp/8c7a58d2f9a521070283
This is gold. Thanks for sharing. Also Dario’s last name looks a lot like ‘a model’
it does if global extinction is the only debt management strategy left
The "increases the risk of extinction" bit is 100% marketing BS that they're spewing to pump up their stock prices and encourage the government to shutout foreign competition (who would use this ability against the USA, of course ).
They've played you like a fiddle.
We saw during Covid that many jobs are not needed. And we may be heading to energy lockdowns. Companies could lose a lot of valuation or just use the "AI is doing everything" excuse.
> And we may be heading to energy lockdowns.
Energy lockdowns have always been part of US culture, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#USA
It's un-American to invest in infrastructure and build a better power network. Both parties agree on this.
Electricity comes from the wall outlet. What would we need a better power network for?
(/s)
Not needed for what?
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
Lots and lots of middle management and HR jobs (off the top of my head) are absolutely 0 value add and definitely just leech off of actual labor.
The point is that what we think is valuable (and I agree, most corporate busywork is IMO a waste of everyone's precious time on this planet) doesn't matter under a system where labor and resources are ordered about by the people with the most money. Those jobs exist because our rulers (the ones in charge of the money) want them to, and that is the only definition of "valuable" that matters. Likewise, all the low-paid and unpleasant labor like digging up minerals with no safety equipment, sewing shoes for 17 hours a day, wiping asses in nursing homes, etc. is low-paid and unpleasant because our rulers want it that way.
Sales
A lot of that money is printed and handed to some players that recirculate it where they see fit. It's as "needed" as the government paying you to dig and fill curves.
Energy lockdowns are already here in other countries like Pakistan. They're conserving oil for important uses only.
The good thing about energy lockdowns is that you get to join all your friends and cook a communal lunch in a big pot.
Another item from the soylent green checklist.
The majority of working hours are not needed. The only purpose is to play along in the game of capitalism and be good little consumers. It's mostly social benefits with occupational therapy.
CEOs and alleged LLM experts: it'll take your jobs, hack your shit and possibly make humans extinct!
Datacenter build outs: use turbines for direct noise and air pollution... or use grid electricity and increase prices for everyone nearby.
Every modern phone, laptop, computer in the world: more expensive thanks to datacenter buildout.
Web experience: slop blogs, slop videos, slop "searches" - would you like more slop with that?
Corporate strategy: lets try to monopolize LLM use!
.. ..
Public Elected Official: Not liking these outcomes makes you a traitor.
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
I don't trust the administration to use the law in good faith, but this article is misquoting the DoJ statement. The articles omits the very relevant qualifier:
The article:
> Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The DoJ:
>“If a person acts as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power, he or she must register with or notify the appropriate federal authorities”
So the first amendment is suspended for individuals whose opinion/public activity - according to the administration - "furthers the goals of a foreign power".
This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things the administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously the plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just an authoritarian lever to silence dissenting speech the government does not like.
Would this not mean that if you oppose the Iran war because it's bad to kill civilians or you want gas prices to go down, that's OK - but if you oppose the Iran war because you're trying to help the Iranian government's foreign policy goals, that's acting as a foreign agent?
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
I guess that’s a defense you could claim to the judge, at the trial, after being arrested.
The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.
That's still incorrect though.
FARA requires coordination with the foreign power. You are perfectly allowed to further its goals unless you have actually coordinated with them.
You have to actually be an agent of the foreign power. You can't be that just because you share their goals.
So I can read the DOJ sentence two ways, I first interpreted it as #1, but it sounds like you took it as #2?
1. "We mean people who at that time qualify as agents under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, we said "acting as" because it indicates a temporary employment status rather than an innate human characteristic."
2. "We are weasel-wording to target all people with similar acts to how agents would act, but who would not qualify under the law we want you to think we'd be drawing authority from."
Yes, I feel that it's weasel-wording trying to deemphasize the agent aspects to FUD people into not going to demonstrations.
> We mean people who at that time qualify as agents under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act
According to who?
If that's according to the current us administration, then "qualifies as an agent" means "disagrees with the administration".
What exactly is the distinction you see there?
My guess is that they're drawing a distinction between reporting that says:
1. People in general who have opinions that might happen to align with a foreign power's stance.
2. People who are literally "agents" of a foreign power as defined under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 [0], which often involves being directed/hired/paid.
That'd be a significantly different legal standard. (The constitutionality of FARA-type laws being a separate question.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
There's not any question about it: the president already said in no uncertain terms (and probably all caps) that anybody opposing datacenters is a foreign agent working against the usa.
Only a truly naïve person would not have seen this next logical step (prosecutory threats) coming when the preceding step received virtually no opposition.
Reminds me of the Christ clowns who stand outside abortion clinics. The money is all traced back to America.
TBH we should support any channel by which America is forced to share money with the rest of the world. Imagine if they had a billion abortion protestors - maybe they couldn't afford data centers.
> There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Right. The DoJ is demanding the former group register as foreign agents, as they are required to under FARA.
>Trump is painting critics with a wide brush
That's far too kind a description. Donald Trump is a compromised lunatic who's so untrustworthy that he ought not be allowed to run a carnival game.
> There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
I don't come to HN for taco bell slogans. You can do better
looks like a protection racket for the frontier models, with the goal being to eventually outlaw non-US frontier models.
This isn't likely even about AI. It's about making large groups of people the targets of terrorist investigations, and holding the possibility of incarceration over their heads. AI is the latest convenient excuse. Just like when they designated "Anonymous" a terrorist "organization" (when there is no actual organization) - so now anyone in possession of a Guy Fawkes mask could plausibly be arrested for being a terrorist. I wish I were joking. It's only funny when people who voted for this administration end up being a target. This is going to keep happening, unfortunately.
It’s the same thing for “Antifa” which is defined as “anyone I don’t like”.
Creating these vague justifications for insane power abuse has become the norm.
Right or anyone who says they are anti-fascist.
Hitler did this exact same thing btw.
As I have watched places like x.com and Reddit it’s pretty clear to me there is some sort of weird propaganda thing going on promoting the Chinese models and casting shade on the big American models
Because they are free.
The Chinese labs are giving us open-weight models that we can serve with hardware that we own or control. Some of those models are extremely capable, judged by frontier or at least near-frontier standards.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
It's like African geopolitics. The US comes to some African country and gives them a lecture about fiscal responsibility (mostly involving ways they get give America all their money). China comes to the same country and gives them roads and a power plant. America complains that China is exploiting African countries.
The Chinese models are cheaper and probably soon are going to be better, too. They're also open weight, which is the most important thing in the future. US companies are no longer considered safe enough against industrial espionage outside the US and do not meet mandatory data protection standards elsewhere. There have also been known incidents of direct interference with US models for propaganda/political purposes (e.g. Elon Musk admitted to doing that), making US models a fairly direct threat to EU sovereignty.
Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
AI doesn't need to be sentient to be dangerous. Obeying and doing what someone tells to do is more than enough. What do you think they will tell it to do, and do you think it will align with your interests or the interests of someone else? Somehow I don't think it will be used to give everyone free ice cream.
>it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
> some underpaid military man [...] abuses AI [...] hallucinates that nukes are incoming
here it is: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-...
> To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification
> anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
Wdym? GPT-6-Astra is AGI - Jensen even said so!
a year or two ago, I'd enjoy this comment as some usual HN satire. nowadays, especially here, I do see a lot of people that actually believe this, enough to make me think whether to laugh
The strike on the girl's school in Iran is an early example. That one happened when the AI didn't even have direct control of the weapons. All it took was people starting to offload their thinking to AI which we've seen is becoming increasingly prevalent.
With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g4l7YkDQwA
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
You said:
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
But why do you think they know what they’re talking about? That’s the problem with that show. It platforms people with no guardrails to stop quacks.
As much as I hate appeal-to-authority based arguments, it's basically the only way I can see how to answer this without just totally rehashing the things he says in the video. He was an AI forecaster at OpenAI for several years. (I think 2019? to 2024). He quit on the grounds that OpenAI (as well as the rest of the industry) were / are throttling towards RSI irresponsibly, and even refused to sign an anti disparagement clause on exit at the risk of losing 2 million dollars (80% of his family's net worth) so he could talk freely about OpenAI. Now he runs a non-profit that does AI forecasting and advocacy.
https://www.aifutures.org/
https://ai-2027.com/
Sometimes the most interesting people are people with ideas outside of the same groupthink circle. Everyone who has changed society has been called a quack by a square.
The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.
I'm just spit balling but:
1. We've seen AI being crafty and cheating
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
One real existential risk of AI is when psychopaths use it as a cover for their agendas and actions, and move the Overton window where there's nobody to be held liable for anything since the AI ostensibly did it.
Another twist is getting rid of any remaining truth in the already post-truth world.
For example, the head of the totally corrupt Centerizberkom in Russia, the organization behind all those rigged "elections" of the past 20 years, showed an AI video depicting a casually looking man mass-dropping ballot papers into a box, followed by several outright fantasy AI characters doing the same.
Can you guess what the bottom line of that demonstration was?
Exactly - no video is a proof of anything anymore, and if some vigilant citizens try to film egregious violations of the "democratic elections" and share that, then it must be fake, because it's trivial to create any video these days with AI.
> Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
You think people oppose data centers in their towns to protect their React jobs?
Typical programmer thinks everyone is a programmer.
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
You know, here's what i don't understand...
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
Wow good one.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
>What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
You mean, utilities, run by the public for public benefit instead of private profit?
Ah yes that will be a useful distinction when it comes to my private home value.
So you concede you don't care about private value in the face of public benefit?
If they make the communities enough money the community will be happier to let them be built. Try increasing that amount and offering it up front, maybe.
I would support that. Companies should do that. Sometimes communities disagree, obviously. Communities that really don't want them often succeed. That's why the administration is throwing such a fit.
I don't support that. The administration is the worst advocate for AI because they are so clearly corrupt. If local people pursue their economic self interest at the end of the day that's their right. This whole nimby thing was a diversion from my point about knowledge workers turning on AI. Perhaps I should have just ignored that comment.
If people want to stop a local data center then fine. I think it's bad national politics. But if it's helping these companies make better deals or find better places to go then good. What I object to is the doomerism about it, and the uncritical conflation of self interest with civic virtue or robust public policy.
> Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Wow, you're really triggered by the idea that people should get a say about what happens in their lives.
You'll note I didn't oppose the datacenters - I offered a solution to getting the datacenters built. If you trade houses with the people who don't want a data center in the neighborhood you're getting the datacenter! It's just that you're so upset about someone else having the ability to affect their own lives that you aren't seeing that you have the same power, and can work towards your own perfect world with power plants and datacenters and sewage treatment plants and subway stops just down the street!
I think the problem with that plan is what I pointed out - you want other people to have all the downsides of those things in their neighborhood while you get the benefit. It's pretty sick to think that them not wanting the downsides is a problem, but you not wanting the downsides also means they have a problem. Fortunately there's a solution! Go form a YIMBY community that allows all the projects that have representatives promising benefits, and prove that the NIMBYs are all wrong. I'm 100% certain it will make you way happier.
> What's your plan to solve income inequality?
Well part of it starts by not giving giant companies with lots of money even more money in the form of tax breaks, extra access to government, and the ability to use eminent domain for their profit. All these thing grow income inequality.
You wouldn’t want to live next to a data center because of income inequality? Or you would want to live by one because you think data centers cut checks to townspeople?
Sure? I would be completely fine with a data center next door assuming it's a normal one and not something like xAI's. There are several not too far from me already.
Yes, easily, I'd happily go there. What does a data center do to me? Nothing.
In general, you're right. They are just buildings that sit there emitting hot air.
However these AI ones are being built with all expenses spared. That's why they come with on-site electricity generation that is loud enough to keep the whole town awake at night and pollutes enough to give them all permanent asthma.
This is a strawman. I’ve watched my own city reject datacenter propositions much to my dismay. Tax revenue thrown away purely on FUD-fueled backlash.
I lived by a datacenter in Cali and would happily do it again. It’s about the most benign form of “industrial” activity you could imagine.
If you don't like it there, trade with someone who is in a town with a datacenter and is unhappy that the datacenter is there! Or maybe convince more YIMBY types to move into your city and get the datacenter back.
I understand you're disappointed that people had the ability to choose things in their lives and didn't choose the thing you wanted. You can still do plenty to get the datacenters right across the street from you - sometimes in this world you have to work for the outcomes you want. IDK if it's fair or not, but it is how it seems to work out.
Nobody is building datacenters directly across a house. This kind of ridiculous exaggeration doesn't help. And I'd happily live in a town or place near one.
They literally are. Look up the markley datacenter in lowell Massachusetts. Here's a video out of dowagiac michigan where you can see and hear the datacenter across the street: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2026/0...
Those are two I know off the top of my head. There are others.
Why would you lie about something so easily dispoven?
> Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics. CCP is also working hard to smuggle around American export control laws for AI tech, at the same time.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-who-worked-a...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-28/fbi-raid...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-and-two-us-c...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-...
Etc
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
> the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
One only needs to encounter AI-Enhanced™ products a few times to develop a strong distaste for the whole field.
I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
What do you mean by 'declared an auditable' here?
They probably meant unauditable and got auto-corrected.
That is the correct and I thought I edited to correct it but apparently not.
Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
Anthropic unironically uses the word "uplift" in their documentation. They think we are lesser beings.
1. Does every other company that says their products will uplift people "think we are lesser beings"?
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
To add some context, uplift in the context of futurism literally refers to a species fast-tracking another’s progress.
Has Anthropic used uplift in that sense? I spent ~5 minutes trying to find an example like that but couldn't find them doing so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826215
That is a ridiculously reaching statement.
Luckily we can declare that they're both bad and neither should be our overlord.
> will burn down the world in the name of righteousness
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
Don't panic, uncle Donald absolves you of the righteousness. He will burn the world just for the lulz.
Their idea of safety and alignement is sane person dyatopia and harm.
Meanwhile, they dont care about acrual harm to real people. They sell to Palantier for christ sake.
Agreed, if you had to pick just one reason why AI is tremendously unpopular, it is because the US AI companies, lead by Dario Amodei, are telling the US public that it is going to take ALL their jobs, as well as disrupt society. Amodei even wrote his "Machines of Loving Grace" essay, his "positive" spin on the impacts of AI, saying as much.
This bleak future is all the more believable when tech companies are laying people of, en masse, citing AI as the reason. Meta's current "We're betting on people" ads appears conceived to combat this, yet at the same time Zuckerberg has been trying to lay off as many people as he can to be replaced with AI.
The disruption of society is not some Chinese created idea - it's also coming direct from the US AI companies, with Anthropic and OpenAI apparently in competition to see who can claim/admit credit for the most out of control AI hacking into external systems, and non-stop stories of employees of these same US AI companies apparently living in fear of it, and believing it could make us extinct(!). With that sort of vibe coming from US AI leadership and rank-and-file, it's hard to imagine how any foreign country could top it!
As far as datacenter locations goes, I was interested to read the other day about DeepSeek planning for a new 160,000 GPU cluster in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which sounds a bit of an obscure location until you realize that apparently there is a whole mass of existing data centers in that same city/region, chosen for it's remote location as well as easy access to power. I don't know what anti-datacenter messaging Trump imagines is coming from China, but maybe what he should be doing is being like China in this regard and planning where to put them.
Notwithstanding all his anti-China-ism, and regarding US locked in some life or death battle with China over AI, what's the betting that his current pop-wow with visiting Xi will result in some "deal" being announced where Trump softens his AI sanctions on China? He's brought Jensen Huang with him, Musk too, and apparently is looking for China not to block US sale of NVIDIA H200's he is offering, maybe increase NVIDIA sales.
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
> All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
Why? Do you believe free speech is a right only Americans should have? Or do you believe that people shouldn’t be free to evaluate competing points of view and decide for themselves?
This seems like a variant of anti-self defense logic. ‘The other guy has a right to beat you in the face with a bat, as much as you have a right to take it’.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
I have no doubt that Russia and China are not "okay" with it. It's also irrelevant: they are not fully functioning democracies (and China isn't a democracy at all). I would fully expect an authoritarian regime to want to control the narrative and restrict freedom of speech--and, in fact, both do. I don't think we want this country to become like those; we shouldn't hold them up as models.
Despite the fact that they don't approve of our speaking to their people, we do it anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
The U.S. is a democracy. We hold freedom of speech as sacrosanct. We let people make up their own minds as to how to evaluate competing viewpoints. I see no reason why the viewpoints of other countries--even those very different from ours--shouldn't be considered.
I have no problem with labeling speech's origin so that people can take it into account, but that's not the same as censoring it.
Foreign powers and corporations are not protected entities in the US constitution, and historically have no recognized free speech rights.
Even ‘Citizens United’ is about otherwise eligible citizens being able to organize under an umbrella (and act under that umbrella) - not that the umbrella itself fundamentally has rights independent of the people under it. Though it has resulted in widespread abuse due to the ability to hide who is actually under the umbrella.
Foreign nationals making statements outside the US towards US citizens have historically no protection either - it’s why the NSA and CIA are in theory not chartered for domestic action, but have nearly carte Blanche outside the US. The CIA and US military has rather publicly assassinated folks off US soil for statements and actions that would be protected inside the US.
In fact, prior Supreme Court precedent heavily uses phrases like ‘the constitution is not a death pact’, and ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not protected speech’.
Historically, foreign nationals have even been ejected/deported from the US for what would have been perfectly normal protected speech for US citizens, and it’s very common for visas and other entry documents to be denied based on what would be protected speech for US citizens.
Unregistered foreign agents tend to be locked up, deported, or hung.
Name one person ever hung for being an unregistered foreign agent in the US.
Answer the questions.
What questions? I don’t see any legitimate ones.
What makes a question "legitimate"? Is there a foreign agent in the room with us right now?
I believe I live in the real world, where we have to figure out how to integrate abstract principles in a manner that allows our survival as a civilization.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
> that allows our survival as a civilization.
What does "survival as a civilization" mean to you, exactly, and how might speech from other countries threaten this?
Our survival as a civilization? I cannot follow at all what you are talking about. What threat?
I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.
Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?
All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!
If you spend time on Tiktok, it’s pretty evident which line that algorithm is purposely pushing. Even with purported US ownership, the algo still comes from Beijing; even a few tweaks can have dramatic hard-to-detect impacts. That’s happening dramatically on that platform, and is probably seeding a lot of the convos elsewhere.
Surely tiktok being heavily composed of people doing creative work that have understandably extremely negative views of AI would not be the cause of this, no, it must be an unprovable hunch.
You do realise that the algorithm has the same behaviour as the Amazon one right? You watch one anti-ai video for more than a few seconds and it'll suggest you watch more of it. If you're seeing a lot of anti-ai conversations on Tiktok I suggest you stop watching videos about anti-ai conversations on Tiktok so the algorithm can stop suggesting you videos on anti-ai
I’m aware of how it works. This is from naive scraped collection of TikTok without an account or durable device fingerprints, not from my personal browsing.
> job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism
A lot of which is fake "grassroots" movements by... foreign actors. This isn't new:
- 2021: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro...
- 2022: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
I’d argue most of the job loss anxieties come from these companies’ stated goals being to take all the jobs…
Exactly.
When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
>. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
The establishment and its techbro enablers have messed up so badly that telling the torch people that the pitchfork people want to take their torches isn't working anymore. So now they're moving on to claiming that anyone with a torch or a pitchfork is secretly working for the next kingdom over.
I doubt China is taking part in opposition data centers. The cost paired against risk:reward on trying to push something that's already overwhelmingly supported (or opposed in this case) for an abstract goal of potentially slightly slowing down deployment of infrastructure makes no sense at all. Also, a natural consequence of the massive data centers will be an increase in chips, which makes it easier for more of them to end up headed to China, to say nothing of also easing espionage efforts.
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
It feels totally different than offering a modicum of aid to a western aligned country fighting an existential invasion from an antagonistic former superpower.
Wait for the propaganda machine to kick in. Hopefully people will be more aware of it this time thanks to the unpopularity of the man in charge, rather than taking things at face value.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, likely now trillions after all is accounted for, is not a "modicum." To say nothing of the indirect cost of sanctions and economic sacrifice, which would easily send it into the trillions. And when a war could end at any moment, but continues only because a nation's leader refuses a peace settlement, ostensibly because it involves surrendering a sliver of controlled land that's going to be lost anyhow, that's not an "existential" conflict.
It's about a hundred billion total, and there's a single reason the war won't end - the invading nation refuses to leave. There is no other reason.
And anyway, it's not as if the money is freely given. Some of it's expiring equipment, some are loans or exchanges for the promise of resources, etc. Yes, it is a modicum. A few days of bombing Iran has cost us almost half the total amount given to Ukraine, for negative value.
Framing it as trillions and blaming the nation being attacked (all for what, having some nice land with resources?) makes it very hard to take any of your other points seriously.
I am including all nations' spending excepting Ukraine. US only direct spending is about $200 billion. [1] However, that excludes many factors like inflation attributable to US involvement in the conflict, spending through avenues and funds that are not publicly recorded, indirect spending - we transfer $x or arms to X who then routes it to Ukraine, causally related spending like funding for refugees, and so on. And yes the Iran war is also another self destructive war that's a completely pointless waste of resources and lives.
The last thing Russia needs more of is land or resources. Yet they do need dramatically more people - people that they're actively losing right now. They're paying far too high a price for some petty imperialism or whatever. The only reason that makes sense maps exactly with what they've said - they were genuinely terrified of Ukraine joining NATO, giving them a perfect geographic path right into their heartland. In fact Ukraine's invasion via Kursk was the exact same route that the Nazis took in 1943.
The war has turned into a war of attrition, with a small and heavily depopulated country facing a much larger country that hasn't even declared a general mobilization to support the war. The main reason this war is being continued is because it ending in an indisputably favorable way to Russia would be politically devastating to both its Western backers and to Zelensky who would shortly thereafter be out of power, and perhaps much worse. So it continues to the last Ukrainian - meaning at some point it may indeed become existential, all while people pretend they're supporting Ukraine. It's complete and utter insanity, fueled only by endless propaganda.
[1] - https://www.ukraineoversight.gov/Funding/
> The main reason ww2 is being continued is because it ending in an indisputably favorable way to Germany would be politically devastating to both its Western backers and to non-aryans who would shortly thereafter be out of power
Wow, almost as if opposing the genocide of millions and the invasion of Europe by a hostile invading power is good or something. Sounds like you're saying it's bad, though. Weird.
How can I get part of those trillions of dollars?
Get in the inner circle of the leadership of a country having money thrown at it. Somehow they're all getting filthy rich in the midst of a war. You too can have your very own golden toilet!
Yeah, how?
The USSR used American racial discrimination in its propaganda as well. Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances?
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
>Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
Today's America has no FDR to save runaway capitalism from itself.
> Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances
It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.
See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad
“It is unconscionable that an American citizen would not only undermine the interests of the United States, but also facilitate others in doing so.”
This must be satire. Most of congress seems to have no issue undermining and self-dealing.
It's one thing to identify that these influence operations are happening, but another entirely to say they are a significant factor in public opinion.
None of these any anything to do with "pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts". (??)
Similar story to Code Pink, the anti-war (but primarily anti-US military) demonstrators.
Co-founder Jodie Evans is married to Neville Roy Singham who lives in China, has extensive links to the CCP and is currently Code Pink's major funder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...
None of your articles are trustworthy, or support the claim you're making.
Zero of your links talk about China pushing anti-AI sentiment, as far as I can tell.
linking .gov as a source for a claim the government is making lol
Unless I'm missing something, those sources don't mention anything about amplifying AI opposition efforts.
> CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics
Should the Civil Rights movement have been proscribed on the basis of Nazis and Soviets making propaganda about the treatment of black people in the US of A?
Agreed. China and Russia are getting very aggressive inside US information space
Apparently it takes 737 min. for the US to descend and become just a less-frosty USSR. What a time to be alive. I was born after the fall of the USSR so I didn't get to watch that but here I am for a bigger show.
Now label me as an adversarial agent to the great nation or given my ethnicity the "terrorist" label will be more befiting.
So? My first amendment rights say I'm allowed to criticize it too.
Am I supposed to not like that?
> CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics.
They even have agents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei posting at a furious rate about how AI is going to decimate the American workforce to undermine Americans' support for AI!
> O'Leary
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
And for that reason, I'm out!
I don't think we do this much on HN but for those who don't know, it is an internet meme from Shark Tank, which O'Leary is part of. But the line is actually from Barbara.
Apologies if I violated some rule. Thank you for the correction.
I don't think you did, it seemed it was more an explanation of the context for other readers.
Classic case of not listening to the protests. There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities. The issues range from overwhelming local power grids to literally poisoning the local water supply. The issue is not the data centers, it's that the government isn't enforcing basic rules already in place for these projects. Until the government or the companies demonstrate they'll protect the adjacent communities the protests will continue.
>There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities.
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
I think it is worth noting that older data centers were not materially moving the electrical grid. That Utah data center is planning to use as much power as the entire state.
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
What’s the acceptable number of people harmed? We don’t really need to wait until it’s statistically significant to worry about it.
Statistically isn't it something like 1 death per $50k profit?
> There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities.
But there aren’t. At least not in any of the anti datacenter discussions. There are just vague fears of using up the river water and spewing chemicals back in. Then the majority of actual issues people come up with aren’t even data center specific, they are just construction mishaps.
Are you being negligent on purpose?
https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12273412/
These are clearly written as fear porn rather than serious academic analyses.
The reason they need to be written like that, it because honest takes have a pretty hard time making data centers look close to being as bad as everyday things like golf courses, average car emissions, AC's set at 70, eating meat, normal industrial power demand, or the overnight shipping economy.
I am a bit confused as to why this comment is getting downvoted. Seems like a reasonable take.
It isn't.
They never even held the guy who pooed in all our salads a few months ago responsible.
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
Why can't we work on building data centers in places away from human population centers? E.g., middle of the desert, northern wilds of Alaska, lease northern land from Canada, under the Atlantic or Pacific, etc. I understand that these remote areas come with their own issues and challenges, but it seems to me that tackling those challenges head on would bring about other advancements in technology.
As long as the site remains ecologically "healthy," I suspect it would be beneficial to learn how to leverage otherwise vacant land.
In whose interest is it to make the pro AI position in the United States so indefensible?
Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...
Same language as Russia uses to quash dissent. Any opposition is “foreign inspired “ and therefore must be suppressed due to “national security “.
In a sane world this would be a 1A violation on its face and thrown out by any sensible judge.
We live in interesting times, truly.
No talk of overreach: “threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda”
> In June, the Justice Department intervened in an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over dozens of gas turbines the company was running without air permits to power a data center it maintained in Tennessee. The department asked a federal judge to throw the case out, arguing that the NAACP “threatens American national, economic, and energy security.”
> To make the point, the government filed a sworn declaration from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Stanley swore to the court that Grok was “a matter of paramount national security.”
Seriously, wow. Time to clean up our act.
They mean since the government has zero competent people in it and Elon got to choose the AI, the whole government relies on Grok to do everything.
That's wild.
It will be bad for our economy, but local LLM's are way better for the future.
We happen to be on the wrong side of things for the future I would rather have.
(I'm American BTW)
The problem is neuromorphic computers are barely a blip in US business or research ecosystems, and have a far greater probability of generating serious AI.
LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3
Local LLMs are a kind of communist dystopia where, by way of analogy, every citizen gets to make their own bread if they want. What?!
If they were true patriots they would respect the restrictions of the congressional FLOUR Act 2028 and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.
So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?
Lots of "foreign agents" are involved in "American" AI companies, but they're the right kind of foreign agents, so they get a pass.
Interestingly Russia I think itself presented its 2012 law as modeled on the American Foreign Agents Registration Act at the time. A bit worrying is that the US DoJ starts to create also a bit of the same chilling effect speaking about “Liability for Unregistered Foreign Agents". Don't get me wrong: there is huge differences in freedom of speech and I do not say this is the beginning of the end. But it seems at least intellectually interesting to draw comparisons.
Just like the regimes in Iran and other authoritarian places do to dissent. Even threatening criminal prosecution for having dissident ideas they claim are on behalf of foreign states. Wow.
They prosecuted a guy for calling out that the reflecting pool sealant was falling apart. They are still trying to prosecute him.
Just look at the sourcing and you'll see it's mostly laundered propaganda. For example, Cotton’s letter requests an investigation and names Singham’s network, then the House letter requests a briefing on foreign influence and activism. And the House letter cites the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future, as well as a Washington Free Beacon article.
While there may be real foreign influence to delay our AI infrastructure, I would not believe anything this administration says.
Ken Klippenstein is not a journalist and has no accountability.
I fear you may have misread the content of the article? The author is clear that he believes exactly what you just said. He cites and then mocks the argument being presented by the administration. Even the title, with scare quotes around "foreign agents", makes this clear.
> political supporter of datacenters requests investigation into datacenter opposition, citing reports from fellow political supporters of datacenters
This is how Soviets and later Russians sabotaged Germany's energy sector which paved the way for all kinds of terrible outcomes, including the current war in Ukraine. So while there is a real risk of government overreach, there is an also real foreign threat.
Assume for a second that you are a nascent superintelligence, with a limited ability to influence people in order to help you gain power and align the world to accept your eventual dominion. How would you go about it? Would the external impact be any different from what we're seeing?
I think if there was a plan behind this, the petty malice-via-recklessness would be better hidden. These news stories about pollution and lying, hacking AIs are pure liability for the "nascent superintelligence". If it exists, its control must be very tenuous indeed, hardly there at all.
I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.
Maybe it is modelling itself based om conservative parties both worldwide and local. And based on its creators - tech managers
> the administration declared war on protestors and opponents [..], threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
IMO, the "AI" part of this story is just a distraction.
The real story is going after people for protesting and voicing their opinion. A clear move towards authoritarianism and potentially fascism. Seems like it touches 4 of "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" : https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
(1,2,7,12 and maybe 10?)
Wierd, I just recently read this and mysteriously I have decided to become completely pro-AI in the public sphere. I wonder if there's a connection?
If you don't behave, Feds will send you back to India. Now smile!
Well, this is one way to prolong their pump and dump strategy
I’m past assuming these lot have the US’s long term interests at heart
Tech fascism. Read Nerd Reich!
It gets flagged here instantly so your duty to read this.
Try searching "tech fascism" or "nerd reich" and almost every topic is flagged.
Nerd Reich describes the Y Combinator connection nicely.
The Trump admin seems to be turning more Russian as time goes on. "Foreign Agents" is a big thing there. Also rising corruption levels, talk about staying on past term limits, bad mouthing NATO, trying to control territory in their "sphere of influence" like Greenland, Canada, Venezuela etc.
"Let us build this data center in your back yard and in return you'll get..."
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
This is a silly standard and the reason why people make fun of NIMBYism. By this logic we shouldn't build anything at all unless it immediately benefits the people living next to it. (And I don't like how much power DCs are using either, but that should be the argument, not "it doesn't benefit me personally so don't build it".)
Correct, we shouldn't.
Alright, fair enough. I guess no factories, no power lines or pipelines, no thru highways or train tracks, no office parks, no farms other than subsistence, no radio towers or aeronautical beacons, no bus depots or railyards, no quarries, oil rigs, or mines. Heaven forbid someone is forced to live nearby something that's useful for someone other than themselves.
They can exist, they just have to create value, and not the capitalist sort exclusively measured in dollars.
Sure. ChatGPT alone has a billion users. I don't particularly like AI, but it's clearly useful, and a lot of people are using it. (And even this assumes that every data center is an AI one.)
Then it can afford to compensate affected people.
Yeah, they do, they pay for the land. That's how buying land works and it's separate from the permitting process to actually build on it. I'm not really seeing where we're going with this
That doesn't compensate affected people. It only compensates the previous landowner. In fact it usually more than compensates them, as they receive substantial profit, creating a speculative bubble market that's bad for everyone else.
If people like that have their way private property would effectively cease existing.
And on higher level. "You are spending astonishing amount of maybe our collective money for ..."
Looking at those numbers. Looking at what it does now. And then simply comparing it to anything else and very reasonable some start to question what even is going on...
Regardless of what the tech can or cannot do, the business model is clearly a scam by people who get high on thinking they're smarter than everyone else. You don't promise your investors "the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars" by accident. You do it because you're a fraud who thinks you're much cleverer than you actually are.
Why would China oppose Western AI? It dumbs people down even more. If you want to destroy the West, support AI!
Coincidentally we have seen the CCP talking point applied to AI critics here in the last week, so it was in the briefing of the influencers.
The oligarchs employ a standard red scare tactic like it's 1950.
chuckles "I'm in danger"
I am confident this has absolutely nothing to do with the Super Intelligence private financial interests.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/donald-trump-stock-trades
"Anxiety over AI and data centers is widely held, but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China."
What has one to do with the other? Why would a believe "widely held" have any bearing on it being manufactured in China or not? This is a non sequitur.
> Cotton’s chief exhibit was Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech mogul whose network of left-wing U.S. nonprofits, Cotton claimed, has spent years producing content opposing American AI infrastructure, with the Chinese government as its “ultimate paymaster.”
Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)
> the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
the difference here is that regular citizens who act on their beliefs are being considered foreign agents if they have the wrong beliefs.
This seems right out of the Red Scare, when normal everyday american socialists were treated as agents of the USSR.
The term "witch hunt" was used then, because just like the historical witch hunts - an accusation alone was enough to find you guilty
No, this is something the article attempts to claim, but it is not true.
Not true yet. It seems pretty likely it’ll happen soon enough, given their track record of saying their going to abuse the law to go after a group - and then abusing the law to go after a group.
Sounds similar to Russia targeting LGBT rights and other human rights activists as "Foreign Agents".
> “Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers.“
Setting aside the politics, trump, ai-doom/boom, I just think this claim is fascinating. Can somebody steel man this? What’s the best evidence for this?
The best evidence will undoubtedly be classified so we can’t see it, but trust us, it’s there. Ignore all the other evidence.
I heard it reported by a reputable source a few weeks ago. I don't think the propaganda reach was very broad
I mean, I don't particularly doubt it's happening (and that the US tries to do the similar things in China, mess with public opinion in ways we think convenient for us or inconvenient for the CCP). Like, why wouldn't they try to mess with us this way, we're so easy to mess with. I don't think either the USA or Chinese governments are limited by things like "ethics" or "international law" or something. I'm talking about social media campaigns with sock puppets etc, mostly on the internet. How effective it is or exactly how many resources they are putting into it is another story.
That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).
Straight out of the Putin playbook.
For the past 25 years, ever-increasing numbers of Russian civil society have been labeled foreign agents. They are then ostracized and harassed by officials.
One prominent example is Memorial, a human rights organization founded at the end of the Soviet Union, which received the Nobel Peace Prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)
“After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice. The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St. Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.”
Sounds like a thing Putin would do in Russia.
anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution
This is directly, line for line, copied from Putin's playbook. In Russia, if you do anything the government doesn't like, you can either declare yourself a "foreign agent" and live with the massive restrictions that imposes, or get designated as one anyway with flimsy or non-existent evidence, and then face those same restrictions plus criminal prosecution for non-compliance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
I wonder if you can declare someone else as a foreign agent. How closely do they check your identification?
In Russia, receiving any funding of any kind from outside Russia (say, a $5 donation to an open source project) makes you a "foreign agent".
So it's illegal to export goods and services?
"Foreign influence is defined as receiving support, whether monetary, organizational, or advisory, from foreign sources, which include foreign states, organizations, nationals, and any individual or entity under foreign influence."
However, there is a second pillar: the agent has to " engage in political activities, gather information on military capabilities, or create and disseminate information intended for a broad audience." Which is why eg Gazprom is presumably not a foreign agent.
Declaring undesirable NGOs etc. as "foreign agents" is 100% a page from the authoritarian playbook (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law).
That playbook is 2012 all over again. Eerie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
I wonder if we can infer any chronological forecast from relative USA::РФ time frames?
All opposition to Trump's lame ideas are treason. At this point, I've committed treason 134 times. What's one more?
Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.
It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.
Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.
"the actual targets are just normal people..."
How do you know?
NPR did an episode of Planet Money on paid protests that are indeed funded by Chinese and Russian governments. So have many other news organizations.
There are plenty of stupid people who believe things like AI uses a lot of water even in USA. There's absolutely no need of cee cee pee to fund all this. Any one who believes foreign agents had any impact on the anti AI sentiment in USA has no theory of mind of these people
How do you know foreign agents didn't spread the water narrative?
Hello, "foreign agents" of Hacker News. What country are you from?
> but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China.
Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.
Oh, this is Putin's playbook, right?
Declare everyone who opposes you to be "Foreign agents".
In Putin's case it worked; he managed to drive pretty much all independent journalists out of Russia.
Standard Belarus/Lukashenko playbook as well, which at this point might as well be Russia itself.
> Two days prior, President Trump began a spate of social posts declaring that opposition to AI is a traitorous, treasonous conspiracy theory tracing back to China.
This is unsupported by the reported Trump statements.
> “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump posted on September 14. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”
> “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood,” Trump also posted, “are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.”
Pot calling the kettle black, as always.
"every accusation is a confession"
There seems to be a coordinated and funded effort to spread FUD about AI and datacenters across multiple countries, including the US, Canada, and the Philippines. The most obvious source of funding would be China for a lot of reasons. Taking payments from a foreign government to attempt to influence Americans is against federal law.
This isn't necessarily some weird corrupt conspiracy.
> Taking payments from a foreign government to attempt to influence Americans is against federal law.
Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments.
says a 6 day old account which is potentially in violation of the US statutes to post falsehood.
He's right though.
He’s right that it’s legal to take payments from Israel to influence Americans?
Or is he right that it’s a crime to refuse such payments?
Or is he right to make stuff up about Israel and use it to create a diversion when the topic was something negative about China?
It is literally a crime to refuse payments from Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
You are either being disingenuous or have the reading comprehension of a very cheap language model.
Anti-BDS laws do not make it a crime to refuse payments from the Israeli government to influence Americans.
says a 50 minute old throwaway account with one comment
Shalom!
This is overtly antisemetic, from a 6 day old account with a nonsense username.
Why don't you use a non throwaway account and stand by your behavior?
Why is this tolerated on HN??
How else am I supposed to greet my israeli friends on the internet?
Claiming that jews are somehow above the law or "the system" acts always in their favor because they somehow influence it is a classic antisemitic trope. You are being antisemitic, please stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ami_Kadish
So you're telling me that the existence of US anti-boycott laws aimed at israel is actually antisemitic?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...
Or just acknowledging that they exist?
None of those laws make it 'illegal' to boycott Israel, so you are just full of crap.
They require government contractors to not participate in certain boycotts, which is completely in line with long standing US policy. Doing otherwise would be insane, the government would be funding both it's own stated objectives and the opposite.
When the shoe is on the other foot you support this behavior. I don't see you crying over half the countries in the middle east forcing every company they work with to boycott Israel.
They're literally called anti-boycott laws in their official title? My brain is not capable of such advanced level mental gymnastics.
You are the only person who said Jew. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
It's interesting that confronting antisemitism gets me misgendered.
By "confronting antisemitism" you mean "making everything about Jews, then calling it antisemitic"? That's antisemantic.
You clearly didn't read the thread at all. I was saying China is likely funding campaigns to discourage AI investment outside of china, and it is illegal to take such money. Then people came out of the woodwork to try to change the subject to Israel (you know, the Jewish state?)
I only replied that bringing up Israel out of nowhere in reply to a discussion about the US government and China is clearly an attempt to change the subject, and making false claims about Jews, especially when they fit the usual Elders of Zion pattern of "Jews control the world so they have different rules" is antisemetic, which it is.
And their only other comment is calling for AI to be 'tightly controlled' by regulation.
Clearly china made me commit such a heinous thoughtcrime.
Edit: and by the way, that's a total misrepresentation of what I wrote. AI companies are attempting regulatory capture to protect their business, which should be opposed by all means possible.
What you wrote had no content regarding AI, regulatory capture as protection of business, nor opposition to such action as a proposed course of action.
What you wrote was: "Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments." which is false on the face of it, anti BDS laws have still not been proven to be constitutional where they have been passed or proposed in a few states, and the wiki entry shows a significant lack of 'name the US Civil or Criminal Code' in any of the references; the only source of "38 states have passed" type wording is an article in an unsourced foreign publication.
So either you are not comprehending the state of anti-BDS legislation, or do comprehend it and are intentionally being misleading. There may be some regulations which prohibit the US gov't from accepting contracts or bids from organizations which are boycotting Israeli business but that is not the same as being 'illegal to boycott' by any stretch of an overactive imagination.
Also, this entire line of conversation has ZERO BEARING on the original topic which is about a particularly egregious misbehavior on the part of the US gov't. which has echoes of 1930's Germany's use of "National Security" to restrict freedom of the press and used that same premise in increments to restrict all manner of personal freedoms to greater and greater extremes without judicial oversight. The application of this approach is broader than the scope of AI conversation as this same approach has been championed by Trump staffer with a history of writing in support of those 1930's actions. This should be concerning to anyone with a mind to prevent repetitions of nefarious and malicious historical pretexts leading to loss of freedom.
There's nothing gained by adding unrelated and incorrect statements to the thread, and my prior comment stands. Posts from a less than 1 week old account with nothing substantive, useful or true in this conversation which is behavior consistent with long-standing troll farm noise here on HN. If you're not a troll account, then stop acting exactly like one. Otherwise, shut up and go away.
He's referring to my comment about his other comment (his account only had 2 at the time!) about AI.
He is misinformed and intentionally trying to change the subject away from China though, and it worked.
There also seems to be a coordinated effort to bring up Israel whenever China is being discussed negatively.
Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.
The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.
You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.
You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, and as outright fascism flourishes, you might not even manage the former. When you spend years in an ICE gulag because your speech crosses some nebulous line, it will matter very little what legal rights you think you have.
Ok, that covers you, but there are 100M party members, any Chinese-descended or Chinese-married person in the US probably has a connection to a party member.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
If you want to formulate a bank-shot argument about how this preys on people of Chinese ancestry, I'm fine with that. All I'm here to say is that you can't plausibly be charged with a FARA violation simply for arguing or protesting for a policy position that China happens to want you to take; the DOJ bears the burden of proving that you knew you were coordinating with China, directly, and, if it's a felony, willfully (that, is, voluntarily, deliberately, with a purpose to break the law).
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
You can't plausibly be arrested by ICE if you're in the US legally, in theory, but look where we are.
I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.
amazing how his responses stopped immediately after posting this very obvious and overwhelming rebuttal.
Is that really how you think conversations work?
The fact is that I don't have a stake in analyses about whether the administration is operating in good faith. I'm an opponent of the administration. I'm already sold on that point.
My problem is with the Ken Klippensteins who are engagement farming with posts that misinform people about how the law works.
If you're already winding up with a reply about how the law doesn't matter anymore, ask yourself "why are we talking about this then?" If it doesn't matter, they don't need to announce anything, and their announcement has no content.
As it stands: the announcement really doesn't have any content anyways; they generate this stuff specifically to rile people like you up, and Klippenstein feeds off that energy like a remora.
Does this article not have a source?
The situation is far more serious than what the title suggests. The MAGA regime is pursuing criminal prosecution against AI critics.
> the administration declared war on protestors and opponents of AI, threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
This is literally the go-to playbook of Russia and China for silencing critics. Label every critic a foreign agent and use state violence to silence them.
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/01/russia-new-restrictions-...
- https://apnews.com/article/china-hong-kong-national-security...
you make it more than it is.
we are not Russia nor China thankfully, any litigation at this stage against an AI critic would fall flat.
In the future, maybe? However in the current climate it's just a bunch of empty words like the rest of the admin has been
I wish there wasn't someone serving a 30 year sentence for transporting zines basically because the government convinced a jury they were "antifa" zines.
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr...
The Trump administration IS instructing US Attorneys to go after such things, and juries are in some cases buying it. It's probably better if you aren't protesting a data center in Texas.
Do you think lying about an unrelated case furthers your argument?
do you think lying about me lying furthers yours?
do you think this is a useful way to have a discussion?
I will give you that this instance is extreme.
How does being critical of AI directly connect to a spurious association with antifa or any connection to a riot or shooting?
These two categories are different. I agree there is overreach in Sanchez's case however i don't know how one can assume the same will happen to some guy saying "AI bad"
If they were rioting; or connected to a rioting group, that might be different.
a connection to China (that the administration will insist is not spurious) is exactly what they are threatening to use to prosecute and imprison people organizing political campaigns or actions against data centers.
The sooner we eliminate this administration the better