The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution
capitalbnews.org374 points by doener 9 hours ago
374 points by doener 9 hours ago
This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect.
Pejoratives aside, it’s also bad news for AI companies.
Anyone who knows the story of the US auto industry in the 1970’s and 1980’s knows how excessive government protection for an industry works out.
I don't know that story. Can you summarize?
They became lazy and uncompetitive, and were eventually overrun by Japanese imports. It's probably reasonable to say they never really recovered.
It also sustains the bubble for a bit longer. I'm genuinely curious/anxious to see when and how the bubble bursts. It could end up being something seemingly trivial or random and completely illogical that finally topples the jenga tower.
> the bubble
> the jenga tower
I am not so sure about these narratives anymore.
Both bubble and Jenga tower are examples of unstable systems that can persist for an unexpectedly long time.
They're good analogies. It's possible to keep a Jenga tower going forever, just extremely difficult once it reaches the point of being all middle pieces.
Also easier if you can hold up bits of it with strings from the ceiling, which is what the EPA is doing for data centers here.
I don't think it's a bubble
The dot com boom was a bubble. Doesn't mean that the underlying web technology that powered it was bad or worthless. But the valuations definitely were. AI, in its current form, will be around for a long time, maybe even as ubiquitous as the internet is today, a few decades from now. But the situation right now can definitely be classified as a bubble.
It’s a bubble. “AI” could be quite successful at this point, and the economics still don’t work out.
Parts of it can be a bubble while other parts are not. The need for datacenters can be real while the valuation of model providers can be a fantasy.
If the need is driven by a bubble economy, when the bubble pops the demand disappears too. This can even lead to a separate bubble popping (see: the dotcom and telecom bubbles).
Yes, datacentres can be reused for other purposes but dark fibre didn't save the telecom bubble and the utility of train tracks didn't save the railway bubble.
The economics work out just fine. Their actual target business model is replace every knowledge worker. Their thought process is "look at all these people making 150k+, we can do their jobs for 10% of that, think how much money that would be if we had all of it"
Sure, the next step is complete regression to feudalism, but they aren't thinking that far ahead, they just want to take every job in existence that isn't physically turning a proverbial wrench.
It’s wild to me that anyone can have that thought and yet not think about what happens to everyone whose job you took. Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
Especially after seeing what the “learn to code” movement has brought people into, I can’t imagine those people will just roll over and peacefully enter homeless encampments..
>citizens known for owning guns.
They're largely the ones voting for this.
I’m old enough to remember when people said computers would do all jobs 30 years ago
the moment AI is capable enough to replace every knowledge worker and all knowledge workers are fired and/or dead the AI companies will just hike up the price for access to their bots until every company is paying at least as much if not more than what they were on human workers.
What even is the economy after they have killed all the workers and it's just bots clicking on each others ads?
Then it's on to centralization of the "human" components of the workforce into company towns, robot armies and competition for natural resources that will be processed from raw.
Once the economics work out, the economy as a whole doesn't, therefore the economics DOESN'T WORK OUT.
I think you're making an assumption that the owners of this capital aren't: "That the economy has to work out for everyone."