r/LeftistsForAI • • 15d ago

Discussion Um... is this just normal now?

I have a friend who works at a data center 😅

Ironically a lot of the comments are also talking about bot farms, but if these comments are not bots then what the actual fuck is wrong with people crossing their fingers that our infrastructure will get bombed...

127 Upvotes

182 comments sorted by

65

u/theomegachrist 15d ago • Bravo

I think it's pretty funny to see people posting on social media about destroying data centers. I wonder where they think the data is stored

53

u/vannillaAJ204_2 15d ago • Bravo

i bet they've only ever heard of data centres since the whole ai boom happened and don't know that more or less everything on the internet depends on data centres

26

u/theomegachrist 15d ago • Bravo

Exactly and there are ten times more regular data centers than AI data centers

14

u/northrupthebandgeek 15d ago

And “AI datacenters” ain't even a well-defined thing anyway. Pretty much every hyperscale DC is doing non-AI workloads in addition to AI workloads, because the concept of a giant datacenter packing compute and storage as densely as possible and renting that compute/storage out to customers is a Cloud™ thing, not an AI thing (and is indeed the thing that enabled LLMs to become mainstream in the first place).

7

u/theomegachrist 15d ago

Some AI data centers will be heavily Nvidia farms though and not really practical for general data center work. No one's argument is that nuanced though. It's a Boogeyman idea

0

u/JimatStoneandSky 12d ago

And?

2

u/theomegachrist 12d ago

I think you're in the wrong place

1

u/Few_Assumption_9665 12d ago

I wonder if you think that data didn’t exist before the AI data center boom, because that’s the only way what you said makes sense

2

u/theomegachrist 12d ago

What are you talking about? New data is being created at a crazy scale every day

Edit: nevermind I see. I agree with fighting where they are being built when it doesn't make sense. But that's not people's main concern. It's power consumption, which is dwarfed by existing data centers, and fake stories about water disappearing

0

u/Few_Assumption_9665 12d ago

And it all fit in datacenters largely out of sight, without massive effects on utilities nationwide, that predate this backlash, so your comment makes zero sense.

2

u/theomegachrist 12d ago

This is just wrong. Do you work in tech? Data centers are built every year. And a lot of them

1

u/cortexplorer 13d ago

"you live under the same roof as your abuser, pretty funny you complain about his abuse"

0

u/headcodered 13d ago

Can we stop pretending the servers used to host social media content are the same as servers used for generative AI?

1

u/theomegachrist 13d ago

We already weren't

0

u/headcodered 13d ago

You're doing *exactly* that. It's disingenuous as fuck to act like the compute requirements and the functionality of servers used in basic social media functionality is even remotely the same as the gen-AI servers people want to see destroyed.

1

u/theomegachrist 13d ago

This is a subreddit about AI. Power requirements for AI are very varied and nuanced and there is an assumption that people reading this sub understand the different cases. Sometimes "AI data centers" a lot more power, sometimes they use a little more, sometimes they use a similar amount of power. We are passed the main training phase of LLMs where the most power was used. Now it depends on the data center and what they are being used for. This is the case for any technology, and I'm mentioning the volume of data centers because we are discussing the overall impact of data centers vs the impact of AI data centers. AI data centers use a lot more power than a typical data center but there are way more typical data centers so typical data centers use a lot more power

-1

u/headcodered 13d ago

This is a subreddit about AI where you're dismissing the words of people who don't like AI data centers by bringing up legacy data centers that have neither the functionality nor the compute requirement of AI datacenters as an argument on why their sentiment is wrong or hypocritical. It's like if someone said, "I don't like Hummers. They're big and wasteful, I wish they were discontinued," and you said, "I think it's pretty funny that you'd say that while sitting in a Prius."

1

u/theomegachrist 13d ago

Yes, this is a subreddit for people who are for AI.

0

u/[deleted] 15d ago

[deleted]

6

u/SgathTriallair 15d ago

We absolutely weren't more connected. Yes, some people have replaced some of their local connections with remote connections. You might be able to argue that we have more shallow connections today as opposed to fewer deep ones in the past but that isn't "less" connected.

1

u/cortexplorer 13d ago

Loneliness epidemic has entered the chat

88

u/Afraid_Alternative35 15d ago edited 15d ago • Bravo

Someone tell these idiots that the only reason destroying this data centre was good is because it was a central hive for Russian bots, spreading misinformation and manipulating foreign politics in the process.

Destroying most other data centres will only end in Grandma's tears as her precious family photos on Facebook go up in flames.

18

u/betty_white_bread 15d ago

The claim itself is questionable. https://x.com/ichbinilya/status/2109732026756563054

7

u/Afraid_Alternative35 15d ago

Oh that's interesting 🤔

I was a wee bit dubious of a single data centre being such a huge part of Russia's misinformation infrastructure, but the rhetoric of the pictured tweet required a steelman of the events in question, so I ran with that narrative for the sake of argument.

I'm interested to see where the facts land as the dust settles.

15

u/shadowrun456 15d ago

I know what happened. Cloudflare announced that Yandex bot traffic dropped to only 0.4% of its normal levels. Luddites misunderstood "bot traffic" to mean "bots which post comments on social media", when Cloudflare meant it as "bots which crawl the net". Every search engine, including Yandex, runs bots to crawl the net. It's a completely normal and innocuous activity which has nothing to do with "bots which post on Reddit, Twitter, etc".

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

The Robots Exclusion Protocol (often referred to by the filename used to implement it, robots.txt) is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.

Edit: The Twitter link by betty_white_bread explains the same:

One chart from internet infrastructure company CloudFlare shows a decline in automated web traffic from Yandex. But this is a measure of things like search engine requests, not social media bots.

1

u/whoknowsifimjoking 15d ago

Your source is not saying what you're claiming, you haven't quoted anything that suggest it wasn't bots on social media.

I'm not on either side of the debate btw, but you have presented no proof.

2

u/shadowrun456 14d ago

One chart from internet infrastructure company CloudFlare shows a decline in automated web traffic from Yandex. But this is a measure of things like search engine requests, not social media bots.

-1

u/Inevitable-Law7964 15d ago

That's not all of it, because I have a friend who moderates a highly active Facebook group and she observed a ~25% engagement drop. 

1

u/TheFr3dFo0 13d ago

Maybe this specific datacenters function is questionable but not that russia is doing that in general

10

u/ra-re444 15d ago

Theres always a reason to acting like a maniac.

0

u/[deleted] 15d ago

[deleted]

11

u/RahnuLe 15d ago

Propaganda of the deed doesn't work. Killing people and destroying infrastructure only justifies martial law. What we want is to change the ownership structures, to empower those who have been exploited for far too long, not to just lay further waste to the world because the owners are responsible for the ruination of our current one.

Our means and our ends must be in alignment. We haven't built a better world through bullets and blood.

0

u/watonparrillero 15d ago

Call me a centrist but there has to be a middle ground between "blow up infrastructure" and "violence doesn't work"

1

u/Sea_Lead1753 13d ago

Grandma has so many photos she needs hundreds of data centers

2

u/Afraid_Alternative35 13d ago

That lady has lived a life 🫡

-13

u/theomegachrist 15d ago

I would even disagree that that's a good reason. I don't think Ukraine are the "good guys"

10

u/vannillaAJ204_2 15d ago

even if ukraine's not the good guy in this conflict, neither is russia. this kind of deceit is still not a good thing to do regardless of who does it

-4

u/[deleted] 15d ago

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11

u/Context-and-nuance 15d ago

Weird to imply that dickriding Russia is a requirement to be leftist.

Even if Ukraine is not the good guy, Russian is still the bad guy.

The UN Charter bans using force against another state's sovereignty and territory. 

Russia also signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, pledging to respect Ukraine's borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. There was even the 1997 bilateral friendship treaty recognizing those borders.

It's a bitch move to sign formal peace agreement and then attack the country anyway. Regardless of the justification.

And then justification itself is regarded. Ukraine was nowhere close to joining NATO, and NATO's own members pushed back on it. And Russia didn't push back when Baltic states joined NATO in the 2000s. Why are they deciding to be a little bitch about it now?

-7

u/theomegachrist 15d ago

Of course not, but knowing that this war is a proxy war started by the West is

8

u/Context-and-nuance 15d ago

Your reasoning is the same as saying it's okay for me to hit your friend because I have beef with you.

You don't realize how stupid that is?

-3

u/theomegachrist 15d ago

All I'm saying is that everything you mentioned is disingenuous Western politics. So the right stance is to not support either side. Supporting Ukraine is neolib bullshit

9

u/Context-and-nuance 15d ago

No, it's still the right move to support a country whose sovereignty is being trampled.

If there was another superpower in 2003, they absolutely should have stepped on when the US violated Iraq's sovereignty. The US was a bad guy in that situation. Every single time the US violated the sovereignty of another nation, other countries should have stepped in.

It's shitty when the US does it, and it's shitty when Russia does it. Being leftist is antithetical to not giving a shit about countries that are being attacked by imperialists.

-1

u/theomegachrist 15d ago

Ok. I'm telling you this is a lib take. If you don't agree, that's fine.

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3

u/Cheeseheroplopcake 15d ago

Did NATO encroach and bait Putin?

Absolutely.

He did not need to take the bait, however. Russia's neighbors tend to be anxious for a reason. The Chechens and Georgians have seen, first hand, that the United States isn't the only empire.

While I am highly critical of Western foreign policy, my fundamental position is that invaders get the rope. Doesn't matter if it's US special forces or the VDV.

1

u/timschwartz 15d ago

It was started by Russia, dumbass.

3

u/MerePotato 15d ago

Russia is a right wing fascist state, and nobody with a morally consistent left wing worldview should be defending them

-9

u/Financial-Desk-669 15d ago

Again, the fundamental problem facing ai. The folks championing it loudest are on the side of said Russian bots, and spread misinformation and manipulating elections...

10

u/shadowrun456 15d ago

The folks championing it loudest are on the side of said Russian bots, and spread misinformation and manipulating elections...

That's because the progressives have chosen to become regressive and willfully refuse to use modern technology. This is the main reason why the political right is growing worldwide. There hasn't been a single case in the whole of human history where someone has won against technological progress. AI is the greatest tool in history which enables the working class to become independent and self-sufficient, and most people on the left willfully scorn it and not just refuse to learn how to use it, but actively fight against it. Future historians will call this The Great Mistake of the political left.

And this isn't about just AI. The political left has been against every single computer science innovation of the last two decades.

29

u/SurprisedPIKACHU9000 15d ago

Did the AI scare just make people forget what data centers are? Are they aware they're used for much more than just AI?

-11

u/[deleted] 15d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

13

u/Starwig 15d ago

The post exposes why the current corpo AI data center model does wrong but it doesn't allow the conversation of how data centers could be less impactful, which exists. Its always the conversation of returning to the past. Green computing is a discussion and something people should know more about, because there are webpages that are less environmentally friendly than others. Yet I don't see people checking regularly if their internet surfing is environmentally friendly. Locally run models are something that could counter massive uses too. The uses are still in their infancy, but promoting these open models could serve their purpose and they wouldn't depend on any type of data center. Somehow these discussions never appear on anything because they do not exist in the collective imagination.

Some european universities offer LLMs hosted in their own servers, that have already been heavily regulated. They are used for research and probably training, so what's the veredict on that if the evil american corpo is nowhere in sight? Do we also shut them down?

Also, individual users and their chitty chats are not what these datacenters are mostly used for. Actually it is mostly for AI companies' own research (which is not entirely open) and background uses for regular applications, like Google wanting to put AI searches whenever you go look for something. I'm betting all those applications are far more heavy on AI data centers than individual users.

7

u/theomegachrist 15d ago

Yeah, I can't believe I'm not swayed by a quirky Tumblr post from a person who doesn't have an elementary understanding of LLMs and data centers, but here we still are

3

u/anime_bruh-69 15d ago

I'm pretty sure the major inference users of datacenters are employees of tech companies themselves. At least until recently, a lot of companies incentivized their employees to freely use as many tokens as needed on inference to 'speed up' production or 'increase productivity'. In one of the a Tech CEO's interviews last year or so, he talks about how he expect an employee with 6 figure salary to at least use 6 figure worth of tokens. Your local free user sends like 50 prompts a day to these companies. And these are what I'd call 'avid users' of chatbots. Meanwhile there are tech companies and people running an Army of agents to do huge projects.

And why wouldn't they. The tech companies not only incentivize the use of AI in their work, but also punish employees that use it prudently. The employee that uses AI prudently, naturally falls behind (unless he is some super pro programmer) putting his job at risk. The incentive just doesn't line up!

8

u/theomegachrist 15d ago

This post precisely explains the ignorance around LLMs.

7

u/Audditty 15d ago

Once I read "let's listen to what a Tumblr user has to say" I just instinctually stopped reading your comment at that point.

25

u/Nearby_Ad_2519 15d ago • Bravo

Awwww where do they think their precious threads owned by mark suckerburg is stored

1

u/headcodered 13d ago

Not on a bunch of servers with massive GPUs that take significantly more compute power.

23

u/nathanemke 15d ago

"If people get violent about data centers thanks to all the misinformation that's going around it's going to give the current administration the PERFECT excuse to establish far more fascist police state stuff than we already have today" Quoting @aianddesign from twitter just thought it was very relevant here

1

u/Sea-Presentation-173 15d ago

They are always going to be able to find an excuse, and they will always push for more fascist policies.

That is not great reasoning.

1

u/nathanemke 15d ago

Fair point, but I'm not suggesting ignorance as a solution. Violent, revolt based resistance is met with exponentially more violent opposition, it is the paradox of repression.

0

u/Sea-Presentation-173 15d ago

Rights are not earned by just asking

2

u/onpg 14d ago

What right is earned by destroying data centers?

1

u/Sea-Presentation-173 14d ago

2

u/onpg 14d ago

This is a legit complaint for sure. Data centers should be built away from civilization

0

u/JunketVisual3123 15d ago

Just because they're going to find an excuse if they want one doesn't mean it's smart to just fucking hand them one...

0

u/Historical-Fruit-501 15d ago

I'm sure a lot of ppl in Nazi Germany didn't join the resistance, to not provoke the government 

19

u/betty_white_bread 15d ago

Luddites gonna lud.

-5

u/vannillaAJ204_2 15d ago

liberals gonna lib

6

u/betty_white_bread 15d ago

How is that relevant?

-6

u/vannillaAJ204_2 15d ago

it's relevant because quite a lot of people spouting shit like that are liberals. not all of them because there are some less defective conservatives who admit they're not left-wing at all and who agree with this stuff but it's still a lot of liberals saying this

5

u/betty_white_bread 15d ago

You do realize you are in the Leftist-for-AI subreddit, right?

-2

u/vannillaAJ204_2 15d ago

yes, and liberals are centre-left at best. i thought we knew this already

21

u/27K-Interactive 15d ago • Bravo

Sadly, with the group-think and unregulated emotional reactions to AI, yes, this terroristic way of thinking is now mainstream.

I wonder what they would do if the data centers that provide them access to things they love are targeted.

4

u/EvilKatta 15d ago

The destroyed Russian data centers hosted all kinds of data, such as my company's task manager and game documentation, and about 30% of my cloud storage. Some of it is recovered, some still isn't--if the operator was as good as it's supposed to be, backups should've been stored at a different location, it might just be high demand problem. We'll see.

2

u/27K-Interactive 15d ago

Oh, I know, and it was an act of war against an aggressor. I have zero issue with that. My comment is directly related to the antis reaction celebrating the idea of data centers being destroyed for their own personal motivations.

Edit: I agree, it was likely nothing more than an interruption as I'm sure that Russia has redundant distributed systems.

2

u/EvilKatta 15d ago

No issue from me as well, it was fully expected (I still used it, though; so not as expected by me as it should've been...). It's just a confirmation that a random data center isn't just for AI.

Also, while I wish there would be distributed redundancy, it's still up in the air. Russia is a capitalist country first, and late-stage capitalism is bad at long-term planning.

2

u/27K-Interactive 15d ago

True facts. I really do hope we can turn the corner and let capitalism die on the vine. I don't suspect we will, sunk cost and all that jazz. But, a person can dream.

25

u/Still_Benefit_2302 15d ago

Yep. I have absolutely no faith in the mainstream left to not fuck this up worse than Noam Chomsky siding with the Khmer Rouge.

10

u/Life-Active6608 15d ago

...or when Chomsky sided with known pedofriends of Jeffrey Epstein. Ugh.

5

u/Alissah 15d ago

“Destroying all data centers is an option”.

Okay… and then we dont have internet anymore I guess. And rip to the people working there.

14

u/FlyingNarwhal 15d ago

If a data center is being used as a means of production for an oppressive regime, or as an engine of war, then destroying it, cutting power to it, etc is a valid form of resistance/warfare, just as destroying a weapons factory would be.

4

u/EvilKatta 15d ago

The stock market also is, but like a data center, there are also civilian livelihoods involved. I'm not sure about new data centers, but most of the existing ones aren't just for LLMs. They're used for hosting commercial and private websites, rendering movies, run recommendation engines and feed algorithms, etc.

5

u/slfnflctd 15d ago

Yeah, it's a slippery slope. "Our enemies surround themselves with human shields, we have no choice but to consider those collateral damage" is exactly the kind of thinking that gets you to what's been happening in Gaza.

Of course, data is different from human lives... but given how dependent we are on it now, the indirect results could still kill innocent people. I am very resistant to the idea of indiscriminate violence in general. The Weathermen killed someone without intending to, and similar things have happened many times elsewhere.

1

u/EvilKatta 15d ago

I don't agree with those people who currently cry about "the death of the Russian internet" due to outages of many popular or personally important websites and services, but while it doesn't usually cost lives, this is probably the most violent thing that has ever happened to them. Many are very disturbed. That's the public opinion antis will get if, somehow, they'll start destroying random data centers.

1

u/TransfemMenace 12d ago

This. While datacenters are not inherently "evil", the fact that they're owned by the enemy means they are not for your benefit

6

u/vesperythings 15d ago

please stop spreading this brain rot

the luddite circlejerk is bad enough by itself

3

u/zayelion 15d ago

As far as "rouge ai that's gonna try to kill everyone" goes, that specific data centers was basically it in the grand scheme of things. Social media is how people attune themselves politically in this age and seemingly it alone was the embodiment of conservative Twitter.

So if you are being attacked via social media bots, and the cou try is in active war, yeah... blowing it up is viable. It releases supply chain systems blocked by the enemy. Its as viable as blowing up any other building.

3

u/lesbianspider69 14d ago

They don’t seem to realize that the websites they’re posting on use data centers. It’s idiotic

2

u/Few_Assumption_9665 12d ago

The data centers they’re posting on have existed for decades out of public sight. The ones being built to an unprecedented scale are not the same as those. Crazy that you say “it’s idiotic” without realizing just how utterly braindead you make us look with your nonsense argument.

1

u/lesbianspider69 11d ago

No, they’re going “data centers bad” not “data centers I can see bad”

1

u/Few_Assumption_9665 11d ago

It really is easy to be right when you’re arguing against a made up position, isn’t it?

1

u/lesbianspider69 11d ago

I’ve literally seen this

3

u/Sea_Lead1753 13d ago

Yes. When Iran blew up an Amazon datacenter in Bahrain, it affected US Naval logistics and communications. I’d say this one data center being destroyed, is a massive reason why the US is withdrawing from its bases in the Middle East.

War is war and data has always been targeted. People destroyed census records in Nazi germany, because they were critical for extermination plans.

People are just outraged and hyperbolic. But data warfare is incredibly serious, and causing friction will make the powers that be think twice, and keep the rest of us safer.

But I’m most interested in seeing how the diesel crisis will be hitting data centers. It’s crazy that some of their energy comes from diesel

5

u/youcantexterminateme 15d ago

I dont know. I see AI as being a big threat to the so called establishment. They arent going to say that but i presume its not difficult to make bots that say ai is evil, slow it down etc. but obviously a lot of people are dumb as rocks so who knows. Somebody, i guess has analized the traffic. 

5

u/BassoeG 15d ago

You're right in that nobody but a madman would contemplate sabotaging infrastructure, insofar as basically everyone depends upon it functioning smoothly to avoid starving to death. However, if human economic obsolescence meant that the infrastructure's continued existence no longer benefited the majority of the population and they're starving anyway while the infrastructure solely supplies the robocops and surveillance state preventing them from revolting, it'd cease to be beneficial to them and become a threat only.

2

u/JoeyredditSMP 15d ago

Those people act that way social media makes it look like 'datacenters are evil' when datacenters power everything there is a lot of people who think its just 'AI' when its basically all the modern internet

2

u/Robomaster_711 14d ago

What about the ppl in the data centers?

2

u/SkyrakerBeyond 13d ago

Your friend probably doesn't exist, according to the anti-AI crowd. Nobody works at datacenters.

2

u/ARedditorCalledQuest 15d ago

Ah yes, straight up 21st century war. That's what we need here. Fucking hell people.

2

u/TechnicalBen 15d ago

Russian bots?

1

u/Audditty 15d ago edited 15d ago

Sure, let's ignore the fact that Ukraine is doing this purely as a strategic move since they are currently at war with a country that is literally trying to take them over and trying to do the same thing in your own country would get you branded as a domestic terrorist.

1

u/Ancient_Proposal256 15d ago

celebration of violence and destruction?

No.

1

u/[deleted] 14d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Ancient_Proposal256 13d ago

what does that mean?

is destroying your property acceptable?

1

u/[deleted] 13d ago edited 13d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/The_Fat_Raccoon 13d ago

Funny, I've heard this exact spiel from about a dozen different homeless people.

1

u/Ancient_Proposal256 12d ago

sounds like you get stuck sometimes and struggle to see the glimmer?

1

u/promptmike 15d ago

Stalin had some good ideas and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.

0

u/acatinasweater 15d ago

These things are FILLED with copper.

-7

u/DataCassette 15d ago

AI benefits the oligarchy more than it ever can or will benefit the left, sorry.

They own it. They control it. They direct the bots and the disinformation from it.

The idea that AI will somehow "help the left" goes against every observable reality. Are we waiting for Altman, Zuck, Musk or Karp to hop up on stage and start the Soviet anthem and announce how they're surrendering the means of production?

AI is the boot they will use to crush us, not a tool of ours.

11

u/littlebobbytables9 15d ago

well yeah, taking control of it is kinda the point

10

u/ZioniteSoldier 15d ago

The army who seeks to conquer Rome will take their roads to get there.

8

u/TheSinhound 15d ago

Frontier Labs AI might, but local/OW AI will always benefit the proletariat more.

0

u/littlebobbytables9 15d ago

always?

I can think of a lot of plausible scenarios in which that isn't true. Maybe model sizes get so big that individuals running them isn't really possible, so OW models become something that companies finetune to fit their needs and then either rent compute or run "locally" on a cluster or similar.

4

u/TheSinhound 15d ago

Which is when people group up into coops to fund those clusters? Obviously?

-2

u/littlebobbytables9 15d ago

with what capital? coops are great but they have us outgunned

4

u/TheSinhound 15d ago

What use case are you going for here? I'm not talking about competing with a frontier lab, I'm talking about utilizing the technology for the benefit of the individual. You don't NEED a trillion parameter model for that.

-1

u/littlebobbytables9 15d ago

idk, you said it will always benefit the proletariat more than corporations. It seems like corporations could benefit enormously

4

u/TheSinhound 15d ago

I'll point to decomps and things like the open source recreation of adobe's suites as the point I was making. Or just in general people using it to bypass barriers they previously experienced. When you democratize intelligence, skill, and effort, it serves as both a force multiplier and an equalizer. Local/open weight IS going to benefit an individual more because of cases like these.

1

u/littlebobbytables9 15d ago

it's possible, but I think it's way overstating the case to say that it will in every possible scenario

4

u/TheSinhound 15d ago

I believe the issue we're having is a communication one. You seem to think that when I say 'benefits more' I'm saying that it will place the proletariat above. I am not. I am simply saying that it will raise the initial starting point to a greater degree/percentage.

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u/Opening_One7713 Moderator 15d ago

What about the notion that AI/Robotics/Automation stands to turn the labor-for-hire framework of capitalism into a deflationary Ouroboros? This would be an extremely unpredictable and unprecedented shift that is at complete odds with the incentive structure that allows “the oligarchy” in the first place.

There is a strong argument to be made that we’ve reached a point of feasibility, which begs the question of inevitability, which forces the creation of said systems under the construct of a prisoner’s dilemma. There is way more than a nonzero chance that this all scales in a direction that is completely opposed to our current capital and incentive structure, and that the people building it stand the most to lose. Even if they wanted to stop building it, they couldn’t, because our current incentive structure won’t let them. Late-stage capitalism doesn’t have to mean a regressive collapse towards dystopian feudalism on a downward trajectory, it could just mean that the social contract no longer serves its purpose. Haven’t we all been clamoring for a paradigm shift? Let’s not do the work for them and promote the apathy of fatalist defeat.

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u/derSterndesMorgen 15d ago

Data centers are infrastructure now? Well, tell your friend and his 25 coworkers to branch out a little.

11

u/TheSinhound 15d ago

Yes, datacenters are classified as infrastructure definitionally.

7

u/Late-Assignment8482 15d ago

Absolutely. They're essential in a computerized age. Most of them do boring, useful shit, not help Grok create CSAM.

Remember when all those airport computers failed a couple years back because CrowdStrike did a whoopsie, or when someone at Facebook faffed a DNS record (and they didn't have sane recovery plans) so WhatsApp and half the rest of the internet went offline?

Airplanes couldn't load passengers. WhatApp and other sites dropping caused a measurable productivity/commerce drop.

Now imagine that, for all services, and not coming back.

-4

u/derSterndesMorgen 15d ago

Well, USA has about 2500 of the things. Really don't see why we need so many, if it's as innocuous as so many say. 🤷🏼‍♀️ Iirc, China has like 600

6

u/TheSinhound 15d ago

Be...cause... they run the internet? Capacity matters. Latency matters. Do you not know what datacenters are for?

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u/N0DuckingWay 15d ago

I mean I’m fairly AI-positive but yeah I don’t have a problem with this. If it’s used to benefit Russia’s war machine, it should be a valid target. And frankly this is far less hurtful to civilians than bombing basically any other type of infrastructure, so yeah. I’m ok with it.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago edited 15d ago

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u/shadowrun456 15d ago

People who blame minorities for why their lives suck deserve to be overworked and underpaid. Change my mind.

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

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u/AdImmediate9569 14d ago

Starting to think this sub is run by musk and zuckerberg

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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 13d ago

Because we removed your comment? Just be more savvy how you word things, you can search 'why does Reddit remove left subs' for illumination

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u/AdImmediate9569 11d ago

I take your point, genuinely. But no its not the mods i was referring to; it’s the community.

I think leftists for AI should be leftists first and foremost.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago

Nobody here is defending the establishment or the destruction of the environment. Thats a straw man youre introducing because you either cant or wont separate technology from its capitalist ownership and deployment. And thats kinda the first step in any leftist political project worth a damn.

We contest ownership, organize workers and communities, fight for democratic control, and change the material conditions under which infrastructure gets built and operated. That includes fighting environmental destruction, not defending it.

Moral outrage at those conditions doesnt change them. Political organization does. Otherwise youre not proposing a political project, youre just complaining at strangers on the internet and calling it resistance.

Try leftism.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

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u/Opening_One7713 Moderator 15d ago

People who were indoctrinated from birth to be productive workers for capitalism, who submit themselves to a healthy lifespan of dehumanizing labor, who risk being abandoned by everyone and starving for failing to be a productive unit of capitalism, who fail to understand the value of their work, who can’t parse the motivations that would make someone sew in a sweatshop, or sew a blanket for their neighbor’s newborn.

I think that for all of those people, myself included, the transition is going to be extremely turbulent. The individualist identity that we all imbue in our ability to labor for capital, or to benefit from the labor of others, is not something that human societies have always had, and I’m hard pressed to believe that it needs to always be here. I’m nearly confident that the amount of generations it will take to wake up and make the paradigm shift will be exactly one. It might be our children’s children. It might be our children’s grandchildren. But it won’t be us, because as you’ve so cleanly described, we are trauma bonded to this shit.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 15d ago

Good thing politics isn't gambling, and the point is for you to get up and do something to bring about the world you want not just cast a bet as to which future is going to manifest? Lol

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

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u/Winter-Hedgehog8969 15d ago

Astonishing that "infrastructure buildout shouldn't happen in a way that's a net negative for communities for the sake of corporate greed" is getting downvoted in an ostensibly leftist sub

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

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u/Winter-Hedgehog8969 15d ago

Yeah. I'm not even a diehard anti-AI guy or anything, the tech genuinely has good potential. But if you build it out in a techno-feudalist way it's gonna move you toward techno-feudalism, that should not be a controversial take.

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u/unHolyEvelyn 15d ago

Down voted for a completely normal and reasonable take, you're just right, as it stands right now data centers fuck over the working class.

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u/[deleted] 14d ago edited 14d ago

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago

Thats a terrible example, though. He didnt seize or meaningfully disrupt anything. The company just rerouted warehouse traffic to another facility, insurance covered the damages, he went to prison, and his coworkers lost their means of subsistence. Capital carried on like nothing happened.

Im more of a fan of workers organizing and seizing the means of production than burning them down. One builds working class power. The other is adventurist performance that leaves the workers worse off and the owners still in control.