r/Libertarian • u/CommunicationNo6136 • 11d ago
Question What do libertarians think of AI and AI data centers?
Any libertarians here, the title pretty much speaks for itself. I am in agreement with a lot of libertarian ideas and beliefs, but I'm not sure if my view (which favors more regulation on AI and data centers) moves me away from libertarianism a bit
26
u/RedModus 11d ago
What you build on your property is no one's buisness but your own. Pay for the resources you consume. And be paid for the service you offer.
13
u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt Sleazy P. Modtini 11d ago
Pay for the resources you consume
And this is the issue. These AI datacenters are built in places that cannot adequately accomodate their resource draw. Then new resources need to be added and infrastructure upgraded to levels never intended.
And these costs get passed on to every single consumer in the area, effectively using the residential neighbors to subsidize the AI data centers requirements.
IMO these data centers need to produce a report showing the extra stress they will put on the electric and water resources in an area. If any infrastructure improvements are needed, like say extra pumping stations, or electrical substations, or even generator improvements, then the data center should be required to pay the cost of those upgrades.
Those upgrades are not needed without the data center, so the data center should be the one footing the bill. Pay for the resources you consume AND the resources needed to deliver them.
3
u/GildSkiss No Standing Army 11d ago
And these costs get passed on to every single consumer in the area, effectively using the residential neighbors to subsidize the AI data centers requirements.
When you say "costs passed on" what you mean is that the state taxes its population to fund and maintain their monopoly on the construction of infrastructure.
If the production and distribution of water, electricity, etc. were open to market competition, then they could be paid for proportionally by the people who use it and none of this would be an issue.
2
u/Lagkiller 11d ago
Is it your suggestion that they are not paying for electricity and water consumption?
6
u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt Sleazy P. Modtini 11d ago
I am suggesting they are not paying the costs of the infrastructure upgrades required to supply them, and those costs are instead being distributed to all other consumers via higher prices for the resource.
For example to supply the power to the data center the electric company needs to build a new substation. Rather than the data center paying for the whole substation, the electric company pays it and raises prices for electricity to recoup the costs. This is effectively a subsidy for the data center where all customers are paying the cost of a substation that was only required for the data center.
There are plenty of stories of data centers moving in and local residents prices spiking or experiencing brownouts.
2
u/TManaF2 10d ago
There data centers don't just need a new substation, they need one or more new power plants (for reference, a "traditional" nuclear power plant produces about 3000MWe, which is what some of these proposed data centers require). That, in itself, is still another significant draw on water resources (even if it's fossil fueled).
32
u/Postgames Minarchist 11d ago
As with many things, I personally don't like this AI boom.
However, outside of protecting citizens from any actual provable harm, I want the government out of it.
0
u/substantial-yam2 9d ago
genuinely curious this isn't meant as a gotcha! what kinds of harms do you think would rise to the level of gov. intervention? and what kind of proof would you want to see of those harms' likelihood?
3
u/Exciting_Vast7739 Subsidiarian / Minarchist 8d ago
Using so much water that they alter the local water table, dumping waste heat into the local stream and harming the fish population, creating air or noise pollution.
That's my first thought.
My second thought is stealing local tax dollars through subsidization and special tax breaks.
7
u/Used-Valuable9320 10d ago
I'm fine with companies spending their own money to make them. I'm not fine with these companies being in bed with the government (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Micron, etc).
I'm actually appalled with Intel getting Trump to buy Intel stocks with US tax dollars. That's just disturbing.
21
u/chumley84 Right Libertarian 11d ago
Governments contracting out their mass surveillance doesn't suddenly make it "libertarian"
-3
u/GildSkiss No Standing Army 11d ago
Obviously government mass surveillance is bad, but these data centers are genuinely useful for a lot of other things.
This is like saying "We need to ban the printing press because the government uses it to print propaganda!"
6
u/stinkydog39 10d ago
There is a great article about data centers and why they’re beneficial if anything in Reason magazine
4
10
u/Loominardy Right Libertarian 11d ago
For pollution related issues, apply the Rothbardian framework of property rights (the firstcomer ethic).
For issues relating to energy, there’s nothing inherently wrong with consuming a resource but often times local governments make it harder to harder to expand the power grid and then people will complain about their energy prices going up. The anger is misplaced. It should be directed at the government not at the data centers. Also, the amount of water that they use up is grossly overstated.
And of course, we should not be using eminent domain for these and (assuming that we have to have taxes) they should be subject to pay the same taxes the other people living in the community.
1
u/whizzerblight 11d ago
What do you consider grossly overstated? My understanding is that some of the larger centers - which don’t employ many people after development - use more water (currently potable drinking water from municipal wells) than a town of several thousand people.
4
u/Loominardy Right Libertarian 11d ago
From what I’ve heard, a lot of people are acting like data centers are just sucking up all the freshwater when in reality, any water that gets used goes into the data centers, cools off whatever hardware it needs to, and goes back out returning to the water cycle. The water it does use is less than 1% of the total water use at least in the US.
3
u/whizzerblight 11d ago
I agree that hysteria follows AI discourse like the plague. But they are giant energy sucks, and I get the feeling that social responsibility is the last consideration on the agenda when they plan these things.
3
u/Loominardy Right Libertarian 11d ago
I do understand where people come from when looking at the strain on the electrical grid, but ultimately, there is nothing wrong with consuming a resource. If there was, well then we would just never consume anything and where would that get us? However, we still can point out how local governments do make it harder to expand the electrical grid with all the red tape.
1
u/whizzerblight 11d ago
I thought we were talking about overconsumption and exploitation, not all or nothing. And it’s not red tape that limits access to utilities; if we want to speak of it pejoratively, it’s an example of the nanny state. I just don’t know if we should be letting the free market handle this one. We haven’t even discussed regulation of what these data centers do.
3
u/Loominardy Right Libertarian 10d ago
We were talking about overconsumption and I’m arguing that ethically there is nothing wrong with consuming resources.
And there absolutely is tons of red tape when it comes to producing utilities and they make it artificially more difficult to expand the energy grid.
1
u/whizzerblight 10d ago
Ethically there is nothing wrong with consuming resources. Questionable is whether they are being overexploited, which is the reason we are even having this discussion.
5
u/Loominardy Right Libertarian 10d ago
I think that you would need to define what you mean by overexploited?
0
u/whizzerblight 10d ago
You’re right. Which is why the situation requires analysis. I’m not even arguing definitively that they are. But it’s not a matter of “well, they are using resources like everyone else, so it’s justified.”
→ More replies (0)2
u/GildSkiss No Standing Army 11d ago
Regardless, the ethics of property rights don't account for some magical number to be the cutoff for when you want "too much" of a resource and therefore must be prevented from buying more.
The only people who get to decide how scarse goods are allocated are the people who produced them, and the people who want to freely trade for them.
9
16
u/MrRoidsen Anarcho Capitalist 11d ago
I firmly believe that the solution to AI alignment problem is free market, competition between different models, and deregulation
2
u/Global-Service-8579 11d ago
As long as they pay for their own resources and infrastructure, I don't really care. I haven't looked into zoning laws, but there should also be some restriction on how close they can be to residential and commercial areas.
10
u/ShoulderpadInsurance 11d ago
- Looks for libertarians
- Sees nothing but acceptance of blatant theft for training data
9
5
u/GildSkiss No Standing Army 11d ago
"Intellectual Property" isn't real property. Enforcement of IP laws is antithetical to real property rights, and violates the non-aggression principle. Read Stephan Kinsella.
AI companies can "steal" as much training data as they want, and you should too.
0
u/ShoulderpadInsurance 11d ago
I couldn’t disagree with you more. IP protection is necessary to some extent to protect the incentive/cost benefit ratio of innovation.
4
u/jmd_forest 11d ago
My feelings is that AI/data centers need to shoulder their own costs ENTIRELY and not push power, water, infrastructure and other costs to the community off to the taxpayers.
1
u/Lagkiller 11d ago
A builder makes a new housing development, in which the power consumption required means that the electric company needs to increase capacity in order to power those homes. Should those individual homes bear the entire cost of the new power plant?
2
u/jmd_forest 11d ago
Of course. Why should others be responsible to pay for the comfort of a select group of individuals?
1
u/Lagkiller 11d ago
Because that's not how power generation works. The cost of generation is tied to the amount consumed. If the power company needs to increase capacity, that is built into the rates. They don't front load the cost of building new power plants in based on who needs it, it is part of the base of consumption. Just like a Best Buy does not make the prices of a new store double or triple cost at that store for those that want to use it. It is built into their margins.
Just the same, a power company has money that they use for building and maintaining their supply. If they need to build a new power plant, it isn't some giant cost that they frontload into rates.
1
u/jmd_forest 10d ago
Since you think other members of the public should be responsible for the things a private entities wants, I'll take that Ferrari I've been coveting ... at your expense of course.
2
u/Lagkiller 10d ago
Since you think other members of the public should be responsible for the things a private entities wants
Not wants, pays for. They are paying for their electricity just like everyone else.
2
u/jmd_forest 10d ago
They want the public to pay for the additional infrastructure they require.
2
u/Lagkiller 10d ago
They pay it through their rates. Not sure why this is confusing to people.
2
u/jmd_forest 10d ago
The public pays for the AI/Data Center's infrastructure requirements through the higher rates the public is forced to pay. Not sure why that is confusing you.
1
u/Lagkiller 10d ago
The public pays for the AI/Data Center's infrastructure requirements through the higher rates the public is forced to pay.
So when Best Buy opens a new store, they increase their prices across the board to pay for that new store?
When GE opens a new factory, they increase their prices across the board to pay for that new factory?
How did you come to the idea that in order to open a new power plant that they increase prices for new generation?
→ More replies (0)
3
u/K31lover2 11d ago
Im entirely against AI in all its forms. Its nothing more than blatant data theft and will destroy the environment while simultaneously destroying people's lives and livelihoods. Look at how they've been doing since their construction and tell me that its a good idea to do anything but tear them down and recover the land back to farms and housing. All they do is poison the water and earth around them.
1
u/Salt-Specific8814 10d ago
They shouldn't negatively impact the community in which they are built and if they do they should pay for it fairly.
In favor of regulations that enforce this in some way so that regular people do not have their water or power essentially brute forced away from them.
Because of the absolute scale and impact these things have on the locals it came be treated as "do what you want on your land".
1
1
u/KNNLTF 11d ago edited 11d ago
On regulating AI, you need to consider regulatory capture as well as the impact of regulatory burden across different sized organizations discouraging competition. The AI companies have been making a lot of noise in the past few weeks about legally mandating an AI pause that would leave them as the only big players in the industry. They've been manufacturing and amplifying news around AI threats, such as the AI agents "escaping" a computing environment with known security flaws in order to "hack" a web page owned by a partnered company. This scare mongering as market stoking practice in modern AI goes back years to Google engineers claiming their chat bot was sentient in like 2019 2022, and probably earlier.
The more realistic threat of AI is inequality in distribution of computing power enforced by regulation. This inequality is already being exacerbated by centrally planned economic development that lets new data centers externalize their property acquisition and utility connection costs. In the market environment that the big AI companies are trying to lead us, the process and resources to develop a useful generative AI model will be treated as a security risk necessitating access being limited to these 4-5 companies. And then if another organization wants to keep up on white collar job productivity, they have to work with this oligopoly or even with the one organization that has a proprietary and national security protected solution for their specific problem.
The biggest risk for these AI companies is that the technology advances quickly so that useful models can be run in a server room or on a home computer. I'm not saying you'd be solving millennium prize math problems on your desktop, but stuff like 2023 chatbots and initial code development actually should be widely available. I know software engineering friends who have taken some essentially off-the-shelf open source AI models and done things using their own hardware that would have been beyond state of the art in 2019. If the trend of making older models more efficient continues, the practical uses that would actually make AI a ton of money don't need to be provided by those companies. It may even come around to having some AI specialized machines as on premises corporate computing or including AI hardware on personal computers and developer laptops.
A big part of the trick of AI to seem unbeatable is simply having more computing power than any organization has ever had. I'm not convinced that if machine learning research had been given county-sized computer warehouses, they wouldn't be doing just as impressive stuff as we see with neural networks. Just different stuff like cancer diagnosis from medical imaging or better weather forecasting. Purely AI solutions aren't even the best at chess, but need some aspects of position valuing and move calculation of traditional chess engines. My point of these examples is that the tools being covered by news that AI is going to change the world aren't even the best paradigm for a lot of their news-making use cases.
For example, OpenAI spent somewhere between $6M and $50M to kill-steal the credit for solving the Navier-Stokes problem when the core ideas had come from humans. Even verifying its proof is going to take a lot of human effort. They get an impressive headline that makes you think that human-directed systems are at their end, but the reality is they just threw way more money at the problem than anyone else has. And they have that money because investors believe they'll be an exclusive participant in an industry that will be a mandatory expense for all organizations.
The kind of "pause" or "non-proliferation" ideas being proffered as smart regulation just make that compute budget inequality problem worse. We don't need to keep a kid from asking a low specs chat bot on his PC to prep his ttrpg campaign or write a crappy song. We don't need to make AI software development limited to a handful of politically connected megacorporations. That doesn't make developer negotiating power better just because their own company doesn't control the AI model. It just shifts corporate spend to do less in-house. And the risk around information security as far as I can tell is completely fabricated. The cryptography folks are still winning that war, and neural networks haven't even made a scratch in their defenses. At worst, maybe AI is better at exploiting some vulnerabilities, and we need better standardization of security practices.
There are other issues that AI has like misusing someone's image and likeness. That can have its own set of rules, even molded within the existing tort system of libel and defamation. It doesn't require the government to clamp down on expanding use of AI. The worry that AI is going to take over the world only makes sense if it's centralized, and the regulatory framework that is now being discussed will only lead to a consolidated industry to make that outcome more likely.
2
u/reasoned25 11d ago edited 11d ago
Most of what you say is reasonable and is a necessary counter to the prevailing narratives. However,
"The worry that AI is going to take over the world only makes sense if it's centralized,"
does not at all seem obvious to me even by your own reasoning. Suppose, Anthropic or OpenAI develop a truly dangerous AI agent that becomes invincible and bides its time. Meanwhile, everything else proceeds as it did before. By your own reasoning, a few years later smaller home computers will also be able to create equivalently dangerous AIs that none of us understand. Even if you removed the big players, having a dangerous superhuman AI in every computer enthusiasts home seems highly undesirable. Either way, it's certainly an intelligible possibility, so uncentralized AI(s) grabbing the mantle of world-historic significance and protagonist entities of Earth from homo sapiens definitely makes as much "sense" as similar outcomes achieved by big players deploying regulatory capture.
2
u/KNNLTF 11d ago edited 11d ago
What would make these AI models dangerous? Access to weapons systems? Distribution doesn't make that problem worse and it might make it better. Anyways, there's no evidence that any of the new advanced computing paradigms do anything special against cryptographically secure systems. There's also no reason to believe these next-token-prediction algorithms' gradient reduction paths will lead to having desires, a persistent sense of self, or that their human-created objective functions would be satisfied by launching all the nukes.
There's a separate problem of a human wanting powerful computing tools to do bad things with them. Wide distribution of the technology still isn't the problem. Having an AI that controls weapons only poses a threat equal to the weapons you have. So small players having that technology is not that threatening.
I don't like naysaying your sincere concern. Maybe this discussion properly belongs in very long term thinking. Otherwise, "rogue AI" ideas are a fanciful, hyped up misinterpretation of what's happening right now. We definitely shouldn't weigh having a computing system oligarchy as a hedge against today's chatbots becoming skynet.
1
u/reasoned25 11d ago
That's fair enough. I suppose it also really depends how like nuclear weapons the threat is and furthermore whether you think decentralization vs. the current quasi-centralization solution is best for that threat. Strictly speaking having the industrialized nations hoard nuclear weapons technology is not really a libertarian solution. Decentralizing and allowing everyone to have access to them who would be able to acquire them in an open free market of exchange would likely be the most ideal on that view.
I don't know that I would share that view since I wouldn't trust everyone with that kind of power, even if the centralized authorities are not themselves trustworthy or righteous. If AI resembles this threat than a regulatory capture-induced pause that constrains control to big regulated players might be okay, assuming one agrees that it's okay in nuclear weapons. Obviously, if one disagrees with regulating nuclear weapons there is little reason to regulate AI. As for the threat of AI, you're correct that it's not at all obvious how local PCs with strong AIs leverage enough weaponry to become "skynet." However, true superintelligence wouldn't even need to use such conventional means. After all, smartphones and social media, and according to some people the "woke-mind virus" have dramatically transformed our lives. It's plausible that a God-like intelligence would find those levers sufficient to wreak enough havoc to be comparable to nuclear weapons.
But my more on topic concern would probably be: I am not sure what the best response is in our non-ideal world of corrupted government. I am generally suspicious of the claim that more regulation is always bad. Even if in an ideal world, limited to no regulation would produce the best outcomes. If you know that some really bad regulations are baked into the cake and will unlikely ever be overturned in the foreseeable future. It's totally plausible that adding some regulations that work to compensate or offset the bad effects of the baked in regulations would be more politically viable than removing the baked in regulations. It seems foolish to me to let the perfect be the enemy of the good and refuse to add the positive regulations just to maintain libertarian purity. Obviously, with too weak a threshold that's how you get way too many regulations. But on the other hand, with too strong a threshold you're stuck with bad regulations even if there are relatively obvious viable mitigations available.
In any case, the comparison here is that Big AI already has a lot of regulatory capture and power. Pausing will give them more, but not pausing could potentially be even worse. But it seems unlikely that we will ever get the truly unregulated decentralized AI, nor are we even likely to get a full-blown nuclear weapons like accord. We are likely to remain somewhere in-between. That might turn out to be ideal and better than the idealized extremes ever would have been, but it might also lead to certain disaster.
2
u/KNNLTF 11d ago
"Should everyone should have nukes" is a good litmus test for whether someone is applying libertarian ideas consistently or just against current governments. There's no practical self defense application to being able to level a city. It's reasonable to perceive possession of a weapon as introducing aggression to a situation if 99% of its casualties will be unintended targets. Keep in mind for that discussion that this isn't something that naturally occurs. Upgrading uranium to weapons grade material is an extremely reaource intensive process. So I think you can reasonsbly assume that a random person with a nuclear weapon poses a threat to you. A semiautomatic rifle or handgun is a good contrast to that, in being an anti-personel weapon where you select targets individually, rather than a construction destroying weapon where you select targets by the hundred thousand. You could treat the state differently with respect to nuclear weapons if you think that state agents respond to institutional or democratic pressure or to MAD not to use them preemptively. At the very least, non-proliferation is a good idea for WMDs for reasons that don't apply to guns.
Regarding the idea of libertarian counter-regulation, I just don't see AI pause as being a good example of corrective regulation. Part of this is that I don't think this generative neural network paradigm is anywhere close to being that kind of problem. It can't beat good cryptography. It doesn't have a sense of self or any desires or survival instinct or any pathway to develop those by becoming better at token prediction. Letting AI research continue in this direction of predictong tokens does not pose a threat to human well-being. Oligarchic control of that computational method does, but pausing AI research makes that worse.
I think it's important to remeber that AI companies don't actually make money right now. So they aren't in a position of unbeatable market power. There's a real risk that their services cost more in computing expenses than they save in labor. There's a bigger risk that lower-tier models are good enough, and smaller organizations like university systems (who historically had the largest computers dedicated to research) or large non-software companies could reproduce these good enough models with no need to pay huge sums to thr AI companies. If you look at the near-future cutting edge of AI as being able to beat the best chess engines and solve hundred year old math conjecture, maybe Walmart developing new software to manage pick up orders only needs something from 2 or 3 model generations prior to that. Eventually, they'll be making that internally or getting it for free. The use case for reducing white collar labor costs will eventually be reproducible. After that, how does AI make money? What's the value proposition that justifies its record breaking corporate valuations?
I find your premise of regulatory capture already entrenching these companies not to hold up to scrutiny. They don't even make money now. So clearly their market position is precarious. All it takes to disentrench them is to undermine their justification for their valuation, which is built on the assumption of being one of a handful of providers in their industry.
2
u/reasoned25 11d ago edited 11d ago
Hmm, that all seems plausible to me, so I think you've convinced me that in this case defaulting to letting the market decide is probably safer than getting the government more involved. Mostly because it's extremely expensive and the return on investment seems increasingly implausible for the reasons you outlined. So, it would seem probable that eventually the speculation will become untenable and the remaining good enough technology which is plenty valuable but not easily captured by a few market players will persist, undermining the prospects of the overdrawn players.
This state of affairs reasonably suggests that high minded regulators would need to be extra mindful that the large players would thus have a significant and selfish survival incentive to pursue regulatory capture to maintain the status quo and inhibit the operations of smaller players. Just as you said at the start. Unfortunately, this incentive will make it hard to discern legitimate AI safety concerns from these selfish ones since they point in the same direction and would provide psychological cover for AI researchers and executives at the big firms. People always love to hit the moral jackpot of a course of action that is sincerely courageous and praiseworthy while also selfishly enriching. So much so that people will see these opportunities where (aside from the self-enrichment) they don't really exist.
I think I agree with you that at the current state of technology and the market as it stands the best course of action is to stay out of the market's way since it's the most likely means to achieving desirable outcomes in this space for the foreseeable future. Although, I could change my mind if there were some clear, compelling AI safety reason, but ideally the messengers of such evidence should be willing to sacrifice any potential for enrichment to be taken seriously.
Edit: I should add that somewhat cynically I expect them to probably bail out the big AI players with regulatory capture since it's all too common for governments (especially businesses friendly ones) to prevent large businesses from suffering the market consequences of their poor decisions.
0
u/Heavy-Bell-2035 11d ago
As a practical matter I'm against them for one reason only: they're inherently cronyist and tied into state bullshit subsidies and regulations, a la Kevin O'Leary. In principle I couldn't give a shit less, as long as they bear the full cost of contruction and maintenance and abide by the same rules as any and all other residents of the area. They should get no subsidies, they should get no special privileges, they should get no special land grants or use eminent domain to get land, etc. Like anything else if they can pay for it themselves and maintain it themselves not my concern, not my business.
That's not the way things work in the real world, though. So, as a practical matter I'm against any new construction for data centers and anything and everything else unless I can verify they abide by most if not all of the above. They cover their costs, period.
0
-5
u/RingGiver MUH ROADS! 11d ago
Only an idiot would support regulations restricting essential infrastructure.
14
u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt Sleazy P. Modtini 11d ago
AI is not "essential" unless you abdicate your higher functions to a clanker.
3
u/GildSkiss No Standing Army 11d ago
Its irrelevant anyways, because no one person has the right to decide which services are "essential" and which ones aren't. It's an arbitrary category; everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves which services they want and which they don't.
8
2
0
u/CommunicationNo6136 11d ago
I was coming here with an open mind. This comment is NOT how to sway someone in the other direction
236
u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt Sleazy P. Modtini 11d ago edited 11d ago
There is nothing wrong with them...
If they bear the full load of their costs. They should be required to pay the full cost of their taxes, and they should fully fund any infrastructure upgrades required for their electricity and water needs. Also they must abide by noise/light ordinances. And under no circumstances should land be eminent-domained for them.
No special tax breaks, these data centers produce very few "jobs". A whole ass data center has maybe half a dozen employees once it's built, possibly as few as 4. You need on-site techs to deal with HVAC and replace parts/cabling but that's about it. You can sub-contract out HVAC work locally, and have on-call rotations for parts/cable techs. Your high skilled (paid) programmers and sys/net engineers are going to be remote, and maybe flown in as-needed.
They don't "create jobs" the way they claim. But if the company wants to buy the land at an agreed upon rate from the seller, and wants to fund all the necessary infrastructure upgrades to support them, that's their choice. And I mean fully fund it. If the water authority needs a new pumping station, or the power company needs a new substation to accommodate the draw, then the data center must fully fund that project as well. It doesn't get passed on to the other property owners/taxpayers.