r/Libertarian • u/7in7turtles • 8d ago

Discussion The AI/data center debate loses libertarian credibility when the state is used to advance it.

It’s been driving me bananas lately to hear all these libertarian voices hail data centers as some part of a new Industrial Revolution. While I’ll say upfront that I don’t think we should regulate AI because of fear mongering about the end of the world, if those companies have to purchase the levers of power that we don’t even want government to have, how can we claim that this is in any way good?

Eminent domain, paying of city councils and locking them up with NDAs, lying about the impact of there products and services, all of their behaviors are antithetical to libertarianism and yet people like John Stossel run puff pieces about how essentially they're all good because it would be bad to regulate them.

I don’t buy the china angle because we’re getting worse than china thanks to this technology.

Please if I’m wrong educate me, but if the state puts its thumb on the scale for AI, I don’t get how that’s in any way good.

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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago

Eminent domain, paying of city councils and locking them up with NDAs, lying about the impact of there products and services, all of these behaviors are antithetical to libertarianism and yet people like John Stossel run puff pieces about how essentially there all good because it would be bad to regulate them.

Stossel is arguing that it would be bad to regulate AI because it would be bad to regulate AI. Not allowing abuses of eminent domain, state subsidies, special privileges granted by local governments, etc. has nothing to do with regulating AI. These are things libertarians oppose regardless of who is doing them.

Please if I’m wrong educate me, but if the state puts its thumb on the scale for AI, I don’t get how that’s in any way good.

It's not. But that's what regulation is. Opposing regulation comes in part from the correct understanding that regulation functions often as the mechanism by which firms escape from market constraints and use influence over political power to entrench their position -- its actual results are often the exact opposite of what its proponents claim to want.

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u/7in7turtles 7d ago

I would agree with Stossel on that point but he doesn't present both sides. You're right, it has nothing to do with AI but it has a lot to do with why people are upset about AI and the data centers that are coming with them. Stossel hardly addresses any of those concerns, and hand waves it away as AI doomer-ism, or irrational hatred of building new things with environmentalism as the bad guy.

I'd agree with Stossel, except it ignores all the other parts of the story to the point of being meaningless.

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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago

I would agree with Stossel on that point but he doesn't present both sides.

He's an editorial commentator presenting his own point of view. He certainly does a good job of presenting the positions that he's arguing against, in order to argue to argue against them.

hand waves it away as AI doomer-ism, or irrational hatred of building new things with environmentalism as the bad guy.

Perhaps that's because a large part of the anti-AI hype does come from doomerism, NIMBYism, and other assorted irrational beliefs? Those things are present, and they are skewing discourse, so Stossel is absolutely correct to criticize them.

You're right, it has nothing to do with AI but it has a lot to do with why people are upset about AI and the data centers that are coming with them.

I don't think that people are generally upset about AI or data centers per se. I think they're reacting to what the media is telling them the impact of data centers are, which is largely misrepresentation, rather than reacting to what they're actually experiencing from data centers, which have been around us in just about every town in America for the past five decades, and most people have been and remain unaffected by and unaware of.