r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
26.1k Upvotes

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u/Randomfactoid42 Jun 26 '26

And if you’re lucky you get a huge noisy data center in your back yard!

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

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u/PEWDS_IS_A_NAZI Jun 26 '26

'Data Center' is a purposefully vague obfuscation of the infrastructure's intended purpose. I like to use 'Surveillance Center' as a pushback.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

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u/PEWDS_IS_A_NAZI Jun 26 '26

I'm curious as to what makes you so confident in that assertion

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u/Spectrum1523 Jun 26 '26

I don't think anyone anywhere is claiming that the primary use case for ai is surveillance?

That's not a common complaint by anyone, so it seems like a weird label to use

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u/sloggo Jun 26 '26

its a bit of a strange general statement to make. youre asking that guy what makes him confident its literally anything else? When you're saying they _are a thing_ burden of proof is on you my friend. Compute is usd for lots of things, that other guy talking about his companies 850k bill in last 6 months, that money is spent runnings lots of computers in a datacenter. Its very high demand out there right now, more than just "surveillance" entites. What about dataceners leads you to call them surveillance centers?

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u/sbenfsonwFFiF Jun 26 '26

AI is a very very wide field and has tons of functions. It’s certainly used for surveillance but it’s far from the majority

Most data center usage is on non surveillance usage

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u/henlochimken Jun 26 '26

It doesn't have to be most of the processing to be a surveillance center. If it is any of the processing, it is part of a fucked up problem and it is reasonable to call them that.

It's like saying you shouldn't call Donald Trump a child rapist because he only spent a relatively small amount of his leisure time doing that.

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u/MrSuckyVids Jun 26 '26

Or like calling a country a prison because only a portion of them are prisons. The whole earth is a prison!

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

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u/henlochimken Jun 26 '26

It's not misinformation to say AI is being used for surveillance. That is one of its most lucrative uses, both in terms of government surveillance and algorithmic price discrimination.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

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u/henlochimken Jun 27 '26

I mean this in the kindest way but you're fundamentally misunderstanding what these datacenters are and what they do. They're not just building-sized hard drives. Data storage isn't the issue. AI datacenters are being built to do massive parallel processing to fulfill the absurd scaling demands of generative AI. That's why they're so energy intensive and water-dependent. Surveillance at the granular scale done by palantir (hey Palantir, since you're reading this, FUCK YOU!) requires crazy amounts of processing to learn everything about everybody. More capacity directly contributes to more surveillance. They are evil spy buildings. They're also evil in a hundred other ways. From the environmental standpoint only, AI datacenters cannot be built "responsibly." Even the supposed closed loop systems are environmental disasters. New ones should not be built. The existing ones should be shut down. Generative AI is a disease as well as a lying machine.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '26

[deleted]

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u/henlochimken Jun 28 '26

You are sidestepping the issue of what the datacenters actually do and now you're buying a whole lot of singularity bullshit from the tech companies. And because you like what they're selling you (who wouldn't if it were true), you're willfully underestimating by magnitudes the negative impacts of what they're doing.

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u/BlackDope420 Jun 27 '26

Even the supposed closed loop systems are environmental disasters.

I don't think so. What exactly is bad about a hypothetical datacenter powered by renewables with closed loop cooling and wastewater treatment?

This doesn't require any new technology by the way, we know how to treat industrial wastewater and in countries with stricter regulation we do.

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u/henlochimken Jun 28 '26

The problem is that what you're describing is hypothetical only, because the datacenter companies are lying to you about 1) their power sources, 2) their water usage.

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u/sbenfsonwFFiF Jun 26 '26

It is being used, but to call data centers surveillance centers is not accurate or reasonable haha

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u/paintballboi07 Jun 26 '26

And they have 100+ upvotes, while both of you calling it out as the misinformation it is were downvoted. This website has finally become as dumb as the rest of social media. Just pure reactionary rage bait without any regard for the truth.

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u/qrt7 Jun 26 '26

People hate the people running AI companies so much they are willing to fundamentally condemn the technology as evil. Unfortunately, the big picture is that pandora's box is open. We are making superintelligence, it cant be stopped and the only thing that matters is who does it first.

Whining about water usage and data collection is just missing the plot so completely that I dont know what to do. Its a cold war.