美国民众为何越来越反感数据中心

There are at least five different core questions around data centers and their politics.

• In what ways are specific concerns people raise about data centers legitimate?
• In what ways are specific concerns people raise about generative AI legitimate?
• Is it in general a good idea to build more data centers?
• How can we get America to build more (or less) data centers in a better way?
• Why do the American people increasingly really, really hate data centers?

This post focuses on question five, the latest in a series of such posts most famously Jasmine Sun’s road trip.

It is mostly not about the first four questions.

Table of Contents

• The American People Really Hate Data Centers.
• Transmission Lines Are The Control Group.
• Thesis: People Mostly Dislike Data Centers Because They Dislike and Distrust AI, Tech Companies, Big Money And Building Things.
• No It’s Mostly Not the Messaging About AI In General.
• No This Mostly Isn’t An Op.
• No This Isn’t Luxury Belief or Moral Panic.
• A Lot Of People Really Do Want To Stop AI.
• A Lot Of Other People Are Voting No On Tech Or The Man Generally.
• Locals Feel Entitled To Heavily Tax The Gains From Construction.
• Stupid Mistakes Like NDAs Don’t Help.
• People Don’t Like Building or Building New Tech.
• What About The Real Physical Concerns?
• Find A Place To Center Your Data.

The American People Really Hate Data Centers

Support for data centers keeps cratering. Americans really, really hate data centers, and 75% oppose local data center development, despite the economic benefits.

Cremieux illustrates that this opposition mostly does not get solved via arguments about the tangible benefits or costs of data centers. People don’t believe you, and even when they do believe you they don’t care because that wasn’t their true objection. Persuasion buys you a few percent support, but from new very high levels of opposition.

This clearly is mostly not about the physical impact on the community, given that this level of support is now well below that of a coal plant, which is bad enough that it substantially increases the surrounding death rate.

Transmission Lines Are The Control Group

Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.

Transmission lines polling remarkably close to coal plants, when the coal plants actively not only cook the planet but poison the people around them, is crazy. This one absolutely is straight up moral panic.

When we see widespread opposition to transmission lines, and politicians shamelessly jumping on board, you know that a lot of this is simply about building anything new, of any kind, anywhere, especially anything that vaguely seems like it supports our technological infrastructure. And that people will invent phantom concerns, in order to have that not happen or to try and extract concessions or both.

Thesis: People Mostly Dislike Data Centers Because They Dislike and Distrust AI, Tech Companies, Big Money And Building Things

This is my central model.

Building data centers combines:

• AI.
• Big tech.
• Other people having data, especially on you.
• Big money.
• Building things, especially ugly things.
• Not offering that many jobs.

People dislike and distrust these six things. So they hate data centers.

They are also being asked to accept abstract arguments over concrete concerns, the reverse of the situation regarding things like existential risks.

The rest, as they say, is commentary. It is what people latch onto.

They mostly dislike these things for reasons that are wrong in their details, but highly understandable.

Why is opposition rising so quickly? What changed over the last year?

My answer is, mostly bandwagon effects, preference cascades and a rise in salience, combined with AI becoming vastly more visible and starting to impact the world including the job market, combined with a push to build vastly more data centers, which is forcing companies to push into communities that are less receptive.

No It’s Mostly Not the Messaging About AI In General

Many often try to pin the blame for people disliking and distrusting AI on botched messaging. They say the heads of the AI labs should have more often lied. Those CEOs should not have said that their products would take away people’s jobs, and definitely should have said that the product wouldn’t kill everyone, say these folks.

Those same people blaming everything on bad marketing, of course, mostly also think the claims that they say are terrible marketing were intended as marketing. They think everything is marketing. That everything is vibes. That reality doesn’t matter.

They are wrong. People very much are noticing things about underlying reality, especially locally as it impacts them and people they know. They are using empiricism and first principles reasoning, and picking up vibes from each other. It is possible to intentionally steer this process with the right words, but it is a lot harder than it looks.

This is because they don’t like AI, and also ‘I don’t like the Computer Man,’ and also they don’t like The Man.

• They fear for their jobs because it is sensible to fear for your job given what AI can clearly do, and how people are planning for and reacting to AI.
• They fear that humanity will be usurped or wiped out because that is an obvious thing to worry about when building smarter artificial minds, as illustrated by every story and thought experiment about such minds ever, without any need to get into the more detailed and technical reasons for worry.
• They fear their culture and things they care about will be wiped out, because they’ve seen it before and can see it happening again in real time in some ways.
• They fear that big tech and big money are full of false promises and there will be a catch, because of the entire history of everything, as one would observe from the average person’s point of view. They don’t know economics, and never have. They do notice that in many cases communities allowing such construction look like they’re getting screwed out of their ‘fair share’ although in some cases not.
• They fear building and care about relative position. They are not abundance libertarians.

People’s concerns about tech are often coming from very basic places, you know?

PoIiMath: I believe that data center opposition is not so much about AI and more about the fact that your grandma doesn’t understand 2FA authentication or that you need a mobile phone to pay for downtown parking.

That level of concern seems right, but young people oppose data centers more than old ones, so it mostly isn’t about lack of tech proficiency.

I do not think that the CEO messaging around AI much mattered. No one knows who Dario Amodei is or what he is saying. They might know who Sam Altman is, but they are forming impressions based mostly on other things.

Thus, shots like this from Senator Murphy are good lines but I don’t think people ‘just’ believe them. People don’t just.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut): I don’t know…the AI industry has been basically promising to destroy jobs at scale and poison our kids with addictive products and it feels like people are just believing them.

The messaging on various levels definitely hasn’t helped, and I do think that messaging on data centers in particular is bad and is making things worse, but even then it is not the main thing.

I don’t want to go beyond scope, addressing this is a distinct post I plan to write soon, but in brief the ‘the fears are all marketing’ theory is Obvious Nonsense. The whole point is that this is beyond terrible as marketing, yet they say it anyway. So even if you (highly reasonably) do not trust these labs or CEOs at all, the reason they say these things is that they believe them, and in these instances they are trying to be helpful. To the extent that they did tell us, this is to their credit.