https://archive.ph/2026.11.05-224738/https://www.ft.com/content/32fd4450-5880-437d-9bd9-df13289ada24
The US midterm elections — in which voters elected anti-data centre governors in Texas, Georgia and Ohio and passed 38 local votes in favour of restrictions on their development — have forced the tech industry to reflect on its failure to connect with the public.
“The reason is not that people are Luddites . . . it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid. It has become a political symbol,” said Vik Bajaj, co-chief executive of the Jeff Bezos-backed AI start-up Prometheus.
. . . “As a profession, we have spent two years pretty dangerously telling people that AI will change the future of work for the worse — that they will be out of jobs, that their children will be out of jobs, their grandchildren will live in a world that’s unrecognisable. And then for the last year or so, we’ve also been flirting with the idea that it’s an existential crisis.”
“I think this election was a big wake-up call . . . to take a pause and think about what’s happening and approach this in a way that’s maybe a little more thoughtful,” said John Hanke, founder of Niantic Spatial, the AI world model company and gaming group that made Pokémon Go. “It’s been go, go, go, build, build, build, and some of that has been . . . with head buried in sand.”
BURN IT DOWN BURN IT DOWN
GET. FUCKED.
the boom was artiicial in the first place. we just didn’t buy it
Don’t “threaten” : execute.
Ah yes, the old “the rubes aren’t really against AI, they’re just ignorant!” We don’t actually have to change anything about what we’re doing or stop doing it, we just need to hire the right PR firm so what we’re doing seems “thoughtful.”
Good.
They realized the people still have the ultimate power and they can’t just pretend that we don’t exist
They realized the people still have the ultimate power
Wait, you have identified the problem here… Democracy. Companies just need to do steps to remove that barrier. /s
Oh, they are trying.
I read the whole thing, and all I got was "oh shit, we might be fucked because of the non-billionaires, let’s start making them believe we care about them“.
Too late.
“The reason is not that people are Luddites . . . it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid. It has become a political symbol,” ~ Vik Bajaj, co-chief executive of the Jeff Bezos-backed AI start-up Prometheus.
Fuck off Vik, take bezos with you.
Yeah fuck this guy for comparing us to antimaskers. We have actual REASONS why AI is bad. People who were antimask were just fucking stupid.
Yeah you got to love it. Says that people aren’t luddites then proceeds to describe how they are complete luddites in his eyes.
These fuck weeds have absolutely no fucking clue why people hate AI.
it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid
‘ai’ is not the masks in this scenario, it is the fucking virus.
Trillion dollars of their money. Not ours. We never wanted this shit. They wanted this shit in order to surveil us and make billions more.
Comparing ai datacenter backlash to masking backlash during covid is insane.
If anything, being pro-mask is being anti-ai. Its just fucking logical.
Or, you know, the more likely approach is datacenters just make everyones lives worse in multiple unique ways. Maybe they dont want that if its a willing choice, unlike a pandemic.
The attempt to frame anti-ai sentiment as similar to anti-vax is a deliberate attempt to paint protesters as ‘emotional’, ‘illogical’ or just plain stupid. Fuck it, I don’t think it’s even worth arguing with people who say stuff like that.
Indeed, when refuting bad faith digs like this, you give them credibility in the eyes of the uniformed.
The trick is to counterattack on your own points, not answer their baseless talking points. I.e.:LM models are not AI, and never will be, they will never pay for these data centers, and our tax dollars will bail them out in exchange for bending us over for the government and their pals.
Maybe we should just run with it and get the anti-vaxxers on board with opposing data centers too. Just tell them after they chip us they’re going to use the data centers to control us all.
The comparison is also stupid because being “anti-mask”, was literally a political symbol.
Also, people are not protesting data centers as a “political symbol”. They are protesting them because it’s a huge waste of energy and effort that provides mostly trash results that will never be efit most people in a meaningful way that is accelerating the already shitty climate problem.
Not to mention tech companies have spent a decade now obliterating trust in tech they spent the previous decades building. No fucking privacy, no choice to just use a product. It’s all 10,000 ads or subscriptions that just go up and up and up for more features and improvements no one fucking needs or wants because everything has to “move fast.” Then they just start forcibly hoovering up all the data, and even if you take a LOT of pain in the ass steps to avoid letting your data get sucked up they do it anyway by pulling your friends and relative’s data about you and making it harder and harder to do anything with data protections in place line blockers and VPNs.
People are just tired of these shit fuck tech companies, in general.
Being anti mask was/is a Darwin award symbol
God I wish pro-mask had the support of anti-AI. COVID would have died out before it got out of control with 90% people taking it seriously.
Cool. Tell the tech leaders that I say “suck my dick”
Let’s just fix that headline to make it a bit more accurate:
AI backlash threatens make-believe trillion-dollar data centre boom before they have a chance to cash out, say tech leaders
Shut up booster.
Meanwhile, back in reality, it’s AI’s shitty unit economics doing this. A ton of laws have also been broken trying to build these data centers as fast as possible.
No no no, it’s not “breaking the law” it’s “being disruptive!”
/s
It’s a cold war nobody dares talking about, because they’re aware the technology they’re developing to enact a new status quo will make consumer grade equipment more than capable of killing and thus have created a heightened risk of lone wolf and small terror cell attacks. Which is going to be their argument for needing to track everything online, it’s a multilayered shit sandwich
