My conspiracy spidy senses are tingling.
Surveillance. Why you think every car has a camera now? Why are flocks around? Constant tracking for the regime so they cannot be defied.
Its way scarier than people even imagine, but no one cares, so I choose to also ignore it. Not worth the stress because there’s nothing you can do.
Luigi comes to mind. With enough surveillance law enforcement could have literally tracked his every step. I could see it pushed by billionaires for security reasons. Their security mind you. Us peasants can get fucked.
AI. Whoever wins the AI arms race will be able to print money and reign over the world.
Because NVidia made a whole bunch of GPUs that are specifically for parallel processing massive amounts of information and floating point math, which is what is needed for machine learning, model training, LLMs, and everything else we call “a.i.”
They took on a huge amount of investment in 2024, raising $25B in debt to fund more production. In the last 3 years they have sold a ton of hardware. That hardware was bought by people with a ton of cash or a ton of credit.
How much did they sell? In the last 3 years, something like the equivalent of 12GW of GPUs have been sold by NVidia alone. In the US, we have about 30GW of data centers, almost all of them were already full. So in 3 years NVidia sold about a third of the total capacity of the country.
Those cards have nowhere to go to be powered on. They are sitting in warehouses right now. People have spent hundreds of millions on GPUs from NVidia and they are sitting in boxes doing nothing. Because there’s not 12GW of available data center space for them to go.
It took the US something like 30 years to get to 30GW of data center capacity. Even we assume doubling every 10 years, it’s going to take another 7 years to get the next 30GW.
And that means building a shit ton of data centers.
- Surveillance, reverse data anonymization, behaviour analysis, autogenerated prosecutions, propaganda injection, flooding the zone, and a man in the middle for fact finding searches.
- Make middle managers and CEOs feel special.
- Make stock numbers go up.
- Tax incentives on processing power upgrades while environmental laws are at a low and entrenching will allow negligence to continue.
- Moore’s law is staggered so much, it’s likely today’s hardware will not be replaced soon. Also they’re all invested in Nvidia anyways.
- The perception of positive change during a time when stagnation is nearly absolute in the west.
FOMO. In addition to the below, AI is a huge bubble and the only way to win is to have the biggest and the most datacenters. So companies are in a rush to grow the fastest.
When the bubble pops, each hopes to remain on top, dominating a new industry and reaping untold wealth. However most of those companies will lose. Most of those datacenters will shut down. It will be “dead malls” all over again. It will be society impacted the losses of business excess again
Meanwhile a huge part of the problems they cause is we are way behind in infrastructure spending. We already weren’t able to get sufficient power everywhere needed. We already couldn’t easily support new power generation or large power users. Now we’re suddenly tripling projected power growth?
And infrastructure spending from the 2022 bill was mostly cancelled in the current political chaos. And we’re still not talking about being so far behind on infrastructure spending. We don’t seem to care that infrastructure in good repair would be much more resilient to sudden needs like this, much more able to support innovation
data centers are highly concentrated super computer clusters and no need to have conspiracy spidy senses, they outright said that it is to replace human labor and therefore the cost of building and running them is to replace the money spent on wages.
it wont work tho bcs llms simply cant work human jobs. doesnt stop the oligarchy from believing they can, and destroying our planet in the pursuit of achieving it.
This reply is not pulling any punches, the official line is something about freeing humanity from the drudgery of labour. But you are right, totalitarian grip on a dwindling demoralised population by the few who are too arrogant to see they are on the list too is probably closer to the mark.
Funny how up until now they always talked about the dignity of work, and now that they think they can replace us, labor is drudgery.
Whatever they might be able to replace humans for, they can’t do it anywhere as cheaply as a human. So, the results would need to be very valuable. Outside of scientific research, which would still need to be verified and refined by humans, I don’t see a sustainable use for these things. They’re way, way too costly to use as a toy for the masses, that will soon be shut down.
the entire point of work is that a living being has to do it in order to create value (it can exchange) for survival.
a robot has no needs. a machine does not survive. a digital program does not live.
at the beginning of the work preocess, no matter how many layers of tools, devices and machines, layers of management, trade and logistics, is always a human. and that human needs to know all about how those tools, devices and machines work, or rather how to work with them. they have to understand management communications, count trade and logistics into every single action, all of that, for every work process.
and the oligarchy simply is not capable of that. the only thing they have is the management part, but only orders downwards and responses from below. that is all the work experience billionaire ceos have. and no single person, not even hundreds if not thousands, can possibly understand all that is necessary to upkeep the necessities of modern industrial life. only the collective of the working people can.
holy frog kinda drifted into mad agitprop rn ngl
The current model of AI known as LLMs have a direct relationship between how well they work, and how much computational power you can put behind them. More computers = more smarter.
Remember how every major tech company since forever has been sitting on just stupid amounts of cash? All of a sudden, they all had a thing that if they spent more money on, it would get more better. And all of them are betting the one that spends the most, is going to win capitalism.
Meanwhile, China has been sitting back waiting to undercut all of them. Because at the end of the day, the AI war is a production war, and China already won that title years ago.
Obviously thanks to AI. But I will share some information I got on a call with Microsoft the other day, they have had to pause their roll out of the data lake feature because they offered it to everyone and too many people clicked the button to turn it on and now they have actually run out of resources in a lot of their data centers. So just dumb shit all around.
We need datacenters to enable all the Internet stuff. If you buy stuff online, binge TV shows, or rot your brain on social media, your phone is communicating with some back-end server in “the cloud”. And the cloud is all in datacenters now, because they are all connected to the Internet, and each other. So if you want to host an Internet service where everyone can get to it, even if it’s just a virtual server on a cloud platform, that virtual server lives in a datacenter.
The reason it is all hitting the news now is that AI hardware takes much more power than a standard Linux server. So new hyperscalar /AI datacenters require a lot more power than older ones. And in areas without sane regulations, datacenters can go up much more quickly than new power plants can go up. So, if local governments and regulators aren’t looking that closely, new datacenters can quickly drive demand that the local utility can’t service without buying more power on the open market. And unless the datacenter is required by local regulations to pay the the higher price for that extra load, the cost is divided across all consumers.
Also, this increased power consumption inside each rack comes with additional cooling requirements. Old datacenters can make do with air cooling, but these new ones all use liquid cooling. And the cheapest way to do that is evaporative cooling, which “uses up” all the water we’ve been reading about. (There are closed-loop methods that don’t “use up” water, but they are more expensive so the datacenters don’t use it).
So, really, it’s all a scaling problem. One datacenter doesn’t cause that much of a problem. But they grow in clumps, like a fungus. Dozens of datacenters in a small area can cause environmental havoc.
Capex demands constant explo-oita/ra-tion. It’s really just massive scale “maybe this will work? Anyone else got any ideas? No?”
AI task needs Lots of compute power. Ivestors think that AI will take over more and more task and that it is a great Invest.
