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Joined 23 days ago
Cake day: October 18th, 2026
  • morallysuperior@lemmy.mltotechnology@hexbear.net•What’s the deal with techbros claiming that AI and data centers have no adverse effects on the environment?English
    5·
    24 hours ago

    We don’t need most of the land being dedicated to agriculture. Growing animals is massively inefficient and they eat tons more grains and silage than humans would eat if we just ate the food directly. That said;

    If you are talking to pedantic tech bros it isn’t just denial. Their world view rejects what you are saying. Building the data center is a net positive because it creates economic activity. They believe the act of negotiating will always lead to the best case outcome. Interference with economic activity is the worst case because that is where everything breaks down and causes problems. Here you are you proposing to them their worst case.

    Most are data centers are general purpose for large public clouds like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They run everything from streaming video, to websites like Hexbear, to telecom like mobile devices, discord, zoom. Decoupled from training, streaming video uses far more data center resources per use than AI to answer questions and write code. So what else is it that you are coming out against that you want them to stop that they are doing that is less important than food?

    To me, besides being bad for the environment, the data center build outs are a problem because they are servicing organizations that use machine learning and visual processing specifically to enable surveillance. The content generators enable corporate propaganda that is designed to prevent class solidarity. The data centers enable the military-industrial complex to use a variety of automated systems to commit acts that humans (in uniform or otherwise) might actually stop and or at least report on and now they can happen without any or recourse.

    This is why to me utilitarian ethics are so suspect, if measuring utility is arbitrary, you can come to any decision if you just choose the measurements to confirm a bias. Their measurement for success, wealth, power, influence is GDP. So you will never get a moral or ethical imperative to make sense to them like “you can’t fuck up the environment because the environment is good for us.” Can you show to them how investing in nature, wildlife, conservation, regulations on pollution would increase the GDP and by extension their portfolios? That is their armor.

    I think to actually get through to one of them, if it is even possible, would be to start with something bad like surveillance or never ending automated military domination and figure out why it causes people to buy fewer labubu’s.