I certainly don't want it in my backyard

by HCE, Tuesday, June 02, 2026, 07:04 (7 days ago) @ Regular Joseph
edited by HCE, Tuesday, June 02, 2026, 07:13

The fact that Google is planning to build a data center in my figurative backyard, where it will guzzle my community's drinking water, keeps me up at night. Personally, I don't want these things in anyone's backyard, but to Pat's point, plenty of people seem perfectly content to use AI, provided the environmental costs are unseen and borne by someone else's community. It's not unlike those videos of graduating students booing commencement speakers for celebrating AI: most of those students were happy to use AI to write their papers for them, but they're outraged now that the same tech they outsourced their work to might be bad for their career prospects.

Of course, all of this is part of a wider conversation about the real costs of AI and the Faust-like ways we're making our Faustian bargains with technology, but very few people seem willing to broach such matters these days.