To build their thinking machines, the largest A.I. firms have undertaken one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in American history. Not even during the peak years of building the railway, interstate highways or fiber optic networks did Americans spend, proportionally, what these companies will spend this year. The price tag of this boom now exceeds that of the Apollo space program and the Korean War. If it cannot secure new land to build on, this entire project will sputter out.
~ Tanner Greer via The New York Times

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We are more than a trillion dollars deep into our national wager on machine intelligence. The climb in the stock market has buoyed the fortunes of Americans with a real stake in it — but has done very little for everyone else. Half of the country’s adults do not even use artificial intelligence chatbots. Only a quarter of American adults use these services daily, and often for small things: answering idle questions, hunting down recipes, softening otherwise irate emails to their co-workers. For much of our country, Artificial Intelligence is nothing more than that thing the kids use to cheat on their homework.
~ Tanner Greer via The New York Times

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This whole tower of wealth and expectation is built on land that is controlled by ordinary Americans — and ordinary Americans possess an absolute hatred for the data centers. This hate will endure until the builders of the data centers can use their products to tangibly benefit the lives of ordinary people who oppose them.
~ Tanner Greer via The New York Times

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No Artificial Intelligence executive is publishing long manifestoes on how to resolve the backlash against the data center buildout. This is a problem Silicon Valley does not know how to solve. The backlash would not matter if progress in machine intelligence rested solely on a steady diet of capital. But it also requires land — land for the supercomputers powering the industry’s A.I. agents and land for the electric plants powering these computers.
~ Tanner Greer via The New York Times

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