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The following is an excerpt of a draft of this article on AI. Its inclusion in that article distracted from the more important messages of that article so I decided to take it out. I have published it here because I feel it contains information and ideas that I would like people to see. Please note that this writing was not meant to be an exhaustive debunk of all of the complaints people have on these topics, but only a brief section of an article meant to open peoples’ minds to a new perspective.
Again this is an excerpt of a draft written long enough ago that it may not even be relevant anymore, this is not a fully polished article, please judge it accordingly.
A month or two ago I couldn’t spend more than two minutes on the internet without coming across someone whining about AI, data centers, or Flock cameras and I couldn’t go a day in real life without hearing someone reference one of those topics. I got sick of it, partially because I had been aware of all of those things long before the general public started discussing them so none of it was new or interesting to me, but mostly because nearly everything being said about AI, data canters, and Flock cameras was incredibly stupid, uninformed, and tribalistic. Many people would state their opinion based on wildly inaccurate claim then say that if you disagreed with them you had to be a satan worshiping pedophile or something like that. The level of mass psychosis I was witnessing was unlike anything I’ve ever recognized.
Thankfully the outrage over these topics has died down (especially as people have learned it was largely fueled by Chinese propaganda) but I fear many of you may still be suffering from symptoms of that mass psychosis the world was just caught up in. I’d like to calm your fears about AI, data centers, and Flock cameras, or at least give you enough information on those topics to approach them with a level head. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do that for each of those topics, so I will briefly discuss data centers and Flock cameras before going more in depth on the most important of the three topics. Before I do that I’d like to make it clear that I don’t really like AI, data centers, or Flock cameras, I’m not arguing that we should fully support any of these things, I liked the world better before these things came into it. Sadly AI, data centers, and Flock cameras are largely here to stay and we need to accept that. Fortunately none of them are as bad as the low energy complainers, debaters, and whiners of the internet would make you believe they are, and AI has the potential to vastly improve your life if you use it properly.
Data Centers aren’t Scary
There are a lot of data centers being built around me, I’d know because I do work for some of them. You may call me biased on this issue because I (to a small degree) financially benefit from the construction of data centers in my area but I see it differently. Because I make money off of something so many people blindly call evil I’ve had to think deeply about whether or not I should look for a new job. As I’ve looked into the common complaints people have against data centers I have found that just about everything people say about them, and just about everything you think you know about them, is either blown out of proportion, presented without context, or just plain false.
I could go through and debunk a bunch of claims, but I don’t have time for that. What I do have to say is that the engineers who design these things are smarter than you. The issues you see with data centers, such as the water requirements or the strain on the power grid are things that these people have already considered and accounted for. Assuming you’re smarter than the people who spent years studying these subjects, or thinking you’ve found an issue that the people whose job it is to consider edge cases for everything is absolute midwit behavior.
I’ve watched these people spend years collecting water at an ecologically responsible rate for data centers that aren’t even operational yet and I’ve been out to power plants that are being expanded to meet the needs of all the new data centers.
Data centers are not going to destroy the planet, there are thousands of people out there, smarter than you, whose job it is to make sure of that.
Flock Camera Paranoia is for Schizos
Intuitively, I don’t like Flock cameras, I can’t imagine there are many people who would enjoy the idea of being watched by the government all the time. I’m definitely not alone in disliking Flock cameras because people are doing much more than complain about them on the internet, they are making absolute fools out of themselves in opposition to them.
A while ago there was a video going viral of some nerd with nothing better to do with his life than to show up at a city council meeting dressed as Darth Vader praising the members of that council for installing Flock cameras because it “pleases the Empire.” I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed for that city council, surely they had something better to do. A week or two later a video of a guy cutting down a Flock camera came across my feed. He had a truck bed full of them and he explained that what he was doing wasn’t illegal because he wasn’t “stealing” the cameras, he was just going to return them to their owner since he planned on dropping them off at the front door of the Sheriff’s office, I thought to myself “this guy is retarded.” The next day I saw a picture of his truck under a headline stating that he had been arrested for cutting down a bunch of Flock cameras. Sure, maybe he wasn’t technically “stealing” anything, but vandalism is still a crime.
The more I saw people abandon logic and reason in favor of stupid crap like this the less I wanted to be associated with them in any way. I thought of the old Ben Franklin quote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Then I asked myself, “What essential Liberty am I giving up by allowing Flock cameras to go up around me?” I had no answer to this question. Flock isn’t collecting any data on me that the government couldn’t ask my cell phone provider for. Flock cameras aren’t currently being used to enforce any laws I don’t agree with. I realized that if there were twenty Flock cameras between me and every place I like to go I wouldn’t live my life any differently than I am now. Flock cameras have not had any negative impact on my life. I’d be willing to bet that if you honestly and rationally did a similar analysis you’d come to a similar conclusion. Flock cameras (and similar technologies) are not worth losing sleep over.
With that being said, I am still a red-blooded American. I believe in the right to keep and bear sawzalls, and I know that the purpose of that right is not just for DIY projects. But the day to use a sawzall against these cameras is not today and I hope that day never comes.
My thoughts on AI referenced in that draft excerpt can be found here. If that link doesn’t go anywhere that means I haven’t published it yet. It should be up in the next day or two.