Back in the day, when the Internet was deploying superfast (lets say from early 1990s on, after the NSFnet got defunded) there were coachloads of engineers going around schools showing kids how to set up routers and get net access- this wasn't just in the US - Cisco had a program of deployment in Africa, the EU had a project called Silk Road doing deployment from mediterranean to china, along the old trading routes, in may countries very hard to reach even by road...there was serious advocacy for good, and it worked
Fast forward 3 decades, and we now have the massive public backlash against data centers - in US and Europe and elsewhere. What changed?
Well, for one thing, nobody made a plausible case for AI, while a lot of vacuous hype went on.
All the objective reasons for objecting remain true (and the public get it) that there's very few jobs created, there's a lot of land, energy (and possibly water) used for very little community gain. We already had enough data centers for netflix and wikipedia, for zoom, and github and googledocs (oh, ok, also amazon, apple icloud, microsoft office 365 etc etc) - so this growth (and negative reaction) is almost entirely just about AI, and we already had AI in any case (it is behind targetted adverts, recommenders, newsfeed ordering etc etc) and that ran on the good old web servers (and cloud) - all 20 years ago already "scaled out" to meet demand.
So what's the USP for the AI data center? When will there be Good News? The kleponauts who build it can't even be arsed to make their case. They deserve to lose.
This new thing? Just say no, never. It is a waste of space. It is a waste of time. It is a waste of the future.
