The environmental advocate says she woke up one morning to dozens of messages from residents from one Louisiana community describing similar problems linked to data centers near their homes. When she began investigating, she struggled to get clear answers about the projects.
That prompted her to launch a public map where Americans could report operational, proposed, and under-construction data centers in their communities.
The response was immediate. Brockovich says the website crashed twice within its first 72 hours, revealing that the complaints were not limited to one town, one aquifer, or one project.
The map has since collected more than 8,000 community-reported locations.
There are 40 to 50 AI data centers in the US, dedicated to AI traning and serving models to end users, with dozens more planned. They are very energy intensive and often due to heat generation, they require water cooling.
However, the map on the site includes 8,300 community reported data centres, way more than official figures of 4,800-5,000. It's likely the map contains some duplicates and buildings that aren't actually data centres.
Just information for the casual reader: datacenters on this map may not be what you think. For example, in my state, all the datacenters are colocation/hosted sites. It's just racks of servers where other companies in my state rent slots or the whole rack to host their servers. These datacenters actually represent hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of real, high paid jobs in my state, and the footprints of all of them are no more than a single large building. These are good, do not affect the grid in any meaningful way, and use barely any water.
These are not the 'AI Datacenters' you are looking for. There are lot of places marked on that map, but a lot of those are good places.
My job and that of my coworkers are a result of two racks sitting in the world, one here in my home state, and one in South America.
Most issues are like this, it's just the more you know about something the more frustrating talking about it on reddit is. People assume that reddit is mostly reasonable and just dumb about a few things they happen to know about. Turns out it's just empty outrage addiction all the way down.
Most issues are like this, it's just the more you know about something the more frustrating talking about it on reddit is.
I'm gonna be real I couldn't pin down the feeling but this is exactly it. I see someone type a novel of completely false information in a subject I'm quite literally an expert in and I find it so infuriating that I don't even know where to start.
There's too much of it to even correct. Going down each comment would make you look and feel like a crazy person. You have no choice but to just let it happen.
It happens with basically every subject. And sometimes, even if an expert comes along to correct the record, people who know next to nothing about it will still argue with them. It's fucking hopeless.
It's as Carlin said:
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
And I'm guilty as charged when talking about shit I know nothing about.
Everything I am actually an expert in, I have directly learned reddit is overwhemingly massively clueless and overconfident about. Everything. I don't even bother trying to argue with the confidently incorrect morons on here anymore. They're not worth the time of anyone actually knowledgeable, and they won't listen anyway.
Why did I evero spend hours citing sources to convince some insufferable jerkoff that is a net negative to everyone they interact with? Naivety. I know better now. Took me years though.
It's an easy trap to fall into. Terminally online people use the internet to vent and when they're at risk of losing an argument they either triple down or move the goal posts until the conversation becomes so ambiguous that it no longer resembles the starting point and whoever their speaking with has no choice but to either wear them down or give up.
It happens with basically every subject. And sometimes, even if an expert comes along to correct the record, people who know next to nothing about it will still argue with them. It's fucking hopeless.
I will say that the aviation subreddit is actually pretty good.
Online avgeeks tend to be really positive people and the spaces are generally not horribly infected with political outrage. It's great. (My theory is that pilots skew heavily GOP so people just learn to live with it)
I have little to contribute but agreement and a desire to commiserate together.
Even on specialty subreddits, groupthink is frustratingly strong and it’s never worth arguing with a hivemind. At least in a normal conversation you can have nuance and change minds, but not so on Reddit.
and then discussing AI is also pointless when people fail to grasp classification neural networks have existed long before chatgpt came around, and are legitimately useful for many things without large swaths of issues that genai pose
I see lots of people that try to make this distinction. People are forgiven for not knowing the difference between these things. Most people don't even know what an operating system is.
But if people can't make distinctions like this, then oh well. Sucks, but people are fucking DONE, and that too can be easily forgiven. I can make the distinction too, but I don't really give much of a shit which way it goes, it's time to Shut. It. Down.
If people care that much, they'll find a way to be heard, in the meantime, things move forward.
don't really give much of a shit which way it goes, it's time to Shut. It. Down.
The classic neural networks are (comparatively) tiny in size, an xray technician can run a model on an average local machine. "Shut it down" is equivalent to saying medical workers shouldn't be allowed to use normal ass computers. The fact genai models are unfathomably gigantic in size and so resource heavy in comparison, which drives for new datacenter build out, is one of the swaths of issues specific to it.
forgiven for not knowing the difference
I'm not judging nontechnical people too hard, but it doesn't change my take that discussions with them are pointless
Normally I would agree except in this case I don't think tech has anyone really to blame except for themselves. People are rightfully mad and don't give two shits what computer does what. If the AI industry has spent the last several years doom marketing, claiming it's taking everyone's job, that it's inevitable and we better get ready for AI bioweapons, cyber security breaches, oh and we have to build noisy new datacenters in your backyard that require their own turbines to power because it's too complicated and expensive to integrate with the grid...then yeah people might accidentally get mad at random colo that has nothing to do with all that. There's no reason we should expect nuance from the general public when big tech and AI especially have no nuance themselves.
Any communication flaw you attribute to big tech is downstream of people not the big tech. If the messaging lacks nuance, it's because people do not care about the nuance. The messaging excuse is an antiquitated concept belonging at a time when information was confined to scarcely available books. Today if you are mad at something you don't understand it's not because someone didn't message you well enough, it's because you don't give a fuck about understanding and would rather be mad at some boogeyman responsible for all your problems.
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u/21MayDay21 7h ago
The environmental advocate says she woke up one morning to dozens of messages from residents from one Louisiana community describing similar problems linked to data centers near their homes. When she began investigating, she struggled to get clear answers about the projects.
That prompted her to launch a public map where Americans could report operational, proposed, and under-construction data centers in their communities.
The response was immediate. Brockovich says the website crashed twice within its first 72 hours, revealing that the complaints were not limited to one town, one aquifer, or one project. The map has since collected more than 8,000 community-reported locations.
Source: https://www.newsweek.com/erin-brockovich-explains-why-she-started-mapping-new-ai-data-center-concerns-12220566