Security Verification
www.ft.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54061344

https://archive.ph/2026.11.05-224738/https://www.ft.com/content/32fd4450-5880-437d-9bd9-df13289ada24

The US midterm elections — in which voters elected anti-data centre governors in Texas, Georgia and Ohio and passed 38 local votes in favour of restrictions on their development — have forced the tech industry to reflect on its failure to connect with the public.

“The reason is not that people are Luddites . . . it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid. It has become a political symbol,” said Vik Bajaj, co-chief executive of the Jeff Bezos-backed AI start-up Prometheus.

. . . “As a profession, we have spent two years pretty dangerously telling people that AI will change the future of work for the worse — that they will be out of jobs, that their children will be out of jobs, their grandchildren will live in a world that’s unrecognisable. And then for the last year or so, we’ve also been flirting with the idea that it’s an existential crisis.”

“I think this election was a big wake-up call . . . to take a pause and think about what’s happening and approach this in a way that’s maybe a little more thoughtful,” said John Hanke, founder of Niantic Spatial, the AI world model company and gaming group that made Pokémon Go. “It’s been go, go, go, build, build, build, and some of that has been . . . with head buried in sand.”

  • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    18 hours ago

    Good. Let their fingers be burned right off if need be. Those vast data centers are to be used to facilitate oppression, not to improve the quality of life of anyone but (maybe) billionaires.

  • mad_lentil@lemmy.caEnglish
    27·
    2 days ago

    There was never a fucking “boom” just a lot of stupid money being thrown at the latest gamble, rather than investing in the boring, predictable things we know makes life better for people right now.

  • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.todayEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Oh noes! Did the trillionaires’ playtime pretend investments never happen? Oh, poor trillionaires. Maybe they can just hop into a dick-rocket and get the fuck off our planet instead.

  • BuckFutter@timeyak.comEnglish
    51·
    3 days ago

    This sounds like a win for homeowners power bills…infinite growth projections for these projects was ludicrous levels of stupidity.

  • modus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    “My community is destroying my hopes of ever building my pollution factories!”

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    Any time you start forcefully shoving shit down someone’s throat there will be a backlash. In the recent old days you had to back everything up with facts, show whether it is beneficial or not and detail the economy of moving forward. Now it’s just Yosemite Sam with guns-a-blazing!

  • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    3 days ago

    I hope that this means thoughtful conversations about how much AI compute infrastructure is actually useful given realistic demand curves, where it should be located, what resources will it require, and, importantly, how the companies that benefit from it will directly share those benefits, as compared to hazy gestures towards “economic development”.

    I fear that this is just the industry telling us they’re about to start lying even more than they have.