I took a deep breath before writing this. Just so you know. I understand what I’m getting myself into. Again.
But no. They’re not.
This is conspiracy thinking dressed up as insight.
They’re not spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data centers because they secretly want to create a “digital prison.” They’re building them because they expect them to generate hundreds of billions in future profits. It’s an investment in compute infrastructure, not some grand surveillance plot.
If governments or corporations want to surveil people, they already have far cheaper and more effective ways of doing it than constructing massive AI clusters.
Posts like this don’t inform anyone or encourage serious discussion. They just replace evidence with paranoia and drag the quality of the platform down.
One need not exclude the other, and the thinking is not based just on tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories.
Has anyone said this type of thing? Mostly no, but we do know that places like China and Russia have already implemented similar systems.
We also see trends toward software as a service, cloud-based computing, digital ID laws, and a slew of ongoing anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices over the last two years.
Again, no one has said that this is a plan, but if you told me that half a dozen billionaires were pushing it, I wouldn’t be surprised. Any one of those things would be frustrating, but all of them at once? For most of these people, the goal is likely just “make line go up,” but when that line inevitably goes down, what you have is a collection of infrastructure that is almost perfect for digital surveillance and control, not just software, but the internet at large.
I agree that most of this is just late-stage capitalism at work, but most of us here are pretty savvy. We’re mostly in the tech, engineering, or finance sectors. We all have 20+ years of chronic online time, we self-educate, and we’ve watched the world change in fine detail over the last 20 years. It doesn’t matter what the powers that be are saying. It matters what they’ll have the capability to do when the AI bubble bursts, and what modern history, especially Russia, has taught us about market and state collapse.
Personally, I do think that some big players are doing this intentionally. The AI bubble is hurting the personal computing and hobby PC-building industries, and if any of these data centers actually get built, they can easily be bought out or taken over by something like Microsoft.
Market volatility doesn’t just mean some people’s pensions get wiped out. It means market change, asset transfers, and consolidation. Even without a data center being built, if the hardware has been built and it falls into Google, Amazon, or Microsoft’s lap after a bubble bursts, then that’s vertical integration and market capture.
There may not be money in AI, but everyone caught up in the frenzy is helping to push us toward a surveillance state, even if no one has said as much.
And it’s not cool to ignore which way the water is flowing because people are panicking as we approach that waterfall in the distance.
Granted, we’re talking about factors that I can’t fully predict, but we do seem to be seeing heavy short- and mid-term investment in a restructuring of computing, and no one is talking about it because it is all being done in the shadow of AI and whatever political distraction is happening that day.
I know this is meandering, but my point is that we are moving in a very specific technological direction, even if not everyone with a hand on the wheel is driving toward the same goal. They’re all pushing in the same direction (minus a few zigzags, obviously).
It’s not a conspiracy to sound a major alarm about these things when we know for sure that the next hundred years are going to be devastating from a climate perspective. There is going to be some dark shit that happens, and I don’t really know what that will be, but I guarantee that if I can see it, and all of the experts can see it, then someone with a security clearance and a budget has seen it too.
The problem is that “could happen” is doing an enormous amount of work here.
Almost anything could happen. The existence of a capability isn’t evidence that it’s the intended outcome or even the most likely one. It’s reasonable to discuss risks and how technology can be misused, but it’s a mistake to treat possibility as probability.
The world is usually far less spectacular than the elaborate scenarios people imagine. Most of the time, the explanation is simply incentives, competition, bureaucracy, and companies chasing profits, not a coordinated march toward some grand end state.
We should absolutely be wary of surveillance, anti-competitive behavior, and excessive centralization. Those are real concerns. But once the argument becomes “they’re building infrastructure that could someday be used for X,” you’ve entered speculation. Capability alone isn’t evidence of intent, and it certainly isn’t evidence that such an outcome is inevitable.
That aside digital surveillance prison already exists. Google, Meta, Amazon etc. know enough about their users to build a complete day-by-day activity list with high accuracy. Phones listen constantly, Windows logs all you do on their servers, the dystopian tech is already there. Whet most dystopian predictions missed is that instead of endless rows of Secret Service officers watching you, it’s the advertisers who want to milk your attention.
Dystopian police state will start when police starts offering money for reporting crimes. Then all this data will pour into their hands, neatly tagged, packaged and sold.
I think he achieved a lot, and made a huge difference to many people. He can’t change the whole world, but naking a personal sacrifice to bring abuse to light is a good thing.
What they are more likely building is regional processing centers. Meaning most people have a tablet, a laptop, and a phone. All with ram, silicone, memory, and resources that sit the majority of the time. The phone gets more usage. But what if those tools were access points to a larger computer that did the processing for you? What if meant instead of having a stronger chip on your phone you just had sufficient speed of transfer for a larger computer to do the processing?
That would reduce the production costs of everything. Be easier to manage the supply chain, require fewer rare earth minerals
AND they can control/monitor all of the throughput? Security against enemies.
Yup. Once they have crested a point of adoption they are okay with. They don’t even need 50% of the population. They just need to split the room enough that we group ourselves according to arrow’s fallacy.
Please, > 20 years ago, aurora colorado, built a license plate tracking system they installed in most light controlled intersections. Specifically with the intention of tracking every vehicle within city limits. There is no paranoia there, all these jurisdictions say this shit out loud, and have for decades. All the police marketers trumpet they’ll be able to track people with facial recognition, out loud, and for years. Efficacy aside, they’re drooling over it. Out loud, in marketing materials, statehouses, and newspapers for years upon years.
I’ve addressed this license plate scanner thing way too many times.
This has been a known fact for decades, as you yourself mentioned. License plate scanners are already used everywhere. Home Depot is a particularly egregious example.
Which is exactly why I said there are much easier ways to track us than building AI data centers.
Did you actually read what I wrote, or are you responding to what you assumed I said?
You’re masquerading as knowledgeable. Plate scanners have been motion triggered in the past, with text ocr scanning for plates, followed by manual review for confirmation. “AI” increases throughput and allows fast finding of more selective visual data automatically. Like this: https://lemmy.world/post/49325290?scrollToComments=true
Computer vision goes way past the old plate scanners. They are using pkate scanners for what you say they aren’t, with the technology you say they aren’t using.
Did you actually read what I said, and see what you wanted, or are you a shill?
Let’s see if I can get this across, because you seem to have one singular idea stuck in your head. Quite an accomplishment, considering how small that space appears to be.
Read this part carefully. We already have a surveillance infrastructure. It’s been in place for decades. It exists for law enforcement, and even more extensively for marketing. Can AI improve those systems? Yes. Will it? Probably. To what extent remains to be seen.
What I reject is the claim that privately owned AI data centers are being built as part of some grand conspiracy to spy on the public. They’re being built for one reason: money. Companies are investing billions because they expect a return on that investment, not because they’re secretly constructing an Orwellian surveillance network.
I already acknowledged that license plate readers and similar technologies exist. Then you responded with a story about a traffic camera incorrectly flagging a woman for having her cellphone in her lap. That doesn’t refute my point, it reinforces it. The surveillance infrastructure already exists. You’re arguing against something I explicitly agreed with.
Any system can be abused. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. None of that is in dispute.
And what exactly am I “shilling” here? Why do people keep making assumptions instead of reading what’s actually written?
I never advocated for building AI data centers, nor did I advocate for using LLMs. My point was simply that these facilities are not being built for the purpose of secretly spying on the public. If someone wants to monitor people, there are already far cheaper and more effective systems in place.
By that logic, car manufacturers build cars so they can be used in drive-by shootings rather than for transportation. That’s obviously an absurd way to infer intent from a tool’s potential misuse.
Since this will probably be ignored as well, here’s something that doesn’t fit your narrative: I’m actually against the construction of AI data centers. I think they’re an environmental and societal blight. But opposing AI infrastructure doesn’t require inventing conspiracies about why it’s being built.
At this point, you’ve shown there’s nothing you can do to refute anything I’ve said. You have nothing constructive to add to the conversation. You can’t admit you might be wrong or acknowledge when you’ve been corrected, so you’ve fallen back on ad hominem attacks instead.
Soon you will be more powerful than the both of us.
All that response is, is one ad hominem attack after another. Your money idea is also a red herring. Of course anything related to tech and political power involves money, that is sophomore level philosophy.
The normalization of license plates readers, and their history, doesn’t contradict, or even have anything to do with, the increasing use of AI by police and government to process image and audio streams, two of the many things they are using it for. And it certainly doesn’t contradict the worry that increased data center capacity will allow the surveillance state to expand.
So that is a red herring too. You haven’t contradicted the premise of the meme at all, just used red herrings to convey ad hominem attacks.
Okay. First of all, stop throwing around logical fallacies when you clearly don’t know what they mean.
I did not use ad hominem as a substitute for an argument, and I did not use a red herring to distract from the points I’m making.
I am not saying license plate readers are normalized or that they should be. They are terrible surveillance-state tools that shouldn’t exist in the first place. They provide little to no benefit to the general public.
I fully admit that I called you an idiot because you were behaving like one. That insult did not replace my argument. It was accompanied by numerous points that I have presented to you multiple times, none of which you have meaningfully addressed.
The point I’m making, once again, is that AI data centers are not being built for the explicit purpose of monitoring the population. They are being built to generate profits. There is no grand conspiracy behind their construction. We are already aware that extensive surveillance exists through marketing, law enforcement, and other systems.
LLMs, AI, and data centers absolutely can and will be misused. That is not in dispute.
Do you have any evidence that contradicts my position that this is not a conspiracy?
I took a deep breath before writing this. Just so you know. I understand what I’m getting myself into. Again.
But no. They’re not.
This is conspiracy thinking dressed up as insight.
They’re not spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data centers because they secretly want to create a “digital prison.” They’re building them because they expect them to generate hundreds of billions in future profits. It’s an investment in compute infrastructure, not some grand surveillance plot.
If governments or corporations want to surveil people, they already have far cheaper and more effective ways of doing it than constructing massive AI clusters.
Posts like this don’t inform anyone or encourage serious discussion. They just replace evidence with paranoia and drag the quality of the platform down.
One need not exclude the other, and the thinking is not based just on tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories.
Has anyone said this type of thing? Mostly no, but we do know that places like China and Russia have already implemented similar systems.
We also see trends toward software as a service, cloud-based computing, digital ID laws, and a slew of ongoing anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices over the last two years.
Again, no one has said that this is a plan, but if you told me that half a dozen billionaires were pushing it, I wouldn’t be surprised. Any one of those things would be frustrating, but all of them at once? For most of these people, the goal is likely just “make line go up,” but when that line inevitably goes down, what you have is a collection of infrastructure that is almost perfect for digital surveillance and control, not just software, but the internet at large.
I agree that most of this is just late-stage capitalism at work, but most of us here are pretty savvy. We’re mostly in the tech, engineering, or finance sectors. We all have 20+ years of chronic online time, we self-educate, and we’ve watched the world change in fine detail over the last 20 years. It doesn’t matter what the powers that be are saying. It matters what they’ll have the capability to do when the AI bubble bursts, and what modern history, especially Russia, has taught us about market and state collapse.
Personally, I do think that some big players are doing this intentionally. The AI bubble is hurting the personal computing and hobby PC-building industries, and if any of these data centers actually get built, they can easily be bought out or taken over by something like Microsoft.
Market volatility doesn’t just mean some people’s pensions get wiped out. It means market change, asset transfers, and consolidation. Even without a data center being built, if the hardware has been built and it falls into Google, Amazon, or Microsoft’s lap after a bubble bursts, then that’s vertical integration and market capture.
There may not be money in AI, but everyone caught up in the frenzy is helping to push us toward a surveillance state, even if no one has said as much.
And it’s not cool to ignore which way the water is flowing because people are panicking as we approach that waterfall in the distance.
Granted, we’re talking about factors that I can’t fully predict, but we do seem to be seeing heavy short- and mid-term investment in a restructuring of computing, and no one is talking about it because it is all being done in the shadow of AI and whatever political distraction is happening that day.
I know this is meandering, but my point is that we are moving in a very specific technological direction, even if not everyone with a hand on the wheel is driving toward the same goal. They’re all pushing in the same direction (minus a few zigzags, obviously).
It’s not a conspiracy to sound a major alarm about these things when we know for sure that the next hundred years are going to be devastating from a climate perspective. There is going to be some dark shit that happens, and I don’t really know what that will be, but I guarantee that if I can see it, and all of the experts can see it, then someone with a security clearance and a budget has seen it too.
The problem is that “could happen” is doing an enormous amount of work here.
Almost anything could happen. The existence of a capability isn’t evidence that it’s the intended outcome or even the most likely one. It’s reasonable to discuss risks and how technology can be misused, but it’s a mistake to treat possibility as probability.
The world is usually far less spectacular than the elaborate scenarios people imagine. Most of the time, the explanation is simply incentives, competition, bureaucracy, and companies chasing profits, not a coordinated march toward some grand end state.
We should absolutely be wary of surveillance, anti-competitive behavior, and excessive centralization. Those are real concerns. But once the argument becomes “they’re building infrastructure that could someday be used for X,” you’ve entered speculation. Capability alone isn’t evidence of intent, and it certainly isn’t evidence that such an outcome is inevitable.
Speculation and preventative measures are absolutely nescessary, im sorry
I think when you say speculation, what you really mean is skepticism.
maybe im quite comfortable with the knowledge that I need to make decisions under uncertainty, not just hunches, the foot needs to be placed forward
That aside digital surveillance prison already exists. Google, Meta, Amazon etc. know enough about their users to build a complete day-by-day activity list with high accuracy. Phones listen constantly, Windows logs all you do on their servers, the dystopian tech is already there. Whet most dystopian predictions missed is that instead of endless rows of Secret Service officers watching you, it’s the advertisers who want to milk your attention.
Dystopian police state will start when police starts offering money for reporting crimes. Then all this data will pour into their hands, neatly tagged, packaged and sold.
Was about to say this: It is already pretty much here and Edward Snowden showed that it was kinda already there 10 years ago, at least in some form.
Snowden was a naive intellectual who thought that if americans knew they are getting fucked they would do something about it.
I think he achieved a lot, and made a huge difference to many people. He can’t change the whole world, but naking a personal sacrifice to bring abuse to light is a good thing.
What they are more likely building is regional processing centers. Meaning most people have a tablet, a laptop, and a phone. All with ram, silicone, memory, and resources that sit the majority of the time. The phone gets more usage. But what if those tools were access points to a larger computer that did the processing for you? What if meant instead of having a stronger chip on your phone you just had sufficient speed of transfer for a larger computer to do the processing?
That would reduce the production costs of everything. Be easier to manage the supply chain, require fewer rare earth minerals
AND they can control/monitor all of the throughput? Security against enemies.
In a perfect world this sounds fantastic, but it will most certainly be exploited.
You know… Because people.
Oh yeah, this will totally only be used altruisticly. No funny business.
oh you mean the jerking off plot of silicon valley.
that’s when they take the discs away
Yup. Once they have crested a point of adoption they are okay with. They don’t even need 50% of the population. They just need to split the room enough that we group ourselves according to arrow’s fallacy.
Please, > 20 years ago, aurora colorado, built a license plate tracking system they installed in most light controlled intersections. Specifically with the intention of tracking every vehicle within city limits. There is no paranoia there, all these jurisdictions say this shit out loud, and have for decades. All the police marketers trumpet they’ll be able to track people with facial recognition, out loud, and for years. Efficacy aside, they’re drooling over it. Out loud, in marketing materials, statehouses, and newspapers for years upon years.
I’ve addressed this license plate scanner thing way too many times.
This has been a known fact for decades, as you yourself mentioned. License plate scanners are already used everywhere. Home Depot is a particularly egregious example.
Which is exactly why I said there are much easier ways to track us than building AI data centers.
Did you actually read what I wrote, or are you responding to what you assumed I said?
You’re masquerading as knowledgeable. Plate scanners have been motion triggered in the past, with text ocr scanning for plates, followed by manual review for confirmation. “AI” increases throughput and allows fast finding of more selective visual data automatically. Like this: https://lemmy.world/post/49325290?scrollToComments=true
Computer vision goes way past the old plate scanners. They are using pkate scanners for what you say they aren’t, with the technology you say they aren’t using.
Did you actually read what I said, and see what you wanted, or are you a shill?
Let’s see if I can get this across, because you seem to have one singular idea stuck in your head. Quite an accomplishment, considering how small that space appears to be.
Read this part carefully. We already have a surveillance infrastructure. It’s been in place for decades. It exists for law enforcement, and even more extensively for marketing. Can AI improve those systems? Yes. Will it? Probably. To what extent remains to be seen.
What I reject is the claim that privately owned AI data centers are being built as part of some grand conspiracy to spy on the public. They’re being built for one reason: money. Companies are investing billions because they expect a return on that investment, not because they’re secretly constructing an Orwellian surveillance network.
I already acknowledged that license plate readers and similar technologies exist. Then you responded with a story about a traffic camera incorrectly flagging a woman for having her cellphone in her lap. That doesn’t refute my point, it reinforces it. The surveillance infrastructure already exists. You’re arguing against something I explicitly agreed with.
Any system can be abused. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. None of that is in dispute.
And what exactly am I “shilling” here? Why do people keep making assumptions instead of reading what’s actually written?
I never advocated for building AI data centers, nor did I advocate for using LLMs. My point was simply that these facilities are not being built for the purpose of secretly spying on the public. If someone wants to monitor people, there are already far cheaper and more effective systems in place.
By that logic, car manufacturers build cars so they can be used in drive-by shootings rather than for transportation. That’s obviously an absurd way to infer intent from a tool’s potential misuse.
Since this will probably be ignored as well, here’s something that doesn’t fit your narrative: I’m actually against the construction of AI data centers. I think they’re an environmental and societal blight. But opposing AI infrastructure doesn’t require inventing conspiracies about why it’s being built.
So you’re a troll
Yeah. Says the troll.
At this point, you’ve shown there’s nothing you can do to refute anything I’ve said. You have nothing constructive to add to the conversation. You can’t admit you might be wrong or acknowledge when you’ve been corrected, so you’ve fallen back on ad hominem attacks instead.
Soon you will be more powerful than the both of us.
All that response is, is one ad hominem attack after another. Your money idea is also a red herring. Of course anything related to tech and political power involves money, that is sophomore level philosophy.
The normalization of license plates readers, and their history, doesn’t contradict, or even have anything to do with, the increasing use of AI by police and government to process image and audio streams, two of the many things they are using it for. And it certainly doesn’t contradict the worry that increased data center capacity will allow the surveillance state to expand.
So that is a red herring too. You haven’t contradicted the premise of the meme at all, just used red herrings to convey ad hominem attacks.
Okay. First of all, stop throwing around logical fallacies when you clearly don’t know what they mean.
I did not use ad hominem as a substitute for an argument, and I did not use a red herring to distract from the points I’m making.
I am not saying license plate readers are normalized or that they should be. They are terrible surveillance-state tools that shouldn’t exist in the first place. They provide little to no benefit to the general public.
I fully admit that I called you an idiot because you were behaving like one. That insult did not replace my argument. It was accompanied by numerous points that I have presented to you multiple times, none of which you have meaningfully addressed.
The point I’m making, once again, is that AI data centers are not being built for the explicit purpose of monitoring the population. They are being built to generate profits. There is no grand conspiracy behind their construction. We are already aware that extensive surveillance exists through marketing, law enforcement, and other systems.
LLMs, AI, and data centers absolutely can and will be misused. That is not in dispute.
Do you have any evidence that contradicts my position that this is not a conspiracy?