yeah the ballroom contractor is a company thats known for building bomb save data centers. probably the surveillance center for the DC area
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.
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.
oh you mean the jerking off plot of silicon valley.
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.
Lay flat. Seriously, society is like two weeks to two months from collapsing at any moment. All anyone has to do is literally just not go to work for two weeks in mass. The power goes out, water stops running, and the grocery store goes empty. You share your resources with your neighbors. You don’t even need to get out of bed to collapse the system.
literally
Probably not
two weeks in mass.
Bone apple tea!
- in mass - that’s like boycotting Church
- en masse - as a group
in mass - that’s like boycotting Church
Which is not a bad idea, actually. After all the things that the Abrahamic Church had done (and still do in a socially-veiled manner nowadays), especially against the women, boycotting Church is the least we oughta do. All the Sisters and their Daughters who were murdered back in the so-called “witch-hunting” are still awaiting the due historical reparation as I’m writing this.
They weren’t speaking french, why did you correct it to french words?
En masse is one of the millions of useful expressions stolen by English from other languages. (We call it “borrowed” or “loanwords,” but we’re not going to give them back!)
It doesn’t literally mean “in mass,” which would refer to measuring weight or volume, or could mean being in a Catholic church during a service.
If you wanted to use a different expression to denote the whole of the working population acting in unison you could, but “en masse” carries some appropriate French revolutionary connotations and avoids the communist implications of “the masses,” which could hamper recruiting.
Why did you respond with a sentence almost entirely in German?
Bet this guy pronounces it gillateen
I thought this was funny bro.
Now short for in massive quantity. There isn’t that much food in stores. Even less when the trucks stop coming. Most power is generated on demand, the moment people stop showing up to work at the generation site and load balancing site it turns off.
No, “in mass” means you’re physically located in Massachusetts. “En masse” means massive quantity, that’s the point of their post, that’s the expression, its loaner words from French; you’ve never heard anyone say “in mass” in this context in your life, you have been hearing “en masse” incorrectly because your education system failed you.
Goodness, a person makes one error and now the entire education system is in shambles.
Don’t let them convince you it’s an error, language is descriptive and “mass” to describe a group of people is a common English definition. They are just being pedants.
I agree, I’m kinda used to it now. People on Lemmy can be very delicate and beautiful flowers. Literally the smallest disturbance from their desire and they can go on a cursing tirade. If one didn’t know any better one might think the sky was falling. You should see some of the comment chains I’ve been through in my short time here. Although two of those people seemed truly disturbed.
these are fucking hilarious, im hoping everyone Is being tongue in cheek.
I think you mean “tung en cheeke”
So your solution is to cause a famine and leave people without power during a heatwave?
Wouldn’t it be better to attack things like shareholder value instead of supply chains?
After overthrowing the billionaire caste, we’ll still need those supply chains. You know that, right?
More so to turn off the switch for a day or two, that would most likely be all that is needed.
Most power is generated on demand
Until very recently, all power was generated on demand. The amount of power generated and the amount of power consumed had to be exactly equal at all times.
Though now we do have battery farms and other forms of grid-level storage in some places to help balance the variability of renewable sources.
Its interesting being in other countries and you can watch the load / supply change with a standing fan. Speeds up, slows down, lol goes out.
I have heard many variations to this point but I would like to point out a counter example. The great depression in the US that lasted for a decade. The average income level for families fell by 40%. People regularly starved to death and even by WWII almost 50% of men were turned away from recruitment because they were malnourished.
Guess what? No revolution, no collapse just massive suffering.
Motherfuckers can’t even stop buying cheap garbage from Amazon, but we’re gonna expect that they can sacrifice their personal livelihoods and risk starvation? Yeah right.
I’d put it more like people can’t take one day to go vote (two if we count primaries).
Like you said- people aren’t making this grand sacrifice and it’s foolish to expect them to, especially given the sacrifice is far, far greater.
Thats why im going the opposite route, I’m trying to drag people into the stock market with me, get em all hype up on greed and the promise of being rich… then watch them lose everything and discover capitalism is a rigged game and bail.
The infrastructure kept on ticking for those that needed it. The ports kept on moving goods. The power generation kept on, the truckers kept on, society kept on. We’re not talking about an actual collapse of society, more so a game of chicken with people who think they are in charge. The right people aka the ones who actually facilitate the basic functions of society just stay home a few days. That’s enough to get the point across.
That is not really accurate for the great depression as the infrastructure definitely collapsed, but I get your point.
I think there is a profound disconnect here about the power of the people. That is my bigger point that humans will suffer through far far far worse than what we are dealing with now without any sort of pushback.
In some ways it feels like this is almost a mythology when you compare people protesting to getting what they want. The only times this seems to happen is when the wealthy and the common man’s goals align and increasingly in our modern world this is dictated by the persuasive propaganda of corporations. Basically people are convinced to go along with what the wealthy want.
The burn is that the wealthy can and will ignore the people regardless of their desires. The most recent riots and protests in France about raising the retirement age are a great example of this. The people protested violently and in the end the age was raised as the wealthy dictated.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying we can’t do anything. Simply put protesting isn’t the power people think it is and civilization isn’t going to revolt just because things get bad.
Great example with France, a population thats actually civically active and resistant to government bullshit
Any plan that requires everyone to just comply to the same idea will never work.
It’s never about everyone, all ideas are a numbers game, same for whatever is considered culture. If it’s just one guy he’s crazy, if it’s a few hundred or thousand it’s a cult, if it’s a few million to a billion then it’s a culture.
I remember 5-10 years ago looking at China and thinking this sounds too crazy to be true, no way they give their citizens negative points for walking a red light, no way you can’t access the internet outside of China, no way you have to work 6 days 12 hours. Lately most of the times i thought ‘no way …’ it was after reading news about the US.
And the social scoring in China was roled back and limited.
why would they need AI to do this when theyve been doing this without AI for decades.
5 eyes. every phone has a camera. and mic.
the data they collected from spying on you requires a space to store and hardware to process them
These data centers provide them
What you said, and also, data are just much bigger now. And not just a little bit bigger - orders of magnitude bigger. It’s not just that photo and video file sizes have increased… the metadata, the data about the data, have also increased in size and quantity.
Nah, when the bubble collapses there are going to be all these large vacant climate controlled warehouses to use as for profit concentration camps.
the ones they managed to populate with computers will be used for surveillance, the ones that are sitting empty will be the prisons
You think the concentration camps are going to be climate controlled?
We’ll get the bare minimum heat in the winter to keep us from freezing to death too fast before they can get ‘enough’ work out of us. And absolutely nothing in the summer, not even ventilation fans.
The world cup has been a huge boon to AI surveillance.
The World Cup does not create the surveillance state — but it has become one of the most efficient mechanisms for funding, deploying, legitimizing, and permanently embedding it across the globe, one tournament at a time.
Currently watching the show Silo. It’s a documentary tbh.
I sometimes wonder if people understand that the data centers get customers to fill the space in it. Like there’s 40 customers in one data center. Randomly chosen number used for ease if explaining. Could be 10 or 100 different companies renting space for the services.
You’re talking about a colo. Larger companies will have their own datacenters dedicated to their own services.
I don’t want the internet any mores. I want underwebs!!
Look into iroh and rayfish VPN. These will be making the network ours again.
*Already built and expanding
No, they are probably just building data centers to replace any non-physical labor with AI. And hope to be able to do that in the future for physical labor with robots: To create a permanent underclass of unemployed people and the 1% living like gods.
Not really better but that’s what it looks like to me.
Thiel and his crew have talked about wanting the US to have a population of 100 million. They don’t want a permanent underclass of unemployed people, they want a permanent underclass of dead people.
The six feet underclass.
So, basically like that one episode of “SuperJail!”,? That one where the Warden basically takes over the US and turns all the citizens into inmates?
never atribute to malice what could adequetly be explained by stupidity
People see dollarmarks and forget everything else
The older I get, the less distinction I see between malice and stupidity. They always seem to come as a package deal, never one seen without the other.
Evil geniuses and idiots with a heart of gold are Hollywood fictions. In reality, the most evil, spite-driven people and the most moronic people are almost always the same people.
never [attribute] to malice what could [adequately] be explained by stupidity
People see dollarmarks and forget everything else.
So greed overcomes even Hanlon? I see there’s a point there, but what if greed is just malice by a colder name? Malice at least is intentional and driven, but greed gets kinda indifferent as it trivializes the lives of others for our own financial gluttony.
Chilling.
