The panel was asking why data center opposition runs so deep. Harrell says AI leaders have promised cures for years while ordinary people mostly see slop online, and the downsides are right next door.
Kevin, to what extent do you think opposition to data centers is not just about the physical building and the sort of perceived financial costs, but also indirectly just being opposed to AI in general and thinking that AI content is, you know, socially destructive?
…It might have been net good to your corporate life or your job life, but when you come home, you know, we're still kind of doing our thing, right? So there's a huge mismatch there when it comes to the daily benefits of having more AI versus the acute pain of having AI live next to my house, right?
I don't thoroughly agree with that. I think that, you know, it's like the, you know, there are various folks in the AI community who've been promising for a couple of years now, oh, AI will cure cancer. You know, all these good things are coming, but we haven't actually seen them yet, right? What we have, to your point, Kevin, what we've seen in our personal life is a bunch of AI slop on the internet, which, okay, maybe you find amusing, but also it's kind of like your relationship with alcohol. You might like it, but you don't feel good about liking it. And so, you know, I just think there's just not a compelling, you know, for a lot of a lot of sort of just, as you point out, people are using it productively and work, but there's not a sense this is improving my life. And meanwhile, I got this data center down the road that's going to, you know, change the way my community is. And I think until AI not just says all the amazing use cases are coming, but begins to actually show these use cases that people go out and use, I think the political problems for them are going to remain significant.
I think the overpromising of tech is almost like a symptom or a feature of just being in tech. Like you can't be a bad overpromiser and survive in tech, right? Take it until
you make it. Take it until you make it. Exactly. And I
don't want to actually invalidate the possibility sometime in the future that AI could be a primary contributor to curing cancer. We Cooking!? get there, right? This is very powerful stuff when it comes to research of all different kinds. But when it comes to the kind of the short-term political…