Strong Start

OK.... I'm expecting to hear about how we can implement some democratic governance of AI.

At the very least we should get some intel on "robust deliberation" whatever that meaans in this context, and we should be walking away with a clear idea of how data center moratoria are an obstacle to this goal. Let's crack into it.

If you thought the last chunk was bad, we're really starting to get muddled now.

1. "AI development." What does that mean? Clearly, it's something distinct from the physical data center infrastructure, which would certainly be paused by a moratorium.

2. OK - data centers will be difficult to offshore. THat probably means we have some leverage, right? No, wait. The constraints are not set in stone. Drat.

3. Turns out it's lucky they're difficult to offshore - they cause environmental harm! Which we care about. Remember that we care about it.

And here we have what I believe to be the crux of Beck's argument: Limiting compute in any way, shape, or form will result in higher consumer LLM costs. Which, as small-business leftists, we naturally oppose!

(Whether or not these companies will be raising their prices for other reasons, i.e. to attempt to scrape together any kind of revenue that even sort of measures up to their insane capex outlays, is outside the scope of this piece and is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Now this is the good shit.

A lot of organizing to stop data centers is coming from wealthy people. Probably. We don't actually know. But there are clusters of data centers in affluent suburbs -- and in surrounding areas, which I suppose by definition would be less affluent, since we didn't include them in the first category.

Sure, there's a "narrative" of vulnerable communities standing up to big industries. Such as, for example, in the only actual non-speculative instance we are going to identify in this entire piece, where people are sick of being poisoned by data centers.

But just imagine, for a moment, if one of the people who was opposed to getting poisoned, was a Republican.

The only other example of the power of LLM subscriptions I could think of: My monthly $3000 lawyer bill.

Surely someone could pay $20 to subsribe for one month then cancel the subscription in the rare instances where they need thousands of dollars of legal advice from an LLM. Surely you're not suggesting the working class keep an LLM lawyer on retainer just in case.

Bizarre framing. More bad writing.

Casual "Though this could be more" - awesome move.

OK, so we do have some leverage to get these companies to help us decarbonize the grid. That could be cool! Unfortunately we've already established that our entire objection to data center moratoria in the first place is that increasing costs to these companies results in direct downstream impact on end-users who need LLM's to learn calculus and do a bunch of complicated legal paperwork on a monthly basis.

So if I had to guess, probably they would pass along the costs of the grid build-out too. Not sure why that one would be any different.

More clunky writing. Donors and organizations need to focus on labor displacement / a gigantic bubble, which probably does exist, based on these capex outlay numbers. For some reason, unspecified, this "focus" cannot take place under the umbrella of a moratorium.

Look, even OpenAI has pitched some ideas on industrial policy, which they have a history of opposing. That just goes to show that we should listen to them (?)

I mean... it's nonsense. Still have not really heard why any of this can't happen during a moratorium btw.

In Summary

Data center moratoria are being pitched as a leftist "solution" to the issue of AI (and wealth concentration)((and negative environmental impacts of data centers in communities)).

These moratoria are actually actively harmful, because they offshore the negative externalities. Those negative externalities belong here in the US. Plus, most of the people opposing them are middle class or wealthier, and these data centers are being located in affluent communities -- except when they aren't, and except when they're not. We actually don't really know.

That's beside the point, though. In the New Economy, access to frontier LLM models is the difference between survival and oppression for many individuals (+small businesses +medium size businesses) and anything that raises input costs of the hyperscalers during this buildout phase means more expensive monthly subscriptions to Claude Mythos TM.

Which means underserved communities probably won't learn math as well, and they'll have to pay real lawyers an awful lot of money. And it's not fair that developing communities have to pay more to goof around with LLMs. And there's actually probably tons of real reasons to be using these all the time, it's not just that I've gigafried my own brain to the point where I see a 2 year old technology as being as indispensable as drinking water, trust me, I am a professor!

So we need to keep these companies' costs down, leftistly. And by the way, if we don't offshore them, we can get them to pay to improve our power grid. This won't increase costs though.

Plus, have you even seen some of these people protesting these things? If they're not wealthy, which they probably are but we don't know, (again, with the exception of those poor people in Memphis, but they're the minority here, probably) they're almost certainly insane anti-vaxxers. You really wanna pal around with those guys?

Look, the bottom line is, there are some real challenges that we need to face, but moratoria are the wrong tools. They're a dead end approach. Once they pass, people are gonna totally give up on regulating things like power, water, and job loss for some reason. Poof. All that energy, dissipated by Bernie Sanders and his coterie of wealthy environmentalists.