cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44996161
March 25, 2026
The policy, announced by Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democratic representative, on Wednesday morning, aims to ensure the AI boom protects the environment and communities, and benefits workers instead of harming them. A temporary ban, the lawmakers say, would give the US government time to create strong federal safeguards for AI, which is “affecting everything from our economy and wellbeing to our democracy, warfare and our kids’ education”.
“AI and robotics are creating the most sweeping technological revolution in the history of humanity,” Sanders said in an emailed statement. “The scale, scope, and speed of that change is unprecedented. Congress is way behind where it should be in understanding the nature of this revolution and its impacts.”
Bernie just did a YouTube video talking with Claude about this and it’s good
It did change my opinion on the subject primarily from the pov that a bit of wait is good in corrupt systems as it allows justice to catch up and datacenters are not critical infrastructure - we can shop around.
Can we modify the bill to include forcibly closing and outlawing existing datacenters?
I think people would probably be upset at losing access to their banking, Gmail, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. accounts. Basically every big company website runs through data centres.
Don’t get me wrong, I have deep nostalgia for the “small web” days of the 90s. But if we want to go back to that we’d have to do a little more planning than just “shut down all the data centres!”
Would love if someone brought the infrasound argument to the table.
If the argument were that it poses a health and safety risk to people, it might eventually be possible to regulate them similarly to oil fields.
With this admin, I feel like that would be a benefit to their whims. The rich are in charge and they think we should be enslaved or dead. You’d be better off showing how many billionaire heads you could stack before they fell over!
Every person that loses their job to AI is just another person with lots of free time on their hands and no means to support themselves and their family.
I truly do not know what their long term plan is, assuming they even have one (bold assumption, I know) but it seems to me that having huge masses of unemployed people with tons of motivation and nothing better to do is like, the last thing I would be pushing for if I was of the ownership class.
Especially with data centers…which need to be connected to the outside world with sufficient speed to be anything more than miles of copper and hot chunks of metal playing with itself. I bet a handful of guys with some shovels and a dremel could seriously fuck up the productivity of a data center pretty easy.
Nice, but obviously going nowhere.
Being correct too early is what being a leftist means, after all.
but obviously going nowhere.
If the only battles we fight are ones we’re guaranteed to win, we’ll never win the war.
Bring this shit up, even if it’ll never get to a vote.
It shows America that some will fight, but that they need the numbers.
Being correct too early
That only makes sense if by “too early” you mean “before the majority”.
And if no one pushed for progress until the majority of Congress wants it, we’d never get it.
80+ years ago Congress told FDR he had to wait “one more term” before they’d support universal healthcare which the majority of voters wanted and elected FDR to enact.
Stop fucking catering to the majority of congress, and start catering to voters.
That’s how we win elections and make progress.
Changing politicians to match voters. Changing voters to match politicians doesn’t work
Quick edit:
Sometimes changing voters to match a politician “works” as in winning election…
But we just saw how that works out. The politician doesn’t do enough, that party’s voters disengage, and the opposing party captures the entire federal government.
It’s a bandaid that can work every once and a while, but even when it does there’s no pay off. So turnout plummets in the next couple elections.
This shit ain’t complicated, it’s basic sociology
Was Biden right when he opposed universal healthcare, or is it just a new set of rich donors?
Biden isn’t even vaguely left leaning. Am I missing the joke?
We agree there. Given he won the nomination I guess there are very few left leaning Americans.
If you followed how he got nominated, it was yet another scheme by the establishment Dems (who are a center right party, in the rest of the world’s perspective) to stop Sanders or any properly leftist candidate from winning.
All the less popular candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden on the same day at a critical moment in the primary season.
It was less obvious than the heavy-handed tactics of 2024’s primaries, but he was absolutely ordained by the party and not the primary voters.
You are correct. I’m considered a “radical leftist” because I have crazy ideas like “don’t put kids in cages” and “the mentally ill shouldn’t be left to die on the street”.
Clearly polarizing positions that directly contradict the teachings of Jesus.
If a facility truly consumes resources at such a rate that it increases local prices then they should be taxed at a rate that would cover the difference for the community they are entering.
Around me it’s not so much that the data centers use so much that it raises the price for everyone. It’s that the state government wants their business so bad that it has agreed to raise the prices of utilities (water and electricity) for everyone living around the area to subsidize the operational cost of the datacenters. Our electricity bill is up 30% from 2024 and most of the datacenters are still under construction
I really don’t get the kowtowing to data centers in particular, like I get it if they’re payed off properly but when they aren’t then why? It’s kinda like the Noah’s Ark BS in Kentucky where the locals gave Ken Ham the fucken world and it’s brought in basically no runoff business. Why do local politicians do this, for all the money they waste on shit like this they could create local grant programs and spin up a bunch of local businesses.
Why do local politicians do this
Because too many people in the US only vote once every 4 years in national elections and don’t pay attention to their local ones.
I meant why do they do this without the pay side of things. I get corruption since it directly benefits the individual but without that its just stupid. There’s no gain and you risk making yourself a target if folks get pissed off enough.
you risk making yourself a target if folks get pissed off enough
They would have to be paying attention enough to notice, first. Sinclair and others steadily gobbling up local tv and radio stations has created local news deserts across the nation.
People notice their power bills and the horrid white noise these things make. Frankly speaking the propaganda only does so much, and just not acknowledging it does nothing towards the narrative.
I only found out about our county trying to sneak a data center in after the plan had already been withdrawn. They were working on all of it in closed meetings but fortunately some folks found out and when they brought it out in the open where the community would see, it quickly disappeared. Now we’re all on watch for when they try this shit again.
This is America you’re talking about…
Curing the symptoms and ignoring the disease
The disease is fueled by datacenters.
The disease is too much money in the hands of a few who only chase further gains, damaging everyone else
And you don’t think datacenters are involved in providing the money? 😶
Why are data centers bad for the environment? Wouldn’t this cause American ai innovation to slow down? I thought we are in an ai race?
They gobble up power and water.
Moorse law is dead, and the only trick left is tonadd more power. So hardware is only getting more power hungry.
Most US electricity is fossil fuel.
Sucking up water resources from local communities, poisoning water with it’s waste, noise causing illnesses in people living nearby, using a fuckload of energy usually from non renewable sources adding CO2 to our atmosphere, just to name a few things. This isn’t news
“Why are data centers bad for the environment?”
Computer servers use a lot of electricity when they run. I believe most data centers are focused on data storage and retrieval, which means there are upswings and downswings in their usage as demand to access that data increases and wanes, so it’s not always running at 100% power consumption. My understanding is that AI data centers are primarily used for training new models, which means they are nearly always running at or near 100% to maximize training.
Not only does this consume a lot of electricity from the grid to run, but a significant byproduct of servers running is heat, requiring strong cooling systems for the data center, which ironically uses even more electricity. I think they use a lot of water cooling to achieve this cooling as well since water is good at absorbing, moving, then dissipating heat. I’ve read comments that this makes the water difficult to reuse, but I don’t know why that would be the case.
In short, they use a lot of electricity to generate heat that then needs even more electricity and water to manage.
“Wouldn’t this cause American ai innovation to slow down?”
Sure, this could cause the base level processing power available for training to taper off, but I think that would actually breed more innovation in making better training methods that use that power more efficiently. I recall a lot of early Chinese models being just as good for end users as American models despite being trained on less processing power. That sounds innovative to me.
I would liken it to video game optimization. When gaming tech was weaker it was more necessary to optimize games to run on the limited hardware. Modern gaming consoles have enough processing overhead to achieve the same thing that developers can get away with less optimization, which ironically can lead to worse performing games than when that overhead was missing.
If they build the cooling system in a closed loop with cooling towers, the water usage is mostly a 1 time fill.
But it’s more expensive, so they don’t
The water is partially evaporated each heating and cooling cycle. So new water needs to be added continiously. They could build more expensive/less efficient cooling systems. But turns out they can just get lots of cheap water instead. Probably cause there is lacking enviromental protection regulation.
The fact that China is catching up with opensource models basically proves it’s not a money problem. Competition isn’t helping us it’s just bleeding us dry of resources (power, water, and computer hardware). China has basically proven competition isn’t the most efficient way of making the best AI.
