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If you spend any time watching the AI safety debate play out online, you’ve probably noticed it’s a bit of a circus. Right now, the conversation is totally dominated by tech investors pushing for maximum speed, software developers who think a few lines of code can solve anything, and click-hungry influencers screaming about a digital apocalypse.
There’s also the political side of this, especially when it comes to datacenters. As you’ll see in any politicized debate, some people are well-meaning while others are defending their own interests.Without performing a bunch of Vulcan mind melds, I can’t tell you for sure who’s on what side of that selfish/selfless divide, but I’m sure we all have our guesses that might be libelous if put in print, so I’ll steer clear of that in this article.
The latest thing we’re seeing is a push for a moratorium on datacenters until society gets a better grip on all aspects of AI. Not only are there safety issues (overblown by John Connor fantasies, of course), but there are questions of how society will run without abundant jobs, who gets the wealth from information that was taken out of the public domain, and how the whole industry should or shouldn’t be regulated.
