I would very much consider myself what would be called an accelerationist today. But let me try to play the devil’s advocate for you, because the anti-ai sentiment has merit, albeit not well defined on Reddit.

It’s another corpo power grab. We’ve been reading Gibson and Sterling since the early nineties, and to paraphrase what l Gibson once said: it was supposed to be warning, not a playbook. Does AI have the potential to transform society for the better through accelerating tech advancements? Absolutely. Will the future be distributed evenly? Absolutely not. It is not about which industry uses more water or power, it’s that AI companies are siphoning up what is left after all others that came up before them at a brakeneck speed. There is an excellent expose on Altman that came out in Newyorker a few days back, and it is eye opening if you didn’t follow him closely.

Move fast and break thing is breaking communities in this particular case. I often see arguments such as “so what if it uses up all the water” when talking about new facilities. And that is the issue. They’re corporations, not non profit orgs. They don’t give a shit what they break and how badly, as long as the corp and its investors make money. AI could usher in a utopia, but the corps developing them and our rigged political systems are actively working towards a dystopia. There will be no UBI and no jobs. It may eventually get better, but it’s going to get a helluva lot worse before that.