How Local Activists are Interrupting Big Tech AI Investments

• Sam Altman’s “AI empire” alone is using as much power as New York City and San Diego, combined
• Google’s AI data centers are consuming massive amounts of power, with electricity use hitting 30.8 million megawatt-hours in 2024, nearly doubling since 2020 — while inking deals with the Israeli military
• Elon Musk’s xAI has constructed the world’s largest AI supercenter, Colossus, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in one of the country’s most impoverished cities

The neoliberal world order as we know it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. But celebrations of its downfall are muted by the bleak reality of the world that is rising to take its place. Every day, our screens are flooded with images of war, genocide, and AI slop. And we all know we’re living in dark times.

So, what does this mean for us, and how do we move forward?

Our world and our access to it is increasingly structured through technological mediation: Digital platforms and systems are a massively important aspect of not just our work environments or our interactions with government entities or “the media” but also our individual interactions with one another. Our world is built around technological infrastructures that define what we see, who we can talk to and what information gets presented to us.

Surely a society of all narcissistic tech bros whose only talent is talking people into giving them money would be ideal, right guys? Right?

Explain: One of the funniest stories in history that I heard was Dostoevsky recounting some utopian thinkers among the Russian Aristocracy that wanted to make everything rational, and someone objected saying the peasants would never go for it, so they replied “then we’ll just eliminate the peasants”. As though a society of all rich people would somehow work, even though the peasants did all the work, which is sort of the one thing you actually need for society to operate. The rich people would literally just starve in like two seconds.

People sort of still have the same idea today though, like if we can just eliminate the poor somehow, everyone will be rich and live off the interest from their stocks or whatever, not realizing that stocks only go up because somewhere, someone is actually doing work. Oh right, and uh, the robots will do all human labor in like the …

How I built a structured AI-assisted development workflow as a Tech Lead, where the real work happens before a single line of code is written.

In a 1938 article, MIT’s president argued that technical progress didn’t mean the end of work. He’s still right.

Stay informed with AI-summarized top stories from Hacker News. TL;DR for devs, ELI5 for everyone.

Zeli compiles Hacker News and HuggingFace daily AI papers, automatically summarizing and extracting key points to help you quickly select interesting articles to read. Our platform helps you determine if an article is worth reading in-depth by providing concise digests that save your time and boost reading efficiency.

Note from me, Frederick: I did not write this, but it reads exactly as if I had wrote it. Holy cow.

A great overview of the current state of Google search’s AI overview.

This is really fascinating. Something to note is that the sample size is narrow focused on experienced developers with particular famous open source projects (average 5 years and 1,500 commits on the project in question).

In my own job I also have a novel, long-term situation so I can really sympathize with the prime slowdowns they identify. AI just doesn’t cut it.