00:00Even people are more comfortable with solar farms or nuclear facilities, which, you know, a couple of decades ago, people
00:08did not want them around at all.
00:09There's something about AI, like maybe they don't articulate the X risk the way people in Silicon Valley talk about
00:17it, etc.
00:17But there is something about AI specifically that just like has these sort of drives these very anxious vibes in
00:27a way that something with a similar ecological footprint doesn't.
00:31That did end up being my hypothesis, because, again, on one hand, people didn't bring up like deep fakes or
00:37job loss or X risk or whatever.
00:39People were much more likely to bring up water and the NDAs or something like that.
00:44But I think that's what made it feel like there was no pro-faction for data centers, right?
00:49Like it didn't feel like a tradeoff that's like, yeah, we're going to like deal with this big construction project,
00:54but we're going to get more energy or something.
00:56Or, yeah, we all need cars. Like the car has got to be made somewhere.
01:00I think with AI, people were just like, but do we need it at all?
01:03And so then if you're not even sure whether you need it at all, then the trade of like, let
01:08me accept this big cost is pretty significant.
01:11Again, one of the things that distinguishes, I think, the classic NIMBY story from the data center story is that
01:17people who do not live near data centers are as opposed to data centers as people who live near them.
01:22And normally with NIMBYs, it's like, I do want housing somewhere else.
01:25I do want a nuclear plant somewhere else.
01:27With data centers, people are saying, I don't want them anywhere because I don't really think we need this AI
01:31thing.
01:31And so I think it's a failure of Silicon Valley, frankly, and the AI industry and also governments as well
01:37to make the positive case for why is it important to our society that we actually enable the AI build
01:43out?
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