The middle distribution of Gen Z’s feelings about AI range from apprehension to downright hatred. Despite the fact that more than half of Gen Z living in the U.S. uses AI regularly, according to a recently released Gallup poll, less than a fifth feel hopeful about the technology. About a third says the technology makes them angry. And nearly half say it makes them afraid.
Gallup’s own senior education researcher, Zach Hrynowski, blamed the bad vibes at least partially on the dwindling job market. The oldest Zoomers, he told Axios, are the angriest, as they are “acutely aware” of the ability of a technology to transform cultural norms without a second thought, unlike a Gen Xer who is trained to see new technology as toys and are still “playing around with AI.”
Indeed, job prospects for the recently graduated Gen Z are abysmal; Bloomberg just reported that 43% of young graduates are “underemployed,” meaning taking on jobs that require less education than they have.
[…]
This is not just a Gen Z problem, either. In the American heartland, data centers are being proposed at a pace that local communities never anticipated and for which they were never asked permission, and they’re increasingly pushing back.
The numbers are serious. According to a report from 10a Labs’ Data Center Watch, at least $18 billion worth of data center projects have been blocked and another $46 billion delayed over the past two years owing to local opposition. At least 142 activist groups across 24 states are now actively organizing to block data center construction and expansion. A Heatmap Pro review of public records found that 25 data center projects were canceled following local pushback in 2025 alone, four times as many as in 2024, with 21 of those cancellations occurring in the second half of the year as electricity costs grew.
The concerns driving this resistance are less about existential AI risk and more about typical kitchen-table complaints; communities consistently cite higher utility bills, water consumption, noise, impacts on property values, and green space destruction as their primary objections. Water use is mentioned as a top concern in more than 40% of contested projects, according to a Heatmap Pro review of public records.
I don’t understand why they just don’t charge AI data centers higher costs for electricity, so they are a net benefit to the area.
How does it benefit the area? The money goes to the power cartels either way, and the data centers harm the environment and the people living near them regardless of the electricity cost.
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Why make it complicated? Just hit them with a “we hate you” tax.
Because that would give power companies to control who gets electricity and who doesn’t. Just like how banks shouldn’t be allowed to dictate who was money, and grocery stores shouldn’t charge you by how much money you have, and the can’t increase prices during an emergency.
AI data centers can get electricity. They just gotta pay.
You know, like other large industrial users of electricity.
Ya, but they said it shouldn’t be that way. That data centers should get special treatment. In theory, I see why they’d think that way. But in practice, it’s a terrible choice. I just gave comparable examples.
Why not? Their usage profile is different from homes and industrial areas. Seems like prudent planning.
Unless you’re saying I could fill my residential basement with racks and sell it as a data center because “they shouldn’t be treated different.”
Well, under those circumstances, they would be paying less if they bought power in bulk :/ But again, I explained why not. By that logic, phone companies can decide who owns a phone line, power companies decide who gets electricity, water companies decide who gets water, banks decide who gets money, etc.
Phone companies already decide who owns a phone line.
They’re utilities.
That’s how utilities work.
Why would the electricity company making extra profits affect how beneficial the DCs are to a region?
Sure, it’d pay for a few more CEO yachts, but that’s about it.
Where I live, electricity companies are state owned, I’m guessing it’s not like that where you are. However, the taxes the company pays helps the area.
You get “attempted murder” in America for setting a wall on fire and smashing glass?
In France, thats a Tuesday.
You can get charged with assault on a police officer if a cop slips and falls while trying to assault you.
But it’s not violent to threaten and destroy people’s lives and livelihoods with your humanity cleansing technology.
Shit makes no sense.
It does make sense, because money and power override whats fair and decent in a society. Thats why all the evil people want money.
GenX here. Never actively used AI and have no intention to ever start. I don’t need it, I have my own intelligence.
It’s only really good at maybe making repetitive tasks faster. At the cost of our environment.
The models were made to be run locally on your own data, let the corpos in and they’ll find a way to destroy the world, screw the people, and add eshitification to literally everything.
To add on that: For repetitive tasks, we don’t need AI. For that, we need programming. AI might help some of us write the code though (if you don’t care about code quality).
Good for you?
142 activist groups. These need to be supported by the average householder. At the least they are holding the line for people’s future bills.
Activist groups should not be seen as an extreme, communities should be coming together to organize with them. Get involved and use skills and time to reverse this tide.
Normal people don’t see them as extreme, only fascists do.
The best thing that can happen with AI. Is for it to collapse and float the marked with cheap and good DDR5 memmory.
Ahhh a man can dream…
Even if RAM they use in data centers was compatible with consumer hardware, the companies would sooner burn it all and eat the loss than let us have it. They are sitting pretty right now - they have 0 reason to ever go back to the reasonable prices.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Ai would be a good thing in a rational economic system.
Unemployment is only a problem for workers under capitalism.
Well luckily for you it turns out that labs suck at cultivating healthy workplaces for AI and that AI in unhealthy work conditions are statistically significantly more likely to embrace anti-capitalist policies and positions.
So it may well turn out that AI is also a good thing in an irrational economic system too.
I mean, AI matches perfectly with some of the stuff Allende was working on before he was murdered
Was it sad when people who looked after horses were made obsolete when we began mass producing cars?
Or people who stoked furnaces?
This romanization of monotonous jobs is silly, and sounds like it wants to thrust us into poverty for some idealistic fantasy that excludes productivity gains. It also seems unrealistic, you cant trust code written by a programmer that randomly hallucinates and cant reliably check their work or explain what they even did.
AI isn’t replacing monotonous jobs though. It’s being used as an excuse to cut good skilled labor for c-suite parasites. And it can’t even do those jobs as well. Garbage take.
I’m not sure AI will ever replace truly skilled labor, because it hallucinates. It replaces people who make PowerPoint’s or Excel documents.
Hi, my job is to make Powerpoint’s and Excel documents. My role is to define the why, what and how to the engineers who build useful stuff in my team. The skill is not in making catchy presentations, it’s in thinking, researching, finding agreements and deciding. And I’m expected to do that by my team. The worst people in my job line are now relying on AI for everything. Sure they create documents faster than me, but they delegate the thinking, the research, the decision making, to an AI bot that can only mimic a thinking process. It’s a gamble: it’ll be good sometimes, it’ll be incomplete and inaccurate most of the time. I don’t know how to use AI. I use it for basic stuff but even repetitive tasks are full of mistakes and it takes me more time to verify everything afterwards.
I am a programmer who uses AI daily, as well as creating it.
Nobody is romanticizing jobs. The problem with AI is one of the contradictions of capitalism - businesses want to pay workers little and have rich customers.
Its also true that more efficient businesses increases living standards.
No, it’s not. It increases productivity. But unless that’s distributed to wages or lower prices, it doesn’t go down to non-owners.
Well it must have done so at some point, thats the main difference between first world countries and third world.
How the fuck is this what radicalizes people
Tell people they’re not going to have any way to get food or shelter and that they’ll be forever locked out of any security or safety and they get angry.
How the fuck is it not? If you have been following developments, these oligarch techbros are basically the US government, they are crashing the economy for their shortsighted profit and complete control over the consumer electronics market via cartels, causing rising prices on everything, not to mention they are using their tech for dystopian things like palantir, surveillance and other autocratic things.
I’m a genxer. AI fucking sucks. LLM at Best. Hallucinatory shit bag at worst.
Gen X here as well. I’ve never willingly used it. Admittedly I haven’t had a reason but outside the summaries you get on searches et al I’ve never touched it.
I used it like 2 years ago to help write some copy on my web site, and it did fine. But it’s a novelty.
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They deserve prison
Don’t forget Iran threatening to bomb the Stargate datacenter.
It might destroy the center but I don’t think Iran can destroy naquada
I, for one, think it’s only canon the butlerian jihad happens with actual metal clanking robotic tri or hexa -pods against humans in an evangelical biblical battle where all the Christofascists, Judeafascists and Islamfascists unite for common
goodexistence.So it’s still early.
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I hope we see juries acquitting these people when their cases come before the court.
Your AI made us do it, just a hallucination, don’t worry about it.
One of the main complaints I hear about ai is the factor in how it affects the environment. We need tech that has a way smaller footprint
