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.
…igniting a fire at the exterior gate. No one was injured, but Moreno-Gama was arrested approximately an hour later outside OpenAI’s headquarters, where he was allegedly trying to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatening to burn the facility to the ground. He is now facing state charges of attempted murder…
Murder of who? The gate? A glass door? Pshaw.
I hope we see juries acquitting these people when their cases come before the court.
if you live in a common law tradition country like the United States, go read about Jury Nullification right now. and then shut the fuck up about it. if you are summoned for Jury Duty don’t bring it up unless directly asked about it.
i wish.
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.
Good. Burn it all
I’m an Gen-Xennial or whatever and I hate AI because it’s ruining my ability to solve problems m with search results on the internet. I get imaginary results in the AI panels when I’m incognito and don’t have it disabled, and DDG has been completely fucked by Slop Spam websites in their results.
Then there are low price eshop clones that copy legit products at half price. The sites usually have a name so close that when checking trustpilot type places, they’ll “autocorrect” your search to the legit site that was cloned.
It’s finishing off the already largely ruined internet.
yesterday, I was hunting down documentation on how to get a piece of software (Garage) to create a default key and data storage bucket on startup.
Turns out, there’s this site that has a hallucinated set of environment variables to do exactly that with the exact container I’m using. They don’t exist. They never did. The only website with a reference to the environment variable is the “AI generated” 3rd party “documentation” site.
Now is the time of monsters.
Roughly same age group (I think? early Y), and yeah, exactly that.
Searching has become a battle against the terrible AI answers that misinterpret and oversimplify one random result while making it a chore to find actual good sources.
And of course gen AI is also to blame for these good sources being drowned in an ocean of content farms, those shitstain tentacular bastards stealing and garbling information beyond recognition. Walls and walls of text saying absolutely nothing, or complete lies, on every subject known to humanity, feeding on themselves and replacing everything else.
I was looking for a way to copy-paste microsoft word document content with the comments and the suggested edits to no avail. I finally resorted to asking Gemini and it basically gave me a bogus answer that didn’t work :(
Been a while since I’ve had to use that piece-of-shit in anger; but doesn’t the “save as” options give you the possibility of saving it as HTML but with all of those changes baked in? It’s easier to copy-paste HTML.
You could set your search engine to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ so AI will still be disabled incognito
Startpage is also an alternative. Privacy and no AI. Better than that DDG shit.
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
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.
because they are in the pockets of key people involved in making that decision
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.
Many local government’s aren’t on the home rule, they follow some form of the Dillon Rule. This applies to utilities and land use. For some local areas they are required by some degree to follow the State’s allocation and billing of utilities to remain classified as a public utility in the State.
In many areas our legal framework at the State and local level were never made to handle what’s coming down the pipe with new advances. This is why I always indicate that data centers and their impact need to be addressed at the local level. That’s why I think Federal regulation is the wrong step for the building part of AI. This is very much a local and/or State level that needs to desperately be answered there.
The good news is that we see more people who are involved with their local government with this issue. But this underlying issue has been one since the 1970s, it’s just that these companies have hired firms that are incredibly well versed in the shortcomings of local ordinances and State law. It’s super difficult to patch up flaws in the laws when they’re being exploited at rapid fire pace.
Your AI made us do it, just a hallucination, don’t worry about it.
How the fuck is this what radicalizes people
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.
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.
I think the online rhetoric around AI has been way more apocalyptic than the more vague and abstract political stuff. So Trump raped some kids, that’s really bad but that’s not something people feel the need to go out and risk their lives over.
But data centers are going to steal all your water and there will be killbots patrolling the streets? All jobs will be taken away and everyone will be reduced to serfs or killed as surplus population? Drum that into a sufficiently mentally fragile subset of the population long and hard enough and you’ll get them worked up enough to feel like they need to strike first.
L take
It’s a fact AI is effectively stealing water supplies, FaceDeer. Don’t be so glib about it.
And the extreme rhetoric comes from the industries themselves, including Sam Altman’s own mealy mouth. And from industry shills who get good money to pretend that the thing is powerful and dangerous and worth investing in. Yudkowsky, Hinton, etc.
good.
@tonytins All to fight software… seems weird to me when there are people who rule the software
Huh? I don’t get it…
He’s saying you can take down 100 data centers…
Or one CEO.
Not that I’D ever advocate or cheer for violence, no sir.
CEOs are easily replaceable.
Not when the last CEO was publicly executed by an angry mob. That would not attract top talent…
UnitedHealthcare didn’t seem to have difficulty.
Theoretically, both could be done. Theoretically.
