When it’s AI data centers being robbed, suddenly theft is funny, justified, or even worth celebrating. But if the victims were socialist politicians, transgender people, or any other group this community sympathizes with, the reaction would be outrage and demands for justice.
AI data centers aren't people and are owned by corporations. The trans people and socialist politicians you hate don't waste obscene amounts of electricity and water. The trans people and socialist politicians you hate don't store data for surveillance capitalism. Trans people and socialist politicians aren't a plagiarism machine. Trans people and socialist politicians don't pollute everything with soulless slop.
One is a tool of oppression. The other is the people being oppressed.
It's not vandalism to put a nice opaque piece of cardboard on a solar panel. And no one seems to know how the camera got like that between the time the batteries died and when the technicians found it.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve despised Section 31 almost from its inception.
It was intriguing back when it was one guy and you didn't know if he was sane. Now they're the Heroic Protectors Of Starfleet! The post-scarcity diverse utopia needs unaccountable fascists slinking around in black pleather behind the scenes in order to function, after all.
I think an industry built on exploiting the sick and the dying should not exist. You're the one saying that people are numbers so exploiting them is ok, as long as doing so employs erstwhile numbers who could work anywhere.
This wasn't a problem when we decided that manufacturing jobs needed to go away. Or when mining jobs got outmoded. This wasn't a problem when automation replaced workers. This wasn't a problem when the gig economy turned jobs with benefits into contract work with none. This wasn't a problem for decades while wages didn't kept pace with inflation, by design. It's not a problem until some reprehensible industry needs to go away for the good of humanity. Then it's "Oh no think of the workers!"
As time progresses, the industry isn't going to get smaller or less exploitative. It's not going to have less money to buy politicians with, or fewer of the workers that can bask in the comfort of being the one group of workers you are willing to handwring about, at least until they can be replaced with AI. This problem will only become more intractable, killing more people and destroying more lives (sorry. numbers), increasing year on year, as it goes, if we let it persist like you're arguing for.
There's a cost, yes. But the status quo becoming worse and more entrenched will extract a greater cost over not a lot of time. I'd like to buy a better future for humans. You're arguing in favor of spending more to rent a better future for corporations, with other people's (again, numbers') blood.
It's neat how they're not numbers when you want to use them as human shields for a deeply immoral industry. They'll be numbers again as soon as they get sick.
If people not going bankrupt and dying because of treatable illness bothers you personally because you have a financial stake in their exploitation, that's your moral failure.
At a certain scale humans become numbers on a spreadsheet because that’s the only way to deal with them.
And it's also a comfortable way to view them if your income requires denying them medical care.
(Some of the earliest “computers” in the US were built to handle the census more efficiently.)
Yes, IBM's Hollerith Tabulators. Which were also used in the 40's in Germany by people who were just doing their jobs as a vital part of the German economy. Can you believe people wanted to crash the roaring German economy in the 1940s?
If there were fewer of us it would help make us seem more human.
Reducing people to numbers is a great way to rationalize exploiting the sick and the dying. Which is what you're doing.
AI data centers aren't people and are owned by corporations. The trans people and socialist politicians you hate don't waste obscene amounts of electricity and water. The trans people and socialist politicians you hate don't store data for surveillance capitalism. Trans people and socialist politicians aren't a plagiarism machine. Trans people and socialist politicians don't pollute everything with soulless slop.
One is a tool of oppression. The other is the people being oppressed.