Google Accused of Illegally Killing a Massive Forest for Its New Data Center Project: It's "gross incompetence," or "gross disregard" for the law. Or both.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-accused-illegally-killing-forest-data-centerOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
9 replies
Imagine if we treated gross incompetence as malice.
Like, “hey Ford, prove your engineers thought putting the gas tank in a crumple zone was a good idea.”
Imagine if we had a corporate death penalty, where a company who violated the law persistently was dissolved and its assets taken over by the government before being sold off to competitors.
The personal experience my family has with Google and their data center development, from behind the curtain.
Google doesn't give a fuck. Some of the people outside of their executive offices do, but not Google leadership. They have no conscious, no morality, no sense of duty or patronage.
They will not hesitate to lie, break promises, or hide the full truth.
They exist only to capture more wealth in any way that they can.
The phrase was weird to start with. It's like wearing a shirt that says "don't be a pedophile". It's saying more than the words themselves.
Not really. In one way it is like mapping out rules for future members to adhere to, to keep them from straying from their original missions and philosophies.
I guess they didn't factor in fuckheads like Sundar Pichai :'(
With AI replacing the games and VFX industries, they'll be lots more of this stuff going on I imagine.
Holodeck-like game dev will probably eventually be a thing... And I thought I'd be happy about that. But I'm not.
Hopefully the planet and the species will last long enough that we'll laugh about Data Centers taking up huge buildings... And how toxic everything was back in 2026...
... hopefully we'll survive long enough to see today like we now see the 1950s (with nuclear techniques) and earlier. But I just don't think we're improving the world.
...and Nuclear Power hasn't really be that great either.
Ai replacing VFX is still ai marketing as far as I've seen. The US vfx market is in a slump because of outsourcing, and streaming platforms that don't need to produce blockbusters to keep people watching and paying. Ai for vfx only works on social media where one succeeds by capturing attention as quickly as possible, and it doesn't matter if there's 5 fingers if it drives more engagement.
Believing it can do Game Dev, but will for some reason stop at being able to transfer all those 3D modelling and animation abilities for VFX is a bit of a pipe dream. If it can model and animate characters and events in video games VFX tools will start dropping too.
I didn't say I believe it can do game dev. I just have deeper insight into VFX. From what I've heard about games, the industry is also suffering more from factors other than ai, but ai marketers and hypers are happy to take credit for an industry suffering.
I've seen impressive demos for ai animation and modeling, but there's a wide gulf between creating an impressive demo and replacing artists who can synthesize notes, industry knowledge and techniques, company and project-specific pipelines, workflows, and tools, and output something without visible flaws that, in the case of games, factors in hardware and software limitations. And to do that for less than an already underpaid workforce. As Cory Doctrow says, ai cannot do your job, the ai-salesmen just have to convince your boss it can.
I think the tools will eventually find-cost effective ways to support production, but I maintain I don't see it replacing these industries, and saying so is carrying a torch for ai marketers.