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There seems a clearly possibility that Data Centres may become this century's canals;
as investment continues to expand & expensive infrastructure gets built, recent developments in AI & associated technologies suggest it may soon move from a networked utility to a local based (and powerful) software solution, making data centres (quickly) redundant...
If so, pretty quickly (like canals) a major infrastructure sector will be over-taken by technological change.
@ChrisMayLA6 nah, there's good reasons for having data centres, the same reasons that we had for using them 20 years ago. The current boom is more like the massive build-out of fibre optic cables shortly before the dot-com crash, that then sat unused until people bought it for a song from bankruptcy administrators and used it to create the modern internet. The people building them will lose money, but what they build will, eventually, be useful - and maybe even useful as data centres!
@ChrisMayLA6 "This century's canals" doesn't sound promising to people living in the Netherlands.
The lifespan of the GPUs used for #AI is less than three years.
IMO, scaling and oligarchical behaviour mean that replacements will be consolidated, not distributed (likely where the poor live and the politicians give generous tax breaks to polluters)
This means, before the decade is out, we will have hundreds of massive data centers abandoned. Maybe they'd be reused, but probably too expensive to do so.
We must reign in this recklessness.
#RegulateAI
@ChrisMayLA6 Have you come across a good paper on the canal craze and the stranded investment when attention switched to railways?
(Then, of course, insane competition meant the railways disrupted each other, rather than the canals)
Sadly my recollection of such things (after five years of retirement) is pretty much zero... however, I would imagine one of the Economic History journals would have had something - Google Scholar might get you to something. Apologies for not offering something more substantive
@ChrisMayLA6 Thanks, it was just a thought.
It would be an interesting comparison to France, where the canal network sprang up for intercity trade, and to feed the maw of Paris with wood and food, then was hit over the head by the railways, who all hated each other …
(and to forestall the military comments, yes, rapid mobilisation and logistics on the canals and then the railways was a factor important for France but absent in Britain)
@BashStKid @ChrisMayLA6
The French comparison is similar to England.
Canals (and speculative canal plans) sprung up to move coal, raw materials and finished goods across England and Wales.
The railway companies bought out the canal companies to reduce competition and neglected the canals.
(This is paraphrasing and there's •lots• more history I've neglected)
That would make sense for a host of privacy and intellectual property reasons, but I can't help thinking that the AI industry is currently primed for mass data collection over any other purpose....and AI-facilitated data collection needs data centres.
If we live in an information economy then information is the modern means of production, and owning it outright facilitates the creation of information monopolies.
And as you say, that plays right into the history of IPRs
Monopoly ownership of all historical knowledge and intellectual property of the entire species is one hell of a flex.
@ChrisMayLA6 “recent developments in AI & associated technologies suggest it may soon move from a networked utility to a local based (and powerful) software solution” I hadn't heard this - do you have a link, Chris? Thanks.
Actually, its a theme that has come up again & agin in the timeline for various previous posts on AI - tech folk making the prediction that as AI becomes more powerful it will move to a desk-based utility rather than a networked one.... its a coupe of weeks since someone made the point (again), but enough people have said this in replies that I take it to be a far from random prediction.... but other than that, sorry no source
@ChrisMayLA6 @alex_p_roe I think a lot of people believe that models will eventually be run locally, but the training of those models will still be very intensive and use data centres. This is my understanding from what I've read, at least.
@ChrisMayLA6 OK, clear. I’ll ask someone I know who heads an IT department about this.
@ChrisMayLA6 Except I won't be taking a relaxing stroll along the edges of the abandoned data centre to look at wildlife!
@ChrisMayLA6 Well, never say never. Maybe bats will move in or something
@ChrisMayLA6 The aggressive unprofitability and lack of any noticable ROI of the big LLMs as they currently exists certainly doesn't help with that... I've yet to see any convincing evidence they can even pay off the debt to build the datacenters, let alone keep the lights on over the mid to long term...
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