This seems like a strawman. It’s certainly not consensus that AGI has been achieved and I don’t think the people participating in this event feel like there is no value in human input or steering the AI.

This post sounds like someone who lives in deep in an echo chamber and has a warped reality because of it. That said I read this point and was like yup they’re right about one thing anyway.

So that’s what I’m doing here. For what it’s worth I find a lot of the AI people’s worldview very consistent. They believed AI would be the most important technology of our life times and committed their work to it. Some of these same people are total liars so yeah I won’t really hang onto their every word.

Why would I care what they want me to believe?

Intuitively it would make sense that you can put math ability on a chart with a value for “general public” “smart high schooler” “smart undergrad” “smart PhD/ professional”. And you could place frontier AI somewhere on that chart over time from GPT 2 to now and see the trend.

Then you’d have to consider that either you believe there is a fundamental limit that is below peak human mathematician level or there’s not.

For funded startups it mostly just doesn’t matter a ton unless you are passing on inference in your product at scale

Building infrastructure and housing in the US is painfully slow and a huge tax on everyone, almost everything should be fast tracked. We have some of the most productive economic zones in the world (SF <-> LA, Boston <-> DC corridor) and we have made it largely illegal to build housing and transit in these areas due to bureaucracy and red tape.

Do you think the high speed rail between SF and LA needs more rounds of community input?

It should absolutely be focused on anyway. I don’t know how you got the other impression. The US gov paying to stop windmills and solar is insane.

But there’s a difference to that and being just straight up against data centers or anything being built.

For data centers you get a medium term boost to the economy + long term tax revenue. The externalities of data centers are quite low if you don’t put them right in someone’s neighborhood.

I think the general populace has pretty irrational political stances. For example in NYC where I live "gentrification is bad because it will raise the rent" is a fairly common stance, despite the cause of high rent being restricted housing supply. There's a popular case of residents being OK with a truck stop but blocking any new housing [1].

Congestion pricing was incredibly unpopular and controversial, despite most New Yorkers not being drivers and the policy being very effective in many other cities. Now it's extremely popular.

There is also just a lot misinformation that goes around, the water aspect being one of them. Data center use something like 1/8th the water of the California Almond industry [2]. There is some limited indications anti data center sentiment is spread by US adversaries [3].

[1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/nyregion/harlem-truck-dep... [2]. https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/data-centers-less-wa... [3]. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

Even just doing what Northern Virginia does and lowering people’s property taxes gives homeowners more disposable income/ lowers prices for renters which is a start.

> No one wants to live near one, especially not doctors and teachers with young families who can choose to live anywhere.

Northern Virginia is one of the top locations for the kind of people who “can live anywhere” and is the world capital of data centers. And part of that appeal in NoVA is low property taxes due to data centers paying taxes.

There is some real aspects of the data center debate but I don’t think your engaging with them