Most of the scaremongering about Data Centers comes from a book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All" by Eliezer (((Yudkowsky))). In said book the doomsday scenario is AI starts making it's own decisions without human oversight (cause there can't be any realistic human oversight) and it kills everyone on Earth not out of malice but just because it doesn't consider humanity in it's calculations. It needs infinite numbers of power plants to generate power for itself so it just eats up entire oceans in nuclear power and the waste heat boils away the rest.
Almost all of the neo-luddite talking points are either directly from this book or are from various flavors of Indian scaremongering on social media or youtube for clicks quoting this book. And ignoring how Eliezer's a Jew, the CCP is heavily involved in trying to get us to kneecap ourselves as pointed out by others in this thread not too long ago. Shit is moving very fast and the CCP only has to get us to stumble a little bit to let them get a huge advantage. A few useful idiots demanding environmental studies that will only take 30, 40 years to never actually be completed would let the CCP (who will simply shoot the environmentalists) completely dominate the field forever.
This isn't to say AI isn't a scam. It is. But it's a scam that has the not small chance of becoming something else entirely, and whoever controls that will have the economic equivalent of nuclear weapons.
