Noah Smith
speaker
437 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Noah Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You can, you know, I don't, because I think data centers can go elsewhere.
Like, you know, if New York won't build the data centers, Texas will.
Alabama will.
Places will.
They bring benefits to the local economy that can then be seen in tax revenue.
Local tax revenue, you can tax them.
So I'm not so worried about this data center nimbyism, first of all.
That's my first take.
My second take is that I believe, without solid evidence, so, you know, I don't have solid evidence for this one, but I believe that the local nimbyism over data centers is, to some degree, to some substantial degree, not all, but to some substantial degree, an expression of broader fears over AI itself.
that people don't like the idea that AI will take their jobs, you know, basically take their jobs.
I don't think most people think that AI will kill them yet.
I think people are mostly scared of jobs.
And that fear manifests as an instinctive opposition to AI that filters through to opposition to local data centers.
I think it's ineffectual opposition because banning local data centers in New York or whatever community won't actually reduce the amount of compute available to the AI industry.
But I think that that's what's motivating it to some degree.
It's going to be bad, but the bad is going to be, is going to slowly trickle into our economy in ways that it's hard to notice.
It's not like there's some cliff we fall off and like, ah, you know, fertility is low.
It's, um,
you know, old people will clog the top ranks of companies and will be more, less nimble, less able to invest in the future.
You know, less, our companies will get just less creative and dynamic.
Showing 321–340 of 437 · page 17 of 22
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