AIBU to point out that datacentres don't provide local employment?

I’ve visited loads of data centres as part of my job and there are plenty of local people working at them. There are also a lot of ex military, security, engineer roles that may mean people move to an area, but as an example I have been to a huge data centre in Ireland and it felt about 80% local workers.

I’ve been to data centres in northern Sweden and in Denmark and the US and they were mostly locals (again electrical engineers, typical health and safety type roles) with maybe around 30-40% who had moved specifically for the roles.

There are surprisingly few orbits were you stay in the sun 24/7 as the earth gets in the way for nearly all of them. Typical satellites deal with that by relying on batteries while they're in the shade but the battery capacity limits their power load. Data centres need a lot of power.

Meanwhile, all the time your satellite is sitting in direct sunlight it's getting hit with over 1KW of radiant energy per square metre as there's no atmosphere to protect it. Only a small fraction of that energy can be usefully converted to electricity and the rest just makes your satellite hotter. Even worse, space is a vacuum and vacuums are really efficient insulators. That's why Thermos flasks keep your tea hot for so long and also why the International Space Station has absolutely enormous radiators to help it dump the heat and avoid cooking its occupants.

They can always stop.

Otherwise the premise of my point stands. Research into space is going to underpin GDP. Which will be needed if there are fewer jobs.

Power, cooling and space is the draw. The idea is they're powered by solar arrays, which as they can be facing the sun 24/7, without any sort of atmosphere or weather obscuring them. Which means they'd be vastly more powerful than any earth-bound solar panels. Cooling is helped enormously by the fact space is really, really cold. And in sci-fi dream world, the heat the centres produce will be used create power, specifically for extra-terrestrial bases such as a moon base. And space they take up is solved by space being really... well, spacious! But space they take up in space ships to get them there is definitely a bit of an issue. As is cost, and bandwidth. But honestly, I wouldn't bet against them. Just probably not on Musk's timeline.

But it wouldn't really help the UK as we have no spaceships, and no money. So we'd still be entirely reliant on America, and as presumably the point of building our own centres is to reduce our reliance on America, this isn't much of a solution. Though it could be argued what's the point of destroying our own very limited land for it when the tech will be obsolete by the time it's built. But at our building speed, that's pretty much a given regardless, space or no space.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/factsheet-the-uk-space-sector/factsheet-the-uk-space-sector

18% rounded up is 20%. By definition if 18% of the UKs GDP relies on space, then that 18% relies on space research.

Or maybe we should just stop ?

So if he's right, what happens once we've cured cancer, and presumably all the other diseases too? And all the new diseases that pop up? We're just kept alive to get older and older, and feebler and feebler, requiring the least impaired to provide 24hr care to everyone else? Well, until the robots take over and rescue all of us from ever needing to leave the house at all, and from any physical contact with other humans, as our minds and bodies fail and we're kept hooked up to machines to keep our hearts pumping.

Or will it figure out how to keep ourselves mentally and physically healthy for all eternity, so we no longer sicken or fade in any way? The world might start looking a bit crowded pretty quickly... So babies won't really be an option, however desired they may be. Just an increasingly aged population with nothing to do, hoping their accidental death isn't too gory. Or becoming more and more terrified and depressed to the point they take matters into their own hands.

And this is the best-case scenario, Altman's utopia. I gotta say, I'm not sold, personally.

You make a point re employment once built. Taxes need to come from that data centre somehow not the people working as there wont be many.

I'm willing to be proven wrong but data centres in space is something I can't get my head around. None of the big problems about terrestrial data centres - power, cooling, cost, bandwidth, the sheer volume of space they take up - are in any way reduced by putting them in orbit.

Yes but that's redundancy isn't it and any reduced redundancy would need to be fixed, you don't just leave it sat there. But clearly none of us work in an AI data centre so who knows.

Anyway like I said to OP I agree it's not going to create tonnes of local jobs but the government aren't explicitly saying it is.

Brutal analogy 😱

Exactly that. It's been a while since I worked with the really big-ass routers but I do work with moderate-ass ones. They've got redundant PSUs, fan trays, route processors, switch fabrics and so on. And that's just a single box whereas we always install at least two. The only failures we typically get are with optics (which are also multiply redundant) or problems during software upgrades.

Yes of course they have internal redundancy but you don't leave it sat there with reduced redundancy even if only an internal component fails.

And yes you'd have redundant sites as well but again I really don't think they'd leave gb-nw-001 (or whatever we call the actual things we build because obvs were not replicating AWS global regions) sat there with something big knackered for any significant amount of time.

Anyway I agree that the actual data centres probably won't have many staff in, but the government aren't explicitly promising local jobs by the look of it.

Terrestrial data centres are a transient phenomena. With 20% of the UKs GDP already dependent on space research, there is no way humans will not be putting data centres in space within the next 10 years.

The government isn’t having the wool pulled over - someone there will be making money

I don't use AI for that reason.

Marvellous. Isn't there a contradiction though. Do we actually need to cure cancer when human labour will no longer be required by the people who own these technologies?

@SadiraOfTyr I think you're making an assumption that MPs have both intelligence and critical thinking.
Unlike an old dodgy server, we can't just chuck them in a skip when they prove to be lacking.

Sorry, got mixed up: Cato is the name of the Auchtertool project; the company name is ILI Group.

Cato is intended to be the largest of the new datacentres and ILI believes it will create... 120 jobs. Doesn't state that the jobs will be at the datacentre.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/business-environment/business/5504466/fife-auchtertool-data-centre-ceo-mark-wilson/

Cato is the largest of three proposed ‘hyperscale’ data centres, providing 600MW of storage. The others would be Aurelius (400MW) in North Lanarkshire, and Rufus (540MW) in East Ayrshire.
...
Mr Wilson points to a study projecting that the data centre would create 120 permanent jobs – “on salaries 50% higher than the Fife average” – and more than 500 jobs during the construction phase. ... “It won’t create huge employment,” Mr Wilson admitted.

No it's really not, critical national infrastructure isn't going to wait for the next maintenance cycle (especially if it's part of a water cooling system or a generator). The odd disk going pop could wait for a longer time if there's plenty of redundancy but a big ass core router couldn't (running on no redundancy is a big no). The cloud means a lot of the hardware issues are transparent from the software, I really don't think hardware failures have magically disappeared. Unless you actually work in AWS or similar n which case I stand corrected 😁

But yes, max a couple of hundred jobs per site if you factor in the physical security (again it's critical national infrastructure so it's not going to be one bloke and a dog per shift).

That said I've actually read the report now and it says,

The government designated 5 AI Growth Zones across Great Britain, including 2 in Wales and one in Scotland – generating £28.2 billion in investment, creating more than 15,000 jobs, and providing £5 million of targeted funding for each zone to drive adoption at the local level.

So the government haven't been explicit about it creating local jobs I don't think, although the £5 million funding for each zone hints that they could be hoping to attract startups or other businesses to the local area.

I'm currently on the other AI thread running at the moment.

I'm astonished by the naivety of the pro AI zealots who are waving away all concerns presented with almost religious zealotry.

It's almost as though we are being programmed for inevitable assimilation / obsolescence. But it's okay cos the big data centre in the sky will answer all our silly little prayers....

Thanks for starting this thread OP, am trying to absorb as much information as I can, because a tiny bit of my Gen X brain is clinging to the hope that knowledge is power.