Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.
Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.
It’s fascinating how selective people’s moral principles become.
When it’s AI data centers being robbed, suddenly theft is funny, justified, or even worth celebrating. But if the victims were socialist politicians, transgender people, or any other group this community sympathizes with, the reaction would be outrage and demands for justice.
For the record, I have no issue with people supporting socialism or transgender rights. I only use those examples because they’re emotionally charged topics in this community, and they illustrate how quickly people’s standards change depending on who the victim is.
Either theft is wrong regardless of who the victim is, or your moral standard changes depending on whether you like the target. That’s not a principle. It’s favoritism dressed up as ethics.
LLMs are built on theft of intellectual property and copyrighted products by capital managers who hoard wealth propped up on stolen wages and exploitation, look in the mirror before you yap on about selective application of morals.
So absolutely none of that has anything to do with people stealing copper from AI data center construction sites.
You can do all the moral finger-pointing you want. The moment you start selectively deciding who is and isn’t a thief is the moment the justice system starts breaking down. You don’t get to decide who can and cannot commit crimes. We already have enough of that in our American political system, considering who our president is.
To address your other point, no copyright infringement has been found to have occurred in the training of flagship AI models. If you’d like to debate that, that’s fine, but I don’t really feel like arguing about it because we’re talking about the morality of theft, which you apparently view as something that exists on a selective gradient. Good for you, sir. Go play Robin Hood in your own neighborhood.
Wealth inequality is one of the worst and most pressing issues in the world today. There is nothing I consider more damaging than the growing wealth gap, especially in America. You’re absolutely right about that. But once again, it has absolutely nothing to do with construction materials being stolen from AI data center construction sites.
Doesn’t it though? If there weren’t such rampant wealth inequality perhaps people wouldn’t be so inclined towards a life of crime. It has at least a little bit to do with it.
Who the victim is, is part of what makes it wrong or not. A parent shoplifting baby formula is less wrong than a parent stealing formula from another parent. A dude stealing formula to scalp is worse than the first two. A dude stealing formula from a parent is the worst.
It’s really simple math.
There certainly are different levels of criminal severity, and you’ve outlined that perfectly. But it has absolutely nothing to do with this because they’re still stealing from someone. The people who prosecute and sentence the thieves can take those circumstances into account when determining an appropriate punishment.
Furthermore, you’ve failed to take your own example to its logical conclusion. The reason people are stealing baby formula in the first place is because it’s too expensive. In fact, everything is becoming too expensive. That’s a much broader and more serious societal issue than the act of stealing formula itself.
… Yeah, and AI datacenters being built speculatively is the same resource hoarding bullshit as high formula pricing.
Also idgaf about laws and crime, I said better and worse, right and wrong. That has nothing to do with legal, because if it did we wouldn’t be having these discussions about formula or datacenters, those kind of wealth abuses would actually be illegal.
It’s not about criminality. It’s comparative morality.
Amazing that your ‘gotcha’ is just two false statements.
Theft isn’t wrong regardless of the victim - it’s nuanced, just like all crime. That’s why we have very complicated legal processes to determine guilt and appropriate punishments.
Our morals don’t change depending on whether we like the target - it’s that our judgments are based on context.
The cool thing about ethics, morals, principles, etc… They’re all made up. We invented them. They have no objectivity (as far as we know) and therefore can and have changed based on our feelings. “Ethics” is just humans agreeing to do things a certain way because it makes us feel good, or doing things the other way makes us feel bad. There is no objective truth to it that you can so easily plug in a problem and get an objective answer.
Or is the world you want to live in just completely binary? No room for nuance?
Theft is wrong when you’re taking something away from someone who will miss it. Multi-billion dollar corporations will barely notice if their shit gets stolen, so I don’t care if it does.
I’m not asking you to care. What I’m saying is that you’re morally inept by not caring. Either you admonish theft across the board or you don’t. People are stealing from someone else regardless of who they are.
You don’t have to care, you’re just wrong.
Theft is too vague to be given a blanket right/wrong verdict for all situations.
Failure to recognise nuance is morally inept.
We have courts and juries specifically because morality is not a hard rule.
I’m okay with not meeting your strict black and white standard of morality. In fact, I find it immoral. “You stole bread because you were starving?? You’re EVIL!!”
You are reacting to masses but attributing caricature as if the masses were individuals. You’re being played by the game. On any story there’s X% of people who are fuming over it, but its not the same people. You’re reacting to the system but treating broad categories as persons. By default, you’re strawmanning, and there’s power to that, but until you grow out of that mindset, you are ruled by the strawmen you create for yourself, or rather, who our cultural engineers create for you.
What the heck are you on about? You can absolutely have a consistent moral framework that destroys data centers while protecting individuals. Hell, call it humanist or something.
I see one unethical person robbing another unethical person. It’s the same reason I don’t care when bad things happen to criminals. Transgenders don’t fall into the same category as billionaires.
If a socialist did something unethical I’d root against them too.
You’re absolutely correct. As would I. The fact that someone is a socialist or transgender has no bearing on the content of their character. I was simply using examples of emotionally charged topics on this particular platform.
But theft is theft. Luigi Mangione murdered the CEO of United healthcare. That is not up for debate. Whether Luigi Mangione did something morally correct is an entirely separate and highly contested question.
I will still condemn Luigi Mangione for resorting to violence in the same way that I will condemn people stealing from AI data centers. Theft is theft. Murder is murder.
On a personal level, I couldn’t care less who steals what from a data center. The fewer of these things we have, the better. But my personal opinion does not change the principle. If I’m going to condemn theft when it affects people or causes I support, then I should condemn it when it affects people or causes I dislike as well.
Actually, it is. That’s what the whole, y’know, trial and “innocent until proven guilty” thing is about.