I'm actually pretty open-minded about the anti-data-center populism.

From everything I've seen from people working on this, reducing industrial-scale hardware availability seems to be both the most practical, and most non-dystopian / non-invasive way to lengthen AGI timelines.

So if the movement that makes that happen starts out with anti-data-center populism, that seems fine?

Of course you have to do things other than going after data centers located in populated areas to really make a dent on AGI timelines (my intuition is that 10-100x compute reduction is feasible in a "static" model of the world, and 100-10000x if you compare to a counterfactual that includes future chip design progress; those numbers would make a dent), but there is a first step for everything.