Let’s Build A Data Center On Broadway

The inevitability of artificial intelligence is something that big tech CEO’s and boomer commencement speakers love to preach. “You don’t want to be left behind” and “AI is the next Industrial Revolution” are phrases repeated often. The real question is why are we listening to these people in the first place?

It’s obvious that those with the most to gain are the biggest proponents of an AI boom. The Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world will tell you ‘til they’re red in the face how AI is going to create a utopia for humanity, that mundane tasks, labor, and critical thinking will all be replaced by their respective proprietary softwares.

The wealthy business owners and executives are next in line in this inhuman centipede as they pass along their notions of AI decadence and supremacy down to the middle managers and small business owners until it reaches the mouth of the consumer, who often react with disgust as soon as it touches their tongue. Many people want to be “left behind” by artificial intelligence. That’s not a car, probably an electric one, that I want to get into either.

You can imagine my views on the topic, being a writer and creative, but ignoring the oft-discussed AI art issue for now, there are so many other reasons to stop all of this. Some of these reasons range from explicit images depicting minors and “nudifying” photographs of people to ChatGPT encouraging users to kill themselves or the rapid incorporation of AI into the military. I could write 30 more articles and barely scratch the surface.

Data centers alone are a great reason to consider slowing down the AI explosion. These buildings full of servers and storage systems require vast amount of resources to function (land, water, and electricity, to name a few) and they always come at a cost for the locals living near them. Residents’ electric rates go up or they lose service entirely, like what people in Lake Tahoe are facing.

In Congress the other day, AOC presented two jars of brown “drinking water” to an EPA official that started flowing from locals’ sinks after a Meta data center was built in North Georgia. The facilities themselves are also extremely loud and cause noise pollution for the community and surely horrible, yet-unknown consequences for the local wildlife.

Before we know it, these facilities will be everywhere. Nashville alone has 27 data centers in the area at the time of writing, with Oracle building a massive campus on the east bank of the Cumberland and wouldn’t you know it, they’ve already begun cutting jobs due to “data center costs.”

So what will this lead to? As employers continue to trade people and their homes for software and their data centers, will that really improve day to day life for us? We’ve heard it many times before that X-new technology is going to transform humanity and fix so many of our problems, but when has that actually happened? When has any “benevolent” corporation done anything for the good of mankind? At the end of the day, this is a consumer product fed to us by conglomerates with nothing but profit and happy shareholders on their mind.

This does lead to a more positive thought in that we still ultimately have the power. Given the fact that this is a consumer good and its growth and development are entirely dependent the market, it all ends if people stop using it. You asking ChatGPT a question fuels the AI market. You downloading an app to turn your family into The Simpsons fuels the AI market. But if the demand dropped significantly, so too would the need for them to build new data centers or continue developing the software. At the end of the day, cash is still king and apart from the billionaires and corporations hoarding the wealth, the masses still hold a lot of cash. Spend yours wisely.