A Question

I have no expertise in artificial intelligence. There are plenty of experts around, and many of them are warning of the dangers AI to humans and the planet, so I yield to their expertise. What I do know is that the use and growth of AI data centers poses a threat to our water supply, to the electrical grid, and to the physical and mental health of people who live near them with deafening loud noise. It also poses a dire environmental threat, with the inevitable increase in the use of fossil fuels. 

As a sometime economist I know that AI has no solution, and will have no solution to the limits to economic growth, to climate change, to the depletion of resources, to the problem of desecration of the planet through wars and pollution, and to the ever-increasing glut of humans. These problems will fester on their own, and AI or not, we are facing the collapse of human civilization.

The U.S. has chosen to face these problems by electing the deranged and malevolent criminal sociopath Donald Trump as its president. Twice. This is real human beings using their given intelligence to choose a dangerous criminal to be their leader. Dear leader. It can easily be concluded that natural intelligence is threat enough to life on Planet Earth.

The best of human intelligence is fighting back. In Wisconsin’s recent primary election for governor, one candidate, Francesca Hong, ran her campaign promising to place a moratorium on AI data centers. She was the only candidate to make such a promise, and I voted for her. She was vilified for being a "democratic socialist," and lost to the establishment candidate, but by making the issue so prominent she painted the winner, David Crowley, into an electoral corner. In order to win in the general election he will have to promise the same moratorium as she did. I, for example, will let him know that I will vote for Alfred E. Neuman if he doesn't.

One question that has arisen, for me at least, is how easily corporations building AI data centers have been able to get city councils, county boards and other public agencies sign non-disclosure agreements when they approve the construction of these facilities. These are elected representatives of the citizens who routinely sign documents that hide the details of what they signed from the same citizens. They are also routinely being recalled by the voters for doing this.

So are all these local officials corrupt? How did they get that way? I suspect the answer is that AI corporations really, really, really want their data centers, and will use any means available to get what they want. When J. Edgar Hoover was director of the FBI he could not be fired by any president because he had compromising information on all politicians of both parties. He had job security for life, and any president who would dare to threaten this would find himself reading headlines exposing some past or present crime or indiscretion.

Nowadays, in the virtual multiverse in which we exist, anyone can be investigated and have embarrassing information made public.

I can give an example from personal experience. A relative, now deceased, was best friends with a Washington-based "right wing" columnist who had sources in the FBI. They had been spying on Dr. Martin Luther King for years, and discovered that he was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. They confronted him with this information, trying to get him to commit suicide. 

King was embarrassed for sure, but neither killed himself nor stopped campaigning for civil rights. He told the FBI agents that he was only human. So the agents from then on called him "Only human Martin Luther King." This was supposedly an inside joke that gave them derisive power over him. Whatever gets you through the night. 

This also supposedly gave the "right wing" columnist power over King, and by extension, my "inside knowledge" pretender relative, who took great pleasure in telling me this story. This, combined with enormous amounts of alcohol, got him through the night, and likely many more nights. He was a serial philanderer himself, so pretend superiority over Martin Luther King was totally in his mind. His "right wing" best friend, also long gone, is a sad footnote to history, and was lucky when he was alive not to be prosecuted for treason.

So what to do? The country is rising up against AI and its infrastructure of data centers. If blackmail is being used to get local officials to secretly approve data centers, citizens can prevent it by banning nondisclosure agreements. Maybe AI companies will respond by blackmailing everyone – they have the technology – but there are limits to criminality. At some point it won’t get them through the night.

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Here's a song. Eric Clapton. Dionne Warwick. Naked Eyes.

For some expertise in artificial intelligence. click here. Or here. or here. Or here. For an excellent conversation about AI and democracy from ABC Australia, click here.

Public Citizen has some good information on the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) grift, and what citizens can do about it.

Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV.

Some history of J. Edgar Hoover.

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Update, August 26:

R.I.P. Dolly Parton. Here she is with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Here's another great song. Stairway to Heaven. She funded research into the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19. I was one of the beneficiaries. I was vaccinated with Moderna in 2021, boosted several times. It probably saved my life. I was infected with Covid in early 2022, tested positive, and it would have been far worse without the vaccine. The VA was one of the first health care systems to make the shots available. I used my own cure, raw onions and garlic, for every meal for twelve days. It was a battle. 

Update, August 27: 

A story about exploited data workers. Another story about the need to regulate AI. Still another story, Platform Extractionism, about the low-wage AI workers in Venezuela. Robert Reich on how most Americans are getting poorer.

A story from June about Doom Trolling, how AI companies are promoting fear of their products in order to enhance their power.

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Update, August 28:

Some meme response to Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario.

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Update, August 29:

Electronic Intifada has a great interview with Eyal Weizman, Director of Forensic Architecture and professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London. It is available on YouTube here. Or here, on the Electronic Intifada podcast. Weizman's book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,  is linked here. Or here.

Update, August 31:

Salon has a perspective on AI data centers.

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Update, September 3:

R.I.P. Gloria Steinem. I first became aware of her in 1968, when I bought a copy of New York Magazine on one of my weekend excursions to New York City. I was studying the manly art of projector repair at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and would escape to the Big Apple, sometimes visiting relatives in nearby Westchester County. She had written an article about learning to live with Nixon, and I was taken by the quality, mirth and insight of her writing, mixing personal experience with analysis, perspective and detail. My own writing has been inspired and influenced by her style ever since. That experience gave her a special place in my life, and over the years I have paid attention to and have learned much from her presence. 

An interview with Tennessee congressional candidate Justin Pearson, who is campaigning to put AI data centers under democratic control.

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Update, September 5:

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Update, September 8:

For a deeper look at the emptiness of AI frenzy, former Stanford student Theo Baker talks about his book How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University in a recent interview with the Commonwealth Club of California.

Then there is Heidy Khlaaf, Chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute, on the lack of security of AI, interviewed on Amanpour & Company. Among the things she has exposed is the use of AI in Israel's targeting of Palestinians in Gaza.

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Update, September 10:

Now we have an "insider," Jacob Coxon, former Anthropic researcher, giving dire warnings about AI.