There is a lot of fear being spread about artificial intelligence and the data centers that power these models. Let me dispense with the data center concerns first. The misinformation that is spread about their power use and cost and about water use and environmental concerns is frightening. It is frightening because these are economic growth engines that create a lot of well-paying jobs in construction but also in their operation. They pay large property taxes. Any locale that has a data center has experienced an economic boom. These data centers are key to AI growth, which in turn drives productivity increases and faster economic growth. Data centers at this point are generally producing their own electricity, usually from a co-located power plant. They are not what is driving up the cost of electricity; the insistence on renewable energy sources is doing that. Data centers do use water for cooling but that water most often comes from treated municipal waste water, not drinking water, and most is recycled and the heat in the water is used for energy. Data centers directly produce little or no pollution and have few if any adverse environmental impacts. But of course China and Russia and our own socialists and America-haters spread misinformation on all these counts, because they know the data centers are critical to maintaining our lead in AI. If you want to go after a technology with horrific environmental impacts, go after solar panel farms and wind farms.
In terms of artificial intelligence itself, one myth has already been debunked; that AI would cause millions of jobs to be lost. In fact, AI is a net job producer. This is what has happened with every technological invention–fear is spread about job loss, but it turns out that more new jobs are created, usually better paying ones. We saw exactly this phenomenon with the internet. The AI-related jobs may be different than those that are lost, but they are typically better paying. Would you rather be a poorly paid insurance claims processor or an AI coder paid far more? Any government policies should be directed at helping with retraining, we have big need for people who can work in data centers and in AI.
The other misinformation is around AI going rogue and killing everyone. That is frankly not where the concern should lie. Artificial intelligence is nothing but a software program, a very sophisticated program but just a program. It uses data it is given, it takes that data and processes it according to rules given in the software, it makes “decisions” or creates output based on the rules in the software. The software is written by humans and in some cases by an AI program, but the AI program can only code using the tools and rules given to it by humans. Software and software models have been around forever; they only cause issues when humans make mistakes or tell the software to do something they shouldn’t tell it to do or have it work on bad data.
If you understand AI models you know that the issues are in the rules given the software for how it makes decisions based on the data it has. If you have an AI model gather data by reading every human work of fiction or non-fiction or collecting information from media sources, you are going to get what appear to be bad human behaviors–lying, hallucinating events, etc. If you give the software latitude to make certain decisions, you can’t be surprised when the software does things you don’t want it to. The problem isn’t the software, it is the humans who built the software and decided what data it should use and how it weights data in making decisions. A strong truth is that models only do and only output what we tell them to do or output.
So be afraid of humans, who do lie and cheat, who can be evil and malicious and certainly have used software for those purposes in the past and will in the future. And yes, laws and rules are needed that have strong guardrails for AI software construction and operation. But what you should really be afraid of is the US not keeping a lead in AI, because we are more trustworthy than most societies. Do you want authoritarian China and Russia, much less Iran or North Korea to be way ahead of us in AI capabilities, because they don’t have any of our concerns and they have used and will use AI against us. And our best defense is AI software that can detect and defend against what those countries will do.
AI, like all next generation software, will do very good things. It will enhance the productivity of just about any industry. In health care, it already is beginning to help with identifying new drugs. It has been a phenomenal boost for mathematics and general science. If you think of everything the software in your phone, tablet or computer can do and how important it is for the quality and efficiency of your daily life or work, AI is just more of the same. It can be abused, but the abuse isn’t inherent in the AI software; it is from the misuse that can occur with any software; misuse by bad people. It is always the humans; never the machines or the software.
So believe me when I say that most of the bad things you hear about AI are pushed and supported and amplified by China and Russia and other enemies of our free and democratic society, including those internal voices that hate our country. And of course there are the usual malcontents and attention-seekers inside the AI companies. The dumbest thing we can do is slow down and given those countries the lead. We can have useful AI that has protections from abuse. We can’t leave ourselves open to AI abuse from our adversaries.
I have been told that these data centers will be abandoned and the communities will be hurt by these eye sores, huge buildings with no use… what is the “skinny” on their long term use? Thanks!
I don’t know where that comes from but it sounds like the typical misinformation. Why would they ever be abandoned. All the data centers that have been around forever for cloud computing are still in use, in fact part of the economic activity they generate is the constant upgrading that occurs. It isn’t like people are going to stop needing data centers.
I live in PA under the PJM grid and my charge for electricity doubled in the last 6 years. Rates go on bids for the PJM grid, I believe the year before actual usage and the perceived increase demand from data centers for electric drove up the prices on the marketplace. That is not the whole story, the PJM grid was in trouble before data centers. The previous governor of PA. Governor Wolfe did a lot of damage to the state’s energy potential. On October 3, 2019, he signed an executive order directing the state to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Since the legislature is responsible for such action it got tied up in court, only last year was the executive order withdrawn has part of the 2025 budget process. During that time period several base load coal fired generating plants shut down because the operators felt there was no future in investing in coal fired power plants, I believe the number was 4 in PA. At the same time democratic controlled states of Maryland and New Jersey forced the shutdown of fossil fuel base load plants. We had a nuclear power plant also shut down during the time same time period; former Governor Wolf was elated because it could be replaced with clean wind generation. This plant is in the process of restarting.
I believe base load plants are at a disadvantage the way the law is written. Wind, solar and hydro get first usage rights for the grid, which means income. When the sun is shining, the wind is blowing and the water is flowing depending on output from those sources base fossil power plants are running but not collecting revenue.
Jim’s last comment highlights one of the major issues with renewables.
A- the fossil fuel plants have to run on standby (without revenue ) to cover times when wind and solar are insufficient.
B – Wind and solar are subsidized by fossil fuel plants since they dont pay for their cost of intermediciy / unreliability.
I don’t know if there is any stopping AI now with the world AI arms race. But what I see on my job in IT software development is a bunch of AI written code that the developer doesn’t understand, can’t support, injects bugs, and short circuits the learning process for the actual human.
The bigger threat I see is that knowledge has become so cheap that we are disinvesting from our own internal learning and problem solving.
Plus, there’s no enjoyment in the creation process when AI just spits out something instantly. True for work and for creativity in general. Have you ever written a song/poem by hand, and then had AI create one for you? You’ve lost something by not going through the actual beautiful process of creating with your own mind.
Call me old fashioned, but some things are meant to be inefficient.