Op/Discussion: Why the US needs an AI data center moratorium, infrastructure reform, and a complete overhaul of government representation
Warning: The mentions of China's scientific and technological endeavors made in this piece are not intended to condone, minimize, or sponsor China's own human rights violations and contributions to climate change. These mentions serve as comparative examples between US and China's respective central planning systems. Moreover, the mentions of Al Gore and Green New Deal are examples of past opportunities to course-correct. This piece does not support the status quo of officials or structure of any of the branches of current or former US Federal, State, or Local governments.
TL;DR footnote below
In advance, thank you for reading this organic opinion piece that was not generated using AI. It is a huge problem with many layers.
Data is an asset with value that is mined from our sovereign fields (i.e., user data, user searches, user prompts, publications). Think of it in terms of oil companies encroaching on your land property to extract material for production. How they go about it and what we get in return should be for us to decide.
So...
There is an element of intellectual theft and privacy violation that we have consented to with no financial reward, and yet we are already seeing this technology actively weaponized for mass surveillance (i.e. Flock, Palantir).
The US, particularly, has bigger long-term energy and funding constraints (which brought us here to addressing the climate crisis) that will limit the real-world applications of artificial intelligence. The way that the US has implemented AI (much like with energy) is highly wasteful and damaging to the environment, because it simply requires too much power.
Let's just imagine that the US big tech giants produce AI models that truly rival China's (debatable), how will they scale and apply to the production of goods and services without robust domestic robotics and manufacturing infrastructure? That's where the greatest measurable value would come from. Moreover, so much of the labor force (between government and private sector employees, likely millions of people) have been laid off for this, loss that amounts to unmeasurable intellectual talent suppression.
The US government (from lowest township to highest federal levels) is severely compromised, and therefore lacks the vision to properly plan from orbit downward (see how China plans to beam solar energy back to Earth and has integrated AI and energy infrastructure to address their large scale energy and manufacturing ambitions). This infrastructure planning problem has real money-wasting effects at all levels of government, because the private sector is so adored as compared to the labor force that corporations with the primary objective of generating wealth for shareholders simply get the money they want while American taxpayers continue cutting checks to them.
My Point...
I believe sweeping moratoriums should be in place coupled with explicit conditions from the People. No exceptions and no temporary fixes.
The biggest obstacle right now is that our federal government will not address the issues listed above as a holistic problem, so large scale changes in leadership and governance will be necessary for people to truly present our demands with this leverage.
Since at least 1999, we have skipped right over what should have been the Green New Deal and Social-Economic Reform, and the consequences will hamper any real progress in STEM in US; China, on the other hand, is decades ahead in planning and executing in these areas. (By the way, China became the World's Factory by joining the WTO just 3 months after 9/11, while the US spent $8 trillion on pure destruction in the Middle East. Oh, and remember just a year or so before that how we were within a hairs-width of having a climate activist in the White House (Al Gore)? Has anything changed?). This isn't about foreign policy or intellectual or economic wars between the US and China. This is about who and what is being done about the planet. Who is going to take responsibility and ownership? All citizens of US are responsible for being complicit in our inaction.
TL;DR: We must get involved to address our energy and financial bottlenecks, because they are directly tied to how we adapt to the climate crisis without making it worse. Moratoria on AI data centers could be an opportunity for the people to take back power and detail multi-decade plans for environmental, economic, and social reform demands we have desperately needed to address since yesteryear.---
