AI Data Centers, Smart Cities, and the Anti-Human Future we have to fight

Louisiana has just announced that it will be the lucky site for a new Meta AI Data Center.

December 4, 2024•News Release

Meta Selects Northeast Louisiana as Site of $10 Billion Artificial Intelligence Optimized Data Center; Governor Jeff Landry Calls Investment ‘A New Chapter’ for State

RICHLAND PARISH, La. – Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta announced it will build a $10 billion artificial intelligence data center in northeast Louisiana, a transformational investment that cements the state’s status as a major innovation hub and puts this picturesque rural community on the leading edge of a global digital revolution.

Meta projects the data center will support 500 or more direct new jobs in Richland Parish. LED estimates the project will result in the creation of more than 1,000 indirect jobs, for a total of more than 1,500 potential new jobs in the Northeast Region. The company estimates 5,000 construction workers at peak of construction on the 2,250-acre former Franklin Farm megasite that sits between the municipalities of Rayville and Delhi, about 30 miles east of Monroe.

It’s like Louisiana just won a golden ticket to the new golden age economy of AI, robotics, and Smart Cities..a new digital utopia…(with lab-grown meat, plants, and presumably people), but I digress.

Governor Jeff Landry is elated about it, and why shouldn’t he be? It’s like he landed the sweepstakes or won the Bachelor and now gets to marry that rich, rich woman, Meta.

She comes with quite a dowry, right?

So what are the downsides?

Well, clean water usage is the real issue here.

Karen Hao has reported on this for the Atlantic magazine.

To dramatically show the impact of the data center’s usage of energy in the American Southwest, Hao hiked around a specific Microsoft data center.

I quote this section from the open notebook’s story on Karen Hao. Here is a link: karen hao AI data center

Hao’s hike around the data center, which left her sunburned and dehydrated, became the vivid lede of her story, “AI Is Taking Water from the Desert,” published in March 2024 in The Atlantic. The final story did include a crucial data point that Hao dug up on the Goodyear Microsoft facility’s water use: 56 million gallons per year, enough to supply 670 families in the region, a pre-construction estimate from an obscure study. But throughout the story, Hao’s reporting shines most in the dogged approaches she took to reveal the extent of the Goodyear center’s footprint, despite the company’s evasiveness: sifting through troves of city council meeting notes, filing public-information requests via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), pushing past terse answers during interviews, and, ultimately, leaning on the details she gathered from her personal experiences.

The bottom line is that AI will not save us, not socially, not educationally and not medically. We must be honored as human beings by the presence, attention and intelligence of other humans.

AI will not solve everything

I completely agree that AI is actually bad for climate change and social chaos because it is being used for data surveillance and the way it gets the data requires these behemoth data centers so that all of our data can be captured. It’s entirely unclear just how expensive this will be longterm and how odious it will be to have such ubiquitous surveillance especially when we realize the bio-sensors go inside the body and se