With Artificial Intelligence or “AI” and data centers, concerns about climate impact, noise, and water usage regularly appear in headlines. At the heart of it all is concern over who holds the power around AI, and how the load is carried.
Listening to high school and college students talk about the future of AI, it is clear that they have legitimate concerns about the technology's prevalence in their lives. They worry about deepfakes, academic integrity issues, and more, and they face the added burden of considering how these things affect them emotionally, socially, and academically.
As a lifelong educator, I witnessed cheating first-hand at the high school and university levels, and the capricious creep of cheating. Yet, as an historian, I know that Professors and others always worry about how new technologies will impact teaching and learning in their fields. I recall concerns that spell-check might make people stop spelling appropriately. I remember the synonym finder being the bane of many colleagues' existence, and I can easily recall how the word processor was rumored to make students less inclined to write multiple drafts and to carefully read their work. The phrase, “I edit while I write,” became commonplace, and multiple real and complete drafts became less prevalent. Most of the concerns did indeed come to fruition.
I’ve watched firsthand as the current generation of students reads both more and fewer words than any other generation in human history. Mobile syntax, short-form text, and repetitive social circles create a linguistic paradox: this generation reads more words yet experiences less diversity of vocabulary. Convenience triumphs over lexical variety.
As with other technological changes, we do not yet know what we’re trading in the ramping up of data centers and the Artificial Intelligence leaps they will provide for humanity.
For instance, nobody knows how much water they use as they create a humorous image of their dogs wearing a favorite team’s World Cup kit. We don’t know the true energy costs for AI to figure out the glitch in our spreadsheets. We don’t know how to quantify the environmental degradation caused by asking AI to read 30 years of emails between two people to see whether the relationship was ever a loving partnership, or to attempt to pinpoint when things in that relationship went wrong. The technology can do so much, but as with all things, there are trades.
As I recently watched a well-loved neighbor die of lung-related issues, I couldn’t help but wonder if we knew 60 years ago what we do today about smoking, if he would have made different choices. Seeing a Bald Eagle soar over my former elementary school, I wonder if they have nearly come off the endangered species list because we learned about environmental degradation and made adjustments just in the nick of time – with AI we seem to have the knowledge of what some of the trades are, and yet, we are not getting the information at an individual level where we can make well-informed choices for ourselves and our communities.
As I think about the rolling blackouts that occurred in Chicago in the hot, sticky summer of 1995, which killed at least 739 people who simply could not cool off, I worry about the trades we’re making and the power our communities are giving to data centers for technological conveniences.
If the rolling blackouts return, who makes decisions about power consumption and where energy is diverted? Do we have appropriate county or state laws that prioritize citizens’ power needs over the growing needs of data centers? Do we need to set up laws to prioritize power and water for human consumption, with explicit definitions, before using these resources for machine technologies? Perhaps even legal language requiring that power grid decisions never be relegated to AI machines, including decisions about where grid energy is prioritized, especially in extreme events, is now a necessity for serious consideration.
Humans must be at least equal shareholders with corporations when it comes to resources. Water for cooling and the power infrastructure need regulation now so that no single person or machine is placed as the sole arbiter of resources when human lives are on the line, so that nobody is in a position to cheat with much larger consequences than receiving a better mark, garnering a higher class ranking, or gaining admittance to a preferred college.
AI is about so much more than educational issues; as we perch on the perilous precipice of a rapidly changing future and with some, but not all, of the knowledge we need to make decisions, it seems now is the moment to shift power and policy slightly so as to ensure that no human is left in the dark.