This Month’s Featured Article

“Tell me quick,” said Old McFee
What’s this all have to do with me?
I’ve spent all my time at sea, a loner
Is there something else I should know?
Something hidden down below
The level of your conversation?
Ship of Fools – Bob Seger

Dear Old McFee, If you are at all capable (no one else seems to be) of explaining the rationale behind what appears to be irrational enterprise to those of us here on the ground, my ears are open for business. And please include, if you have gotten hold of it, any of it, all the monkey business going on below the surface that no one ever talks about, because we here in Hoi Polloi-ville know it’s there. Specifically, what does this have to do with the advancement of the human race? Signed, Thoroughly Flummoxed

Dear TF, Beats the sneakers off me. XOXO, OM

Nonplussed, turning to one exceedingly bright human friend, asked I, “Can you tell me what the big idea behind artificial intelligence really is?” He thought for a second. “To make things faster,” said he, in a questioning manner. 

Oh. 

I’d be willing to bet not even AI itself has a real good answer. 

While on the surface it seems to me that as a species we may, as your favorite football coach might say, have outkicked our coverage on this one, to this stage I’ve resisted the temptation, as alluring as it might be, of going full Cassandra. At least not to the point where I’m entirely convinced AI is poised to drive every single last one of us out of work and leave us all standing around gobsmacked, wondering how we’re going to feed the little ones and stay warm in the winter. Instead, I’m more like the dog looking askance as you pull that steak out of the icebox, pondering what little bit might be left for you and me. And it may be more than you think. 

Or not.

Is it all sus?

It’s entirely possible, of course, that while the chance exists this is all headed to the destruction of humanity as we know it, such an eventuality would amount to a spectacular achievement on the part of those foisting all this on us in the first place. I don’t think the so-called geniuses behind AI are capable of that. To this old codger, it all seems rather sus, as the kids would say, although I sure could stand to rid myself of the continuous sensation that it’s all being shoehorned into our lives by folks who are much less concerned with the status of your bank account than they are with their own. 

But no matter how one looks at it, AI is in our midst, like it or not. Setting aside all the attendant sturm and drang, which may well in the end turn out to be the point of all this, when has something that carries with it such an overwhelming aura of disingenuousness ever worked out all that well?

Are data centers eating our lunch?

Nonetheless. As the gloomy prospects of an AI-centric demise stare us in the face, it may never get the opportunity, as the burgeoning world of data centers is busy threatening to eat our lunch first.

Okay, I realize we are not all working toward the same thing here. Indeed, most of us have no idea what that thing might be, but we are all acutely aware that it does not involve rapidly rising electric bills and ruined water supplies. And thus, we arrive at, yes, the burgeoning world of data centers, which, as IBM has been known to so pithily phrase it, are “facilities that house the specific IT infrastructure needed to train, deploy, and deliver AI applications and services.” Sounds innocuous enough.

Forbes gets us a bit further down the road: “One misconception is that AI data centers are simply server facilities. In reality, they are critical operational infrastructure combining energy, cooling, cybersecurity, networking, and real-time orchestration. As AI scales, infrastructure resilience and operational continuity become as important as compute power itself.”

According to a map created by Erin Brockovich (remember her?) and quoted by The Guardian, in the United States as of mid-June, “33 AI datacenters have been completed and are operational, 68 are under construction, and 41 are proposed.” According to the website cleanview.co, which tracks clean energy projects, data centers, and developers across the US in real-time, New York State currently sports 36 data centers, 25 in the planning stages and 11 already in operation.

Data centers = higher energy bills?

Let’s zero in a bit closer to home, to East Fishkill, specifically, where Treetop Development has submitted preliminary designs for a 1,000-megawatt complex. For those keeping score at home, the scale of this proposal is “10 times larger than the largest active data center infrastructure currently deployed in the state of New York,” stated latinanation.com, under this headline as the beginning of July rolled around: “New York residents discovered giant data center after power bills suddenly rise.” Busted!

Following intense, sustained opposition, recently the East Fishkill town board voted to establish a zoning moratorium that freezes all large-scale data center authorizations exceeding 20 megawatts until July 2029. This follows a one-year statewide moratorium on new data center construction, noted as the first of its kind in the country, adopted by the New York State legislature at the conclusion of its 2026 session.

A representative democracy?

What is being experienced by East Fishkill seems to have become the pattern for the – most often unheralded – arrival of a data center in a community, magically bypassing the usual planning and zoning regulations that in other cases might well halt a project in its tracks, if not at the very least provided the opportunity for interested parties – let’s think people quietly living their lives in their homes with no particular interest in ruling the world, for one – to learn more and ultimately, if so desired, voice their displeasure.

As of June, according to brockovichdatacenter.com, 116 moratoriums against data center construction are currently in place in communities around the country. These are in communities that have tumbled to the threat, not necessarily in those where “data center developers often enter into nondisclosure agreements with local officials,” notes The Guardian. Data center or peanut farm, the notion of nondisclosure agreements being made with local officials should terrify any American harboring thoughts they are living in a representative democracy.

Say what, Utah?

Let’s ask the folks of the great State of Utah, which seems to have discovered itself beset with the things, how they feel about two genuine monstrosities that can likely be seen from Pluto. As one demonstrator’s sign so clearly proclaimed: “No.” If one were to ask around, seems to me that about covers the prevailing sentiment.

“The Stratos artificial intelligence data center footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq. miles) over three sites in Box Elder County in northwestern Utah. The facility will require about nine gigawatts of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years,” states The Guardian. Let’s allow that to sink in for a second, just long enough for the fog to come rolling in over the hill.

On the other hand, according to ABC4, “Box Elder County and MIDA claim that the project will not divert any water from homes, agriculture, or the Great Salt Lake. Instead, they say the water used will be completely on-site, and is too salty for human consumption or agricultural use in the first place.” Who decides that? Blokes like the one who once told me, with a straight face, to always trust corporations to do the right thing? Since when?

Got … water?

In a world where “only 3% of Earth’s water is freshwater, and only 0.5% of all water is accessible and safe for human consumption,” according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, “large data centers can consume up to five million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people …. Meanwhile, data center developers are increasingly tapping into surface and underground aquifers to cool their facilities. Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually. One report estimated that US data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021).” 

Oooof. 

On a more relatable scale, the EESI states, “According to scientists at the University of California, Riverside, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water. This may not sound like much, but billions of AI users worldwide enter prompts into systems like ChatGPT every minute.”

There’s very little chance that where this is all headed does not involve climbing into a basket with a fake wizard and floating back home to Kansas. Not if we’re onboard with Stewart Russell, a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley and president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence, who writes in The Guardian: “The CEOs are telling us: ‘We’re on track to create superhuman intelligence, which has a good chance of causing human extinction.’” 

Old McFee, what sayeth thee? •