Post #2680379

To make some of these points more concrete: A choice is being made when governments & municipalities are providing tax rebates and subsidized deals on land and/or energy/water for AI data centers, often to the detriment of the local population. Data centers provide little in terms of employment and the rising energy prices are carried by everyone else, also impacting other existing businesses. This is not counting other important aspects like re-zoning, noise pollution, construction of supply roads/lines, (dirty) energy sources, all of which (in total) should be considered to counter-balance any promised gains from mass building such infrastructure. Many of these data centers are built in areas already suffering water stress, which is only going to get more intense! A choice is being made when education policymakers and universities decide to become AI sales people and that AI education should be constrained to students becoming effective/uncritical users of AI tech, rather than using higher education as a platform to critically/objectively research and examine this technology and its costs/impacts on many different aspects of society (energy, ethics, inequality, legal issues, security, sovereignty...) A choice is being made when company bosses are forcing staff to adopt AI or be pushed out, even if this adoption arguably has at the very least a considerable risk of damaging the health of the company and employees long term (via various well-documented risk factors, incl. chronic fatigue or the introduction of company-wide core dependencies on external, unsustainable, VC-backed subscription-based infrastructure/services, whose fees are almost guaranteed to sky-rocket in the foreseeable future). Also worth mentioning here are two new buzzwords terms surfacing currently: Cognitive Debt and Semantic Ablation A choice is being made by governments adopting AI for policing and preparing for social unrest, investing billions into surveillance instead of lowering inequality and improving social services, social mobility & cohesion (e.g. financed via higher taxes obtained from the super rich). A choice is being made when investment & grant opportunities for anything but AI-related businesses are deemed too risky and not worthwhile, essentially forcing AI features into any new business idea which requires external financing and thereby funneling more and more people/infrastructure into this growing spiral of dependencies and into this pyramid system of subscription-based computing, with less than a handful of companies at the very top. Choices... #AI #HouseOfCards