AI Debt and Dismemberment

Some time ago I wrote about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it’s demand on data centers and subsequently their demand for electricity and what that meant for the average citizen without the power to effectively advocate for their own piece of the pie. It’s a depressing condition that’s operating far ahead of the actual need, it’s built-in more expensive power based on the fact that the data center being built nearby will someday require.

Without any new data centers being in operation in our area, the cost of my energy used today suddenly shot up over 30% with my new bill. That’s something that President Trump, my local officials, representatives and senators of both US and Texas legislatures promised would not happen. Despite the fact that everyone knew it would. Now, it has. So, I’m paying a higher price for electricity, because someone else has a data center running in their area.

And, the whole operation is based on a belief, like the Green New Deal, that it will ultimately benefit the people or the planet or just the oligarchs. Casting aside the possibility that it could benefit the people, because that never happens except where the people benefit themselves by growing their own food, milking their own cows and butchering their own beef, pork, deer or elk.

When one looks at it objectively, or conspiratorially, they notice a pattern. 1) data centers are increasingly going into rural areas that are traditionally poorer, where county commissions and city governments can be easily swayed by the prospect of better paying jobs, more tax revenue or just a sense of being with the “in” crowd; 2) data centers are often located close to feedlots, at least here in Texas. My suspicion is that the harmful effects of data centers has an affect of reducing live births among cattle, which has been argued. There’s a cross purpose then from those who’ve been trying to get us to eat soy burgers and plant-based meat for about a generation; 3) cutting off consumers from power to supply the data centers, as was seen in Lake Tahoe, is an option.

The problem is the data center revolution is all based on lies, just like the Green New Deal. Now, articles like this are labeled as Chinese-backed propaganda. Trust me, I’ve not taken a dime from China and I still see problems, something the whole economic world is waking up to.

I pointed out a few weeks or months ago that data centers would cause an electricity shortage, that the grid couldn’t handle it and they couldn’t produce enough new power plants to serve both them and the people, so the people would be cut out of it.

After talking with a long-time reader and a supporter of our first film Lies of Omission, someone who understands the power generation system, there were some added problems associated with producing electricity. During the Green New Deal a lot of the old coal-fired power plants were taken out of commission. Some have been put back into production, at least here in Texas. But, as I was informed, a lot of them are not only out of commission, but have been dismantled and shipped to China. How is China able to build so many power plants so quickly? Well, a lot of the critical equipment has been obtained from dismantling US power plants and shipping them to China. That’s not America First.

The real problem of powering these data centers, that of the tenuous grid, has not and cannot be fixed easily, not in time to power all that are being built. Key transformers are not only in backorder, from China, but unavailable without first paying for them in full and waiting for delivery. Should a key transformer go out in a system, it can take months to replace, meanwhile should any sudden demand overload the rest of the system, the backup might not be available, either. This is a complete blackout for more than several months.

The other problem, one that is just now rising to a level of news, is the debt associated with trying to build data centers at a rate to stay ahead of regulation. I briefly wrote about this earlier concerning Oracle absorbing inordinate amounts of debt in order to build the data centers, so much so that Open AI, their partner, may not need that much computing power even if it were all built out and available. In other words, there would be no way to discharge the debt.

Then, there’s this from Zerohedge.com, a fact that fuels the reality of (AI) and the push to build data centers.

Also, AI is not what everyone thinks it will be. There are people who have relied on it in the creative world and the response is rather tepid. As I once explained: when someone realizes a film or commercial is AI-generated, in other words, cats and dogs suddenly acting human, or humans doing something physically impossible, there’s a sort of dismissal of the entire content. I described it as being like a cartoon. Most adults don’t watch cartoons anymore (except the adult kind), because anything can happen in them, there’s no mystery, there’s no wonder associated with it. Well, of course a coyote can paint a black hole to resemble a tunnel on a sheer rock wall, to trick a roadrunner. To the coyote’s surprise the roadrunner then runs though it to escape the coyote, but when the coyote takes after him at a run, he runs smack into the rock wall beneath the paint. Even as a child I didn’t ask how the roadrunner was able to run through it and the coyote couldn’t. It was a cartoon. It’s AI. Same reaction.

While the whole world is imagining the things possible with AI, as they once imagined all that could be done with computers. Then, they went out and scaled rock walls, climbed mountains, went hunting, joined a local hockey club. In other words, did something in the real world with real actions and consequences.

But that initial imaginative momentum is what’s driving stupid decisions by city councils and county commissions, something they will come to regret sooner rather than later when their data center is cancelled, because the debt built into it, like the debt built into the housing crisis, the dotcom bubble and the great depression brings it all back to reality.

Yet, I cannot, with my conspiratorial brain, wonder how much of this is cynically calculated by those determined to destroy the United States. First, destroy the ability to generate power through the Green New Deal, transfer those critical pieces of equipment to China, who also holds all of the spare parts for electrical transmission, then, inspire a surge in demand for electric generation through the creation of data centers, bankrupting the whole nation. Then, when one understands that the entire climate change hoax was largely perpetrated by China itself, the plot thickens. The next move is to claim that data centers themselves are military installations, so they can’t be challenged or disrupted, leaving the people impoverished and cast into a powerless future only resolved in small enclaves, or prisons.

The most important thing to remember in these times is that electricity was not around for anything more than lighting until well into the industrial revolution. Many of our grandparents and parents grew up without electricity or running water. Some in Appalachia never have had these conveniences and know how to live without them. The Amish and hillbillies might be the most successful survivors of the future.

The point is, though, electricity and running water are relatively new concepts and industrial might is possible without it, once the American mind is free to explore other methods, or utilize already known, better, more compact methods of generating electrical power than huge corporations that control whole sections of the grid and can turn it on and off like a switch. Maybe, we ought to get a head start on that.

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