You do not want to live close to a data center. Having one near your home is like having a lawn mower running in your living room 24/7, as one local resident described it. Residents talked about low-pitched roars interspersed with high-frequency screeches, as the whir of loud fans echoed through the air. A growing body of research shows ... Read More »
Like Moore’s Law, energy efficiency for data centers began to run out of steam by the 2010s. After substantial progress between 2007 and 2018, the energy efficiency didn’t actually improve much between 2018 and 2024. It didn’t stop the PR spin about how Big Tech is so efficient and getting more efficient every year. You’re using as muc... Read More »
For years, energy efficiency was the great big shining bright green fabulously good spinning story of the Big Tech data center love of and care for the environment. This was quite a feat of PR spinning, when you consider that a small area of a data center in the 2020s had more power than all of available computing around 1980, and that t... Read More »
The data centers were coming. Rural Washington, USA, was going to be transformed. There would be so many jobs, so many jobs. Making Rural Washington Great Again. All it required was cheap land, cheap water, cheap electricity, and huge tax breaks. The data centers came. Where were the jobs, people asked? The government would not say. Refu... Read More »
In some ways, a data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Super-high security, ugly warehouse buildings. In other ways, a data center is much worse than a prison. A prison will bring some jobs; data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center will consume massively more water and electricity than a pr... Read More »
Morals matter. Ethics matter. Character matters. Bad people create bad societies. AI culture, like Big Tech culture, is riddled with fast and greedy characters. AI is the latest bitcoin, the latest blockchain. It is the latest way scammers, con artists and grifters think they can grift, scam and con. It is the latest magnet for the speed... Read More »
AI is a master of “bureaucratic cruelties, scaling administrative violence in ways that intensify structures of inequality, such as when AI is used to aid decisions about which patients are prioritized in healthcare or which prisoners are at risk of reoffending,” stated Dan McQuillan from the University of London. AI inevitably increases... Read More »
In the 1950s, AI was developed to mimic the brain during a period when very little was known about how the brain worked. The unknowability of the brain was actually an attraction to these AI pioneers and many felt an intoxication in developing AI systems that were also unknowable, even to their very designers. These were priests concocti... Read More »
If we want to get a taste of the dystopian future that Big Tech is planning for us with AI, then we need look no further than the UK Post Office scandal. My first job, back in 1984, was in Dublin for a small company that was growing fast but having problems getting paid. The owner had been posting out handwritten statements. He was advis... Read More »
It's hard to miss the knife symbol beside the content summary. Its purpose is to warn that if you accept this piece of work you will find violent and disturbing content. “It’s been recently added,” Julián Posada, assistant professor for the American Studies Program at Yale University, told me. “Before, as a moderator, you wouldn’t even h... Read More »