The Walk of Shame

Today’s piece is free to all. Most are not. I humbly ask that you become a paying subscriber at $5 a month. My price has remained constant since 2020, as has my rage.

This is an AI free zone, by the way. Since this is NOT my day job.

I use AI tools at my day job. I use them every day. They save me some time and effort. Mundane things mostly. Things I used to Google. AI doesn’t replace actual human beings, but it does give bean counters whose job it is to save money corporate cover to take a scythe through an office. Because we’re told AI SHOULD replace human beings. So what’s left if an office of 100 is cut in half “due to AI’ is 50 people doing the work of 100. It’s called “a scam”.

Less for you. More for them.

Technology is filled with scams. Whatever they tell you will be the next big thing, whether it be “4G” or “Big Data” or “The Cloud”, suddenly becomes irresistible. The same way that one large tech company deciding to fire 10,000 workers inspires other tech companies to fire 10,000 of THEIR workers. Everybody wants to be the head cheerleader. It’s all the cool kids in one room. Stock prices rise, the rich get richer, and suddenly your electric bill doubles.

Less for you. More for them.

AI tools are as smart as the people who prompt them, which means that AI tools are pretty dumb most of the time. But still, now that I have it to use, I like it. It’s like the first day with a remote control for the TV. You mean I don’t have to get up (or order one of my kids) to change the channel? I didn’t know I needed this. And yet here we are.

So far be it from me to shit on AI as a…..well….whatever it is. Tool? Crutch? Ball of Yarn? Intellectually, I understand that every time I enter a prompt into an AI assistant my gibberish goes SOMEWHERE to be deciphered. That is, some poor data center surely built over the objections of the people who live near it….or who will have to subsidize its massive fuck-you footprint to the tune of skyrocketing utility bills. I know this. You know this. It’s like railing against coal while shoveling the stuff into your boiler. I don’t wish to be hypocritical here.

But here’s the kicker.

Archbald is my HOME. And I’m getting pissed off. So yea, there’s a bit of NIMBY to this, but the smell of the landfill a few miles down the Casey Highway is bad enough without this on top of it. So pardon my hypocrisy.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the apparent plan is to ring my town with data centers the same way Nixon’s White House was ringed with buses during the height of Vietnam war protests. There would seem to be plenty of other places for these thing to go. LOTS of unused mountain space and all that. But no. Somebody thought it would be a better idea to drive them through my fucking back yard. Nearby towns have closed zoning loopholes due to public pressure, but my town remains for sale to a paper trail of shady real estate developers with names out of a Scorsese movie. Archbald has a wide assortment of elected and appointed officials. It has zoning boards and a zoning officer, who when I asked for permission to install an above ground pool in my backyard acted like I was requesting a nuclear reactor. So they can be professionally truculent under the right circumstances.

Archbald also has a city council and it has lawyers and a mayor who spends her winters in Florida….that sort of thing.

They would be the ones who could put a stop to all this with a bang of a gavel. And yet they sit on the borough dais during packed to overflow public meetings, looking exceedingly bored as one resident after another stands up and implores them to enforce the will of the people. Some will spend entire meetings buried in their own phones. They look like Al Capone’s first jury.

Weird, right?

I’m not suggesting that any of them have been duly influenced by anything other than the rosy projections of how all this tax revenue will magically filter down to us serfs like snow on the tongue. But I am reminded of that scene in the movie “Goodfellas” where DeNiro warns everyone not to spend ostentatiously…..and the gang shows up at the mob Christmas party wearing brand new mink coats and driving brand new pink Cadillacs.

Weird, right?

The first general-purpose electronic computer weighed 27 tons, was 8 feet tall, and filled a 30 by 50 foot space. It required enough power to dim the lights of the city of Philadelphia when it was turned on. Currently, the phone in your pocket is millions of times faster than this. Your smart phone is hundreds of millions of times more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer that guided astronauts to the Moon.

Which means?

Well, as Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

These data centers are massive. The size of a football field. That’s how big they need to be NOW. In years to come? What AI requires will fit into the size of a garage. And then into the size of a closet. Which means that in the lifetime of our children these buildings could become as obsolete as a coal breaker.

And then what? Archbald will still be ringed with buses, but now they’ll look like the one that American adventurer Christopher McCandless died in. NEPA is forever being promised she’ll be the belle of the ball, only to be left doing the walk of shame the next morning.

Mink coats and Cadillacs don’t last as long as the view from your child’s window.

My hometown deserves better than this.

In a bit…

—tf