Running to represent the citizens of south Maplewood and Woodbury
The Big Tech companies are engaged in a massive buildout of data centers to power and train their AI models. Many times, they are forcing small city councils to sign NDA’s preventing local citizens from even knowing what multinational company is about to dominate their town. These data centers use massive amounts of resources such as fresh water and electricity driving up costs for everyone. Some large scale projects will use as much energy as the entire city of Atlanta!
Minnesota should pass a moratorium on new data center projects. We do not need to ban all technological progress, but some at the federal level want to ban AI regulation at the state level. I’d rather proceed cautiously with something this powerful.
Mapped: U.S. States Moving to Restrict Data Centers
Below are some approaches that could avoid some of the worst downsides of unregulated AI.
Some states have already required that any new data center must provide its own electricity. Microsoft is bringing the Three Mile Island nuclear generator back online just to power their data centers. However, other data centers are using diesel or gas generators to power their facilities. These create unacceptable levels of noise pollution as well as air pollution in the nearby communities. In addition, they will compete for the supply of gas and diesel. Even if they are producing their own electricity, they will still drive up the price of energy for the rest of us.
One very promising new energy source is to use LFTR’s (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors) to produce nuclear energy instead of uranium. Perhaps the demand for new data centers can provide the investments to create a new and better solution for all of our energy needs.
Could Thorium Power the Next Generation of Nuclear Reactors?
The advantages include:
The main objections to thorium and LFTR’s coming from the nuclear industry in the past is that it would not be cost efficient to transform our existing nuclear infrastructure to use thorium. But this wouldn’t be necessary. Many of our plants are 40 – 50 years old and nearing the end of their lifetime usage expectancy. As we build new power plants to replace the ones coming off-line, we can gradually switch to the new technology. We can also build at a rate higher than replacement levels in order to offset other more polluting sources of electricity such as coal power plants. Data center infrastructure projects can help finance the move to a new cleaner industry.
This is not a solution for every data center, but in some cases instead of just letting the heat generated escape, it can be captured to heat an apartment building or an entire town. This will require more upfront cost, but is a way to use energy twice. This is already being done in Finland. Big Tech wants to build fast at the lowest cost to their bottom line and may dangle some short term money to communities to let them build. But taking a pause can create something very valuable for the long term.
Finland Data Center Heat Capture
Our current tax code is not neutral when it comes to eliminating workers. Due to the nature of how capital expenditures (eg., purchasing robots) are treated in tax accounting vs. how salaries are treated, there is an unintended tax incentive for a company to automate jobs and terminate employee positions. While we can’t stop progress in its natural course, due to the speed and scale of the job displacement that we see right around the corner, it would be wise to adjust those incentives to slow down job loss and give our economy more time to adjust. If humans are going to be competing with Elon Musk’s robot army for jobs, we should at least have a more level playing field.
One way to do this would be to allow 200% expensing of employees’ salaries for tax purposes. This may also create an incentive for companies to raise wages as a way to attract more workers instead of resorting to a huge capital expense of bringing in the robots. Companies in Minnesota do have a hard time finding motivated and qualified workers. If they are able to pay a higher wage by doubling the salaries, that will bring more labor into those jobs.
Using robotics and automation is not inherently bad. We have been doing so for years, and it increases the productivity of workers. It does create some better jobs at the expense of the higher number of lower-level jobs lost. But the decision to automate vs. keeping employees should at least be a tax-neutral decision. We should not be encouraging what is setting up to be massive displacement all at once, relative to our past pace of workplace evolution.
AI is already putting certain kinds of artists out of work. AI is notorious for taking human generated content from the internet in order to learn and then tweak it producing its own output that the original artist gets no compensation for. AI generated paintings, music, scripts, photographs, marketing materials, etc., will disrupt all of these professions.
Many people want to only purchase human generated content and art, but sometimes it is impossible for an untrained eye to tell the difference. This is the same urge to support individual artists as the desire to buy pottery or jewelry that is handmade rather than factory produced.
A solution would be for artists to come up with a new symbol to place on their art or content that states that no AI was used in the production of the art. This would be similar to the ™ or Copyright symbols. Perhaps an “H” for human or a tiny icon of a painter. A trade association could come up with it and copyright the image, and then give permission to anyone who has created their own art to place it on their work. If someone spotted a false claim, it could be reported to the trade association which could then sue for copyright infringement. This will create a self-policing effect to prevent people from trying to pass their AI content as human created. As a consumer, I would greatly appreciate this service to me, because I prefer to support humans doing art or content, not AI.
This is a concept that dairy farmers used when they created the Real Seal you see on dairy products to let consumers know it was made from real milk.
www.realseal.com
I don’t believe artists would need the government to implement this idea. If not, let’s spread the word and hopefully someone will do it. But if any copyright or trademark laws needed to be updated, I think this would be a non-partisan win that either state or federal legislators can work together on.
