The more AI is used, the more of these data centres are built, the quicker collapse will come.
The extra energy and water requirements of these bohemoths is simply not there; so something will have to give - either the data centres burn down or are switched off, or the consumer population dies off. It's a bit pointless having a 4GW data centre for control if the people you are trying to contol simply cannot afford all the electronic gear that is to survey them, or have disappeared because they've no water and no food growing land.
And how much aluminium, steel, copper, carbon fibre, concrete are these things using? If Trump/Hesgeth want to reload their depleted missile inventories, they'll be competing with the resources used to build these data centres, especially the microchips from Taiwan, which will soon be China's anyway.
None of it makes sense, and when viewed through our ecological lens, even less so. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they'll just speed up collapse of global industrial civilisation. So, bring it on!
Speeding collapse may be the logic of these deluded, narcissistic billionaires.
You are correct on all counts, but as the title of the great Talking Heads album of 1984 said (appropriate year), Stop Making Sense.
The insanity of everything is unreal, and I had little clue of how appropriate the name of my endeavor would be when I started nearly five years ago. Thank you for commenting.
There seems to be a lot of commentary around these days about depopulation agendas by the elites, and so on.
I don't think that is actually the case, and we are crediting them with far too much intelligence.
In the case of AI data centres, I am convinced it is merely ego that is driving these. Sometime ago there'll have been one tech billionaire that worked out he needed these big data centres, so started building them. Investors with too much money started investing their dividends in his stock, so he started building more. Then his rivals must have thought, 'hang on, whats this about, if he's getting increased valuation through building data centres I'd better get in the game'. And so, like twitchy neighbours in suburbia each outbuying their next monster truck, the technocrats are responding to these threats to their ego by building more and bigger data centres.
No other explanation needed. Their egos demand it, because they fear they might be missing out on something.
We have to remember that the so-called elites are not one enormous cabal plotting the eradication of what to them are consumer slaves, but they are rivals, in competition with each other, and would be more than happy to see each other go bust.
You could be right. Identifying the motivation of these morons involves considerable conjecture. It could all be ego, not an outright malevolent plot. However, there is little doubt they consider themselves superior. Evidence in their comments leak out. And yeah, the dipshits with monster trucks are examples of the same stupidity. Eliminate Musk or Bezos and there's another intellectual turd ready to step in.
In the end it doesn't matter whether there's a secret plot or not. The end results are the same.
Geoff, it's not a question of what will happen; it's when the crash will come and how much damage will result from the force feeding. Like the recession of the 1930's, this will have a global impact, the likes of which have never been seen.
Do we go to the AI geniuses to recite the truth? "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
I agree. A crash is coming. It's hard to say if the attack on Iran accelerating the crash is an act of utter stupidity or a calculation. Certainly, Trump, Hegseth and Zeldin are idiots, but others like Stephen Miller, not so much just like many of the architects of Project 2025. Shakespeare certainly understood human behavior, such an appropriate quote.
Agree with everything, and learned some more! However I think the conclusion goes further.
I think you are right, the desire is control. But a much bigger form of control. These companies are all hoping to be the one to break through to full power AGI, and in doing so be able to rapidly leverage that power to take over the rest of the world’s compute. Governments are likely sold stories of population control, economic relevance and growth, at a time when everyone in power is seeing the cracks and can’t figure out what else to do. I think the story is you will need to be able to manipulate entire populations to handle the immense immiseration of such a large wealth gap.
AGI is a go big or go home attempt, getting a return on the degree of investment being made only makes sense with the outcome of AGI, and the take over of a significant portion of global (yes global) GDP. Say 30-50%, I forget the math I’ve seen on this...
If they don’t build it, the economy is set to crash anyway. Too much investment is tied up in it, too much imaginary growth depends on AI. The current products cannot produce the return required, but the rush to make them will hasten the breaking down of fragile eco systems and social systems.
This is a rush to become the one guy who made a ‘god’ on a burning planet. Egotistical wet dream build upon an idea that they have the only hope to save humanity.
Wellll we will know where to harvest a load of copper and silicone from at least, all handily distributed around the world in their data centres. What a service to future humanity!
Thanks for your writing 🙏 I hope you can write a followup piece about the above sort of thing, the actual reasons and hopes for the AI buildout is a story that needs telling.
Thank you. When I write I am learning, and I always hope to leave readers with new knowledge as well. I think the breakthrough you're referring to is ASI, artificial superintelligence.
The end of economic growth has arrived. As I recently commented, money is an expression of finite energy and resources. From oil to copper the easiest inventories of most of what we depend on has already been harvested, and now we're on a path of diminishing returns, eventually no returns as the expense becomes greater than the profit.
Perhaps the oligarchs see this and in part the drive for AGI/ASI is a result. I think people like Sam Altman are banking on a fusion breakthrough. On the other hand, when one considers Peter Thiel and Palantir, deadly malevolence is apparent and Musk is a racist and these data centers are being built near poor communities that are directly affected by the toxic air from running these diesel generators.
Little doubt there are some god complexes at work here.
AI in part may be a last gasp effort to create yet more growth. It's a denial of reality of the finite nature of the planet. Even a fusion breakthrough would come with enormous collateral damage as it's not oil, would take many years to build at scale and require a complete restructuring of the economy. Also, just like all technology it comes back to diesel for mining and building out. There will be no fusion powered bulldozers. None of our tech can exist without fossil fuels.
Exactly. AGI is the immediate precursor to ASI. Essentially we already have superintelligence in AI, if only by virtue of speed, but it is narrow and limited. Make that general and you are a few short steps to ASI (thats the theory)
When I started this effort nearly five years ago it was to inform about climate change and overshoot. The rise of AI certainly fits in. This was my second article on the subject and there are endless angles to call out its harm. I ran across one video indicating some of these monsters are being abandoned, but haven't vetted it yet. I never rely on just one source, and that angle didn't fit into the scope of this article. However, community efforts to halt these abominations is on my radar. Thanks for the suggestion.
Well, it still can, for a while, until final lock down. You can still access actual news from around the world, although it is still feeding certain silos which have immunized themselves from truth.
It looks like having the courage to risk all, imprisonment or our very lives. It looks like a mass uprising of protests, boycotts, strikes and crashing the system. It looks like toe-to-toe with ICE, the police and the National Guard in the street.
Would I have ever advocated for such things a few years ago? Hell no, but death is coming as the psychopaths in charge tip the planet beyond survivability, build their bunkers and replace us with AI. India is now experiencing temperatures that rival Death Valley. Farming is dying. Our backs are to the wall.
In the meantime, Americans walk around pretending or oblivious to the police state encircling us and what may well turn into a worldwide Great Depression.
I know people having babies, maybe the ultimate marker of denial and ignorance. How could anyone who's informed do such a thing?
Humanity has been down this path repeatedly, but not at this level of 8.3 billion of us foolishly so interconnected that if one falls, we all go down.
You are on record, very credibly, for how bad it is. And my kids aren't having kids, where given we're humans, with built-in proclivities for reproduction, I want to tell you how much that sucks. All those scrapbooksof mine, and pride from heroic family histories, with no one to pass them to. And with my girls taking care of me now, I worry about who is going to take care of them. All well and good to be cavalier about choices that are sensible, but, for what's life-giving, that sucks.
Back to present time. So now what? What does toe-to-toe look like? Are we shooting?
I'm certainly not an advocate for violence, but as the ghost of the middle class is eviscerated it seems inevitable. Toe-to-toe isn't a matter of choice in a country that now has a gestapo named ICE. ICE won't stop with brown victims, they'll come after anyone questioning "authority."
Credit yourself for raising smart kids. An old friend of mine told me one of her sons has a baby on the way. It appears the world that child will have to navigate won't be fit. That said, I understand your feeling of personal loss.
Human as the only game in town, better to play. And ICE is abusive, but it's not an occupying army.
Now, if Taylor Swift got on a soapbox, she could get everyone boycotting. And singing. What else? I like bribing Trump, where he and Vance resign after he fires his hires. Sleep disorder is his face-saver. What to bribe him with could be a national conversation. Get us excited. We're cleverer than he is, and he doesn't even want that job.
He's so upside down we might even get him to take MDMA, where his contrariness gets him popping a forbidden pill. Wouldn't it be something for the ages if a transformed Trump transformed the world?
If humanity is going to survive its own evolutionary process, population is going to have to come down. All species experience this natural system of checks and balances. At least we have the capacity to plan to seek our equilibrium rather than nature doing it for us in some horrific way. At least one thing we can be grateful for…
When population gets back down to about 3.5 billion then we can start thinking about grandchildren again. For now, you can’t blame young people for not wanting to have children, it’s a natural reaction to the stress of overshoot.
Population IS going to come down, and it won't be in just poor exploited nations. Yes, we have not defeated nature's equilibrium of checks and balances, merely deferred them. We have not been planning for this, but rather pursuing complete denial.
The estimates I have seen for sustainable population on our planet are considerably lower than yours. However, reduction from 8.3 billion to 3.5 in a short period of time are horrifying enough with unknown consequences.
I truly feel for young people who have been left this future. My daughter was born in 2001.
"If you have been led to believe wind and solar are making a significant contribution, think again. Fossil fuels are their primary source and sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg whose products provenly harm the mental health of our children has proposed a data center the size of Manhattan."
Capitalism is fertile soil for Jevons paradox.
And Mark Zuckerberg is a capitalist. A rentier capitalist. Money for nothing. Use what he owns and pay him is the way he wants things to work out.
Wouldn't it be nice if you got a check in the mail, as a small percentage of something sold or a service rendered. You never have to do any work to get it, the check just comes. In America it takes living many years on this earth to understand that what you are doing is a theft. It should be obvious but American culture gets in the way of this understanding. Zuckerberg will never have that understanding. To destroy the earth for unearned riches is an obvious evil. However many Americans cannot see the obvious.
Data centers are a speculative bubble feeding on itself. Capital is raised and the people raising this capital get paid today. Opaque metrics let raisers of capital sell potential capacity and build massive campuses. Transparency makes selling difficult. The AI buildout results from investor storytelling and rentier incentives, not actual verified necessity.
The more AI is used, the more of these data centres are built, the quicker collapse will come.
The extra energy and water requirements of these bohemoths is simply not there; so something will have to give - either the data centres burn down or are switched off, or the consumer population dies off. It's a bit pointless having a 4GW data centre for control if the people you are trying to contol simply cannot afford all the electronic gear that is to survey them, or have disappeared because they've no water and no food growing land.
And how much aluminium, steel, copper, carbon fibre, concrete are these things using? If Trump/Hesgeth want to reload their depleted missile inventories, they'll be competing with the resources used to build these data centres, especially the microchips from Taiwan, which will soon be China's anyway.
None of it makes sense, and when viewed through our ecological lens, even less so. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they'll just speed up collapse of global industrial civilisation. So, bring it on!
Speeding collapse may be the logic of these deluded, narcissistic billionaires.
You are correct on all counts, but as the title of the great Talking Heads album of 1984 said (appropriate year), Stop Making Sense.
The insanity of everything is unreal, and I had little clue of how appropriate the name of my endeavor would be when I started nearly five years ago. Thank you for commenting.
There seems to be a lot of commentary around these days about depopulation agendas by the elites, and so on.
I don't think that is actually the case, and we are crediting them with far too much intelligence.
In the case of AI data centres, I am convinced it is merely ego that is driving these. Sometime ago there'll have been one tech billionaire that worked out he needed these big data centres, so started building them. Investors with too much money started investing their dividends in his stock, so he started building more. Then his rivals must have thought, 'hang on, whats this about, if he's getting increased valuation through building data centres I'd better get in the game'. And so, like twitchy neighbours in suburbia each outbuying their next monster truck, the technocrats are responding to these threats to their ego by building more and bigger data centres.
No other explanation needed. Their egos demand it, because they fear they might be missing out on something.
We have to remember that the so-called elites are not one enormous cabal plotting the eradication of what to them are consumer slaves, but they are rivals, in competition with each other, and would be more than happy to see each other go bust.
You could be right. Identifying the motivation of these morons involves considerable conjecture. It could all be ego, not an outright malevolent plot. However, there is little doubt they consider themselves superior. Evidence in their comments leak out. And yeah, the dipshits with monster trucks are examples of the same stupidity. Eliminate Musk or Bezos and there's another intellectual turd ready to step in.
In the end it doesn't matter whether there's a secret plot or not. The end results are the same.
It's called kakistocracy, and we know their Supreme Leader.
Almost makes me long for George W. Bush. How much lower can we go? The descent seems bottomless.
There is no bottom to depravity - you can endlessly think of ways to torture people, while narrow is the path to love, respect and peace.
Geoff, it's not a question of what will happen; it's when the crash will come and how much damage will result from the force feeding. Like the recession of the 1930's, this will have a global impact, the likes of which have never been seen.
Do we go to the AI geniuses to recite the truth? "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
I agree. A crash is coming. It's hard to say if the attack on Iran accelerating the crash is an act of utter stupidity or a calculation. Certainly, Trump, Hegseth and Zeldin are idiots, but others like Stephen Miller, not so much just like many of the architects of Project 2025. Shakespeare certainly understood human behavior, such an appropriate quote.
We're seriously not burning enough shit down🔥
It IS fight or die time!
It truly is. How many have grasped this?
Agree with everything, and learned some more! However I think the conclusion goes further.
I think you are right, the desire is control. But a much bigger form of control. These companies are all hoping to be the one to break through to full power AGI, and in doing so be able to rapidly leverage that power to take over the rest of the world’s compute. Governments are likely sold stories of population control, economic relevance and growth, at a time when everyone in power is seeing the cracks and can’t figure out what else to do. I think the story is you will need to be able to manipulate entire populations to handle the immense immiseration of such a large wealth gap.
AGI is a go big or go home attempt, getting a return on the degree of investment being made only makes sense with the outcome of AGI, and the take over of a significant portion of global (yes global) GDP. Say 30-50%, I forget the math I’ve seen on this...
If they don’t build it, the economy is set to crash anyway. Too much investment is tied up in it, too much imaginary growth depends on AI. The current products cannot produce the return required, but the rush to make them will hasten the breaking down of fragile eco systems and social systems.
This is a rush to become the one guy who made a ‘god’ on a burning planet. Egotistical wet dream build upon an idea that they have the only hope to save humanity.
Wellll we will know where to harvest a load of copper and silicone from at least, all handily distributed around the world in their data centres. What a service to future humanity!
Thanks for your writing 🙏 I hope you can write a followup piece about the above sort of thing, the actual reasons and hopes for the AI buildout is a story that needs telling.
Thank you. When I write I am learning, and I always hope to leave readers with new knowledge as well. I think the breakthrough you're referring to is ASI, artificial superintelligence.
The end of economic growth has arrived. As I recently commented, money is an expression of finite energy and resources. From oil to copper the easiest inventories of most of what we depend on has already been harvested, and now we're on a path of diminishing returns, eventually no returns as the expense becomes greater than the profit.
Perhaps the oligarchs see this and in part the drive for AGI/ASI is a result. I think people like Sam Altman are banking on a fusion breakthrough. On the other hand, when one considers Peter Thiel and Palantir, deadly malevolence is apparent and Musk is a racist and these data centers are being built near poor communities that are directly affected by the toxic air from running these diesel generators.
Little doubt there are some god complexes at work here.
AI in part may be a last gasp effort to create yet more growth. It's a denial of reality of the finite nature of the planet. Even a fusion breakthrough would come with enormous collateral damage as it's not oil, would take many years to build at scale and require a complete restructuring of the economy. Also, just like all technology it comes back to diesel for mining and building out. There will be no fusion powered bulldozers. None of our tech can exist without fossil fuels.
Exactly. AGI is the immediate precursor to ASI. Essentially we already have superintelligence in AI, if only by virtue of speed, but it is narrow and limited. Make that general and you are a few short steps to ASI (thats the theory)
This was very insightful, thank you.
I’d love to see an article on potential solutions (if you haven’t written one already.)
Or successful community efforts to stop these being built.
Thanks!
Got it! Nonetheless, you’re a very good writer. Looking forward to reading more of your content in the future.
Here is the other article I wrote about AI since you're interested. Thanks for the encouragement.
https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-is-hot
When I started this effort nearly five years ago it was to inform about climate change and overshoot. The rise of AI certainly fits in. This was my second article on the subject and there are endless angles to call out its harm. I ran across one video indicating some of these monsters are being abandoned, but haven't vetted it yet. I never rely on just one source, and that angle didn't fit into the scope of this article. However, community efforts to halt these abominations is on my radar. Thanks for the suggestion.
AI, data centers, all part of the eventual TOTAL CONTROL and the total elimination of Free Will. Resist!
It's beyond disheartening to see how easily manipulated people are. I remember thinking the Internet could lift people. How wrong I was.
Well, it still can, for a while, until final lock down. You can still access actual news from around the world, although it is still feeding certain silos which have immunized themselves from truth.
How to fight?
It has to be physical like every other revolution. There is no other way.
Would you flesh that out, to give a sense of what it would look like?
It looks like having the courage to risk all, imprisonment or our very lives. It looks like a mass uprising of protests, boycotts, strikes and crashing the system. It looks like toe-to-toe with ICE, the police and the National Guard in the street.
Would I have ever advocated for such things a few years ago? Hell no, but death is coming as the psychopaths in charge tip the planet beyond survivability, build their bunkers and replace us with AI. India is now experiencing temperatures that rival Death Valley. Farming is dying. Our backs are to the wall.
In the meantime, Americans walk around pretending or oblivious to the police state encircling us and what may well turn into a worldwide Great Depression.
I know people having babies, maybe the ultimate marker of denial and ignorance. How could anyone who's informed do such a thing?
Humanity has been down this path repeatedly, but not at this level of 8.3 billion of us foolishly so interconnected that if one falls, we all go down.
You are on record, very credibly, for how bad it is. And my kids aren't having kids, where given we're humans, with built-in proclivities for reproduction, I want to tell you how much that sucks. All those scrapbooksof mine, and pride from heroic family histories, with no one to pass them to. And with my girls taking care of me now, I worry about who is going to take care of them. All well and good to be cavalier about choices that are sensible, but, for what's life-giving, that sucks.
Back to present time. So now what? What does toe-to-toe look like? Are we shooting?
I'm certainly not an advocate for violence, but as the ghost of the middle class is eviscerated it seems inevitable. Toe-to-toe isn't a matter of choice in a country that now has a gestapo named ICE. ICE won't stop with brown victims, they'll come after anyone questioning "authority."
Credit yourself for raising smart kids. An old friend of mine told me one of her sons has a baby on the way. It appears the world that child will have to navigate won't be fit. That said, I understand your feeling of personal loss.
Human as the only game in town, better to play. And ICE is abusive, but it's not an occupying army.
Now, if Taylor Swift got on a soapbox, she could get everyone boycotting. And singing. What else? I like bribing Trump, where he and Vance resign after he fires his hires. Sleep disorder is his face-saver. What to bribe him with could be a national conversation. Get us excited. We're cleverer than he is, and he doesn't even want that job.
He's so upside down we might even get him to take MDMA, where his contrariness gets him popping a forbidden pill. Wouldn't it be something for the ages if a transformed Trump transformed the world?
If humanity is going to survive its own evolutionary process, population is going to have to come down. All species experience this natural system of checks and balances. At least we have the capacity to plan to seek our equilibrium rather than nature doing it for us in some horrific way. At least one thing we can be grateful for…
When population gets back down to about 3.5 billion then we can start thinking about grandchildren again. For now, you can’t blame young people for not wanting to have children, it’s a natural reaction to the stress of overshoot.
Population IS going to come down, and it won't be in just poor exploited nations. Yes, we have not defeated nature's equilibrium of checks and balances, merely deferred them. We have not been planning for this, but rather pursuing complete denial.
The estimates I have seen for sustainable population on our planet are considerably lower than yours. However, reduction from 8.3 billion to 3.5 in a short period of time are horrifying enough with unknown consequences.
I truly feel for young people who have been left this future. My daughter was born in 2001.
I'm saving all my blame for politicians.
"If you have been led to believe wind and solar are making a significant contribution, think again. Fossil fuels are their primary source and sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg whose products provenly harm the mental health of our children has proposed a data center the size of Manhattan."
Capitalism is fertile soil for Jevons paradox.
And Mark Zuckerberg is a capitalist. A rentier capitalist. Money for nothing. Use what he owns and pay him is the way he wants things to work out.
Wouldn't it be nice if you got a check in the mail, as a small percentage of something sold or a service rendered. You never have to do any work to get it, the check just comes. In America it takes living many years on this earth to understand that what you are doing is a theft. It should be obvious but American culture gets in the way of this understanding. Zuckerberg will never have that understanding. To destroy the earth for unearned riches is an obvious evil. However many Americans cannot see the obvious.
Data centers are a speculative bubble feeding on itself. Capital is raised and the people raising this capital get paid today. Opaque metrics let raisers of capital sell potential capacity and build massive campuses. Transparency makes selling difficult. The AI buildout results from investor storytelling and rentier incentives, not actual verified necessity.