$1.8 billion<\/a> slush fund for domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol.<\/p>\n\u201cI sure hope so,\u201d he replied, referring to the rewards for seditious, mob criminality as reparations.<\/p>\n
As far as I know, Frank didn\u2019t beat any cops or smear his feces on the walls of American democracy\u2019s most sacred shrine, so he\u2019s probably at the back of the line.<\/p>\n
There was no line at the polls. I was voter 33 at around 10:30 a.m. I signed my name with a pen in the paper registrar\u2019s book and blackened a handful of ovals with old-fashioned ink.<\/p>\n
I fed the machine my ballot, thanked the poll workers for their invaluable service to Our Republic and went on with my day. From my doorstep to the firehouse and back, the process took about half an hour and a bunch of human beings to get done. (Yes, that includes Frank. I hate what he did, but he\u2019s a fellow child of God.)<\/p>\n
More than any other issues, Tuesday\u2019s election was dominated by invasive data center development and the broader, mostly negative future impacts of artificial intelligence on humans. The process itself proved that for all of technology\u2019s advances, there is no substitute for human input.<\/p>\n
No AI agent could have completed or experienced my trip to the polls, even if you put it inside a robotic body. I\u2019m a human being. It\u2019s an it, and that\u2019s it. AI is an imitation of humanity, not the inevitable replacement the tech billionaires are so poorly selling as both the key to a limitless future and the end of civilization as we know it.<\/p>\n
The unintended result is a renewed, rising respect and overdue celebration of humanity as an irreplaceable, endlessly redeemable resource, warts and all. Humans who seem incapable of agreeing on anything else are banding together to battle invasive data center development and push back against the bunk that humans are an antiquated, analog impediment to \u201cprogress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since at least the invention of the wheel, it\u2019s been universally understood that technology should serve humanity. The tech \u201cbroligarchs\u201d aren\u2019t shy about their plans to flip that script. They can\u2019t do it without human cooperation.<\/p>\n
I opined against electronic voting machines when they were pitched in the early aughts as a cutting-edge technological revolution for representative democracy. I endorsed the continued use of paper ballots as a backup for fear that the machines could be rigged, and that even if they couldn\u2019t be, doubts about their security could be exploited and weaponized to undermine the results of free and fair elections.<\/p>\n
Imagine that.<\/p>\n
As I left the firehouse Tuesday, Frank and I traded parting barbs before he uttered something stunning:<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re on the right side on these data centers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Must\u2019ve been the human in him talking.<\/p>\n
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, is fiercely pro-human. How about you? Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat is it? It\u2019s it.\u201d \u2014 from \u201cEpic,\u201d by Faith No More (1989) Aside from the digital voting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1590,2116,88075,201,16790,1559,1560,28,178,180,179],"class_list":["post-198445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-chris-kelly","tag-data-centers","tag-downvalley","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-old-forge","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}