Tuesday\u2019s state Department of Environmental Protection hearing on \u201cProject Gravity\u201d was billed as an opportunity for the public to ask questions and \u201cget educated\u201d on the proposed data center campus in Archbald.<\/p>\n
Because serious questions solicit solid answers and education requires exchanges of verifiable information, the hearing was instead a crash course in the comically speculative nature of data center development and the alleged artificial intelligence \u201crevolution\u201d the centers are promised to facilitate.<\/p>\n
Some nuggets of news were coughed up by representatives of Archbald 25 Developer LLC, including that the plan calls for drawing water from Lake Scranton to cool nearly 2 million square feet of thirsty AI hardware. While Project Gravity attorney Ray Rinaldi repeatedly insisted the proposed seven-building \u201ccampus\u201d doesn\u2019t have a committed tenant, he said the tenant that isn\u2019t committed has agreed to build infrastructure to pump water from Lake Scranton to Archbald.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a remarkable commitment for an \u201cuncommitted\u201d tenant to make. Non-disclosure agreements allow developers to shroud the identities of prospective tenants, but citizens have a right to know which corporations plan to profit from permanently disfiguring their communities.<\/p>\n
The plan to tap the city\u2019s source of drinking water should serve as a wakeup call to Scrantonians in particular. Data center development is poised to transform and exploit the entire valley, not just the host communities stuck with the buildings.<\/p>\n
The DEP organized the hearing and stacked the dais with staffers and officials who predictably responded to straightforward questions with process-heavy jargon that glazed the eyes of the 150 or so citizens in the auditorium of Valley View High School.<\/p>\n
The permitting process may fascinate its functionaries, but the crowd was fixated on what the DEP can and will do to defend the public interest against invasive, unwanted development.<\/p>\n
Distilled to its essence, the DEP response was, \u201cTrust the process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trust is a core driver of the \u201cAI revolution,\u201d which is being engineered by billionaire tech \u201cbroligarchs\u201d who see themselves as \u201cmasters of the universe\u201d and the rest of us as inconsequential as ants on a sunbaked sidewalk.<\/p>\n
This sizzling ant trusts solid answers and verifiable information, not fantastical promises and empty assurances from power-hungry hucksters playing God with the global economy and the future of humanity.<\/p>\n
While local opposition rightly rails against building data centers near homes, schools and public parks, the speculative nature of the \u201cAI revolution\u201d is largely ignored.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s widely accepted that we \u201cneed\u201d data centers to support the \u201csweeping changes\u201d artificial intelligence is supposed to bring to daily life, but most of those changes are theoretical, rooted in a rapidly changing technology and corporate conjecture about future consumer participation.<\/p>\n
The rush to build data centers anywhere assumes they won\u2019t be obsolete by the time they go online. Technology is already being developed to power the industry with much smaller, less obtrusive infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Temporary jobs will be created by building data center campuses, but they may amount to Potemkin villages with dubious value to their host communities. They could be immensely valuable, however, to \u201cminers\u201d of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, a core aspect of data center development that so far has flown under the radar.<\/p>\n
Soaring values in AI-related stocks are essentially fueled by the same handful of corporations passing hundreds of billions of dollars back and forth in a closed loop that looks more and more like a noose around the necks of the local, national and world economies. Virtually all of the current gains in the stock market are owed to the artificial intelligence arms race. They are more ethereal than real.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m no expert, but Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan, the International Monetary Fund and many others have acknowledged that the \u201ccircular investments\u201d of AI corporations have created overvaluations similar to the \u201cdot.com bubble\u201d of the \u201990s. We\u2019ve seen this movie before.<\/p>\n
If (when) the \u201cAI bubble\u201d bursts, it could crater the stock market and crash the economy. Billionaires will be insulated from total ruin, but, like the 2008 crash caused by the burst of the \u201chousing bubble,\u201d the rest of us will be left to sift the rubble of our pensions and retirement accounts.<\/p>\n
Even if data centers were erected entirely on land zoned for industrial use, they would still be a massive drain on water and energy resources and require mammoth investments in new infrastructure. Consumers would surely pay higher utility bills, even if the corporations kicked in as promised.<\/p>\n
Promises of cures for cancer and other astronomical advances may eventually come true, but so far, the \u201cAI revolution\u201d has mostly produced \u201cdeep fake\u201d videos of people farting and flying into the sky and \u201ccustomized porn.\u201d If a woman you desire doesn\u2019t reciprocate your carnal interest, just snap a picture and undress her on your laptop. What a thrilling advancement for humanity!<\/p>\n
The most telling exchange of Tuesday\u2019s DEP hearing was sparked by a question no one on the dais felt compelled to affirmatively answer.<\/p>\n
A citizen asked the panel of developers and alleged environmental protectors for a show of hands. How many of them would want to live and raise children in the shadow of a data center?<\/p>\n
No hand went up. More than anything else the panelists said Tuesday, trust that silent response as the gospel truth.<\/p>\n
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, doesn\u2019t trust anything artificial. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Blue Sky Social.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tuesday\u2019s state Department of Environmental Protection hearing on \u201cProject Gravity\u201d was billed as an opportunity for the public…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1590,182,139,1559,1560,178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-84283","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-chris-kelly","9":"tag-local-news","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-opinion","12":"tag-opinion-columnists","13":"tag-scranton","14":"tag-scranton-headlines","15":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84283","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=84283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84283\/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=84283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}