The Politics of AI & Electricity
After years trying to define the politics of technology, I recently came upon a one sentence definition by Simone Weil, “The detail of the individual destiny of the machine-worker fades into insignificance before the science, the tremendous natural forces and the collective labor which are incorporated in the machines as a whole and constitute with them the employer’s power.”
There you go, the greatest political significance must be placed on the science and the tremendous natural forces incorporated into the machine. One incredible thing about Weil's thinking is how she tied the knowledge gained by science into her politics. Over the years, I’ve fitfully tried to do that, she did it effortlessly. Say whatever about her metaphysics - I say little about hers or any other - but her physics, history, and politics are world class.
Since its marketing launch, I’ve tried explaining AI is simply the next generation of compute, a technology only seventy five years old. The entire present politics of AI is a handful of corporations and a largely clueless greedy Wall Street attempting to control the future. We have no politics for compute. No politics for understanding not simply the insignificance of the worker, but the insignificance of us all before science and tremendous natural forces.
Nonetheless, the corporate AI power grab is meeting a growing response from our archaic republican institutions, sometimes you take what you can get. New York has become the latest state to consider a pause, and we need more than pause, we need a full stop to data center building. It is the only way the boys will be brought to the table and told this is not the way to go. In this regard, here’s a very concise statement by Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, on how the present compute architecture being pushed by the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Sam Altman are by no means the only choice we have, it is their choice.
At present, any AI politics is largely pushed by electricity rates. Let's not forget, the harnessing of the forces of electromagnetism is only a little over a century old. The FT has a good piece on AI's gluttonous electricity appetite churning electricity politics in America. Last year, Harvard Law released a good piece on the whole play, though the idea of energy parks is a total non-starter. The report has plenty of utility-speak, which I unfortunately speak fluently, but it's good explaining how the last three-decades of "market-reforms" created a system where market generated price hikes can be directly transferred to the consumer. In the 90s, when these rigged markets prices were first put in place, they caused Grey Davis to be the first Governor deservedly recalled in California history. Call it a lesson for electeds.
Finally, a word on our Tech boys and their fantastical, money fueled, fever dreams. Did you see by far the worst of the lot, and that's saying something, Elon, said the other day he was now stopping off at the moon before settling Mars? I guess ringing space with data centers is going to postpone the habitation of Mars.
No one better ridicules the idiocy, the "malicious optimism," of so many of these knuckleheads than my favorite theoretical physicist from Eastern Kentucky, Dr. Collier. This is very smart, very funny polemics of the highest order: