AI: The new bogeyman

I first caught wind of this notion on social media, but it wasn’t long before it found my inbox in a story from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists titled “Your AI chatbot is polluting my backyard.”

The article argues that the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is creating an enormous but largely invisible industrial footprint that ordinary Americans may eventually be forced to support. Behind the seemingly innocuous convenience of chatbots and cloud computing lies a vast network of data centers consuming immense amounts of electricity, water, land and raw materials. The piece contends that AI infrastructure increasingly resembles heavy industry rather than traditional software, placing a growing strain on power grids while expanding faster than regulators and communities can fully evaluate its long-term costs.

Another interesting article that came across my desk was published in The Times of London by author and journalist Karen Hao, with the dramatic title “I saw up close the dark reality of OpenAI’s race to create God.”

Drawing on her book Empire of AI, Hao contends that the AI industry has evolved from an idealistic research movement into a highly centralized, aggressively expansionist corporate enterprise. Its current strategy relies on scaling ever-larger computing systems, resulting in enormous data centers, soaring energy and water consumption and increasing concentration of economic and political power among a small group of technology firms. She argues that the costs of AI are being distributed globally through rising infrastructure demands, environmental strain and low-paid labor — portraying the modern AI economy less as a clean digital revolution than as a vast extractive industrial system.

Both articles argue that artificial intelligence is no longer merely a software story, but an industrial one with major environmental, economic and political consequences. The Bulletin article approaches the issue from the ground level, focusing on the physical footprint of AI infrastructure — the power plants, water consumption, transmission lines and sprawling data centers required to keep chatbots and cloud systems running. Its emphasis is environmental and regional, warning that communities far from Silicon Valley may eventually shoulder the hidden costs of the AI economy through strained utilities, rising electricity demand and resource competition. By contrast, the Times article focuses more on the corporate and ideological structure behind the AI boom, particularly the transformation of OpenAI from an idealistic research organization into a highly centralized commercial power. Where the first article asks, “What will AI do to our communities and resources?” the second asks, “Who controls this technology, and to whose benefit?”

As I look at this, I see political lines beginning to form. There are environmental concerns of concern to all of us to be sure, but we have seen the excesses of the environmental movement and it’s not difficult to predict that we will someday be shamed into limiting our chatbot use for the good of the planet. The introduction of inflammatory rhetoric like “playing God” and references to impacts on low-wage labor portend not only a political division but a reactive urge toward regulation that echoes the elimination of incandescent lights, the push for electric vehicles and the proverbial poorly flushing toilet.

While I think the placement of data centers and power plants, and the strain on local resources, should be carefully considered, I can’t help but think that I have seen this movie before. There are elements among us who wish to demonize business and limit freedoms and as we know, the pendulum always swings too far. Let’s keep an eye on it.