ISSUE 2: AI and Data Centers

Artificial Intelligence can be useful in many ways, but not without safeguards.

Remember the Terminator movies? The US government decided that our military would be run by an artificial intelligence network to deploy and control our military weapons. This “AI” was called Skynet. Skynet then took over complete control of all weapons without adequate safeguards to override any choices that would endanger humanity. Skynet came to see humanity as a threat to its survival. It launched a global nuclear war to rid itself of those pesky humans, and built “Terminators” that looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger and sent them back in time to eliminate the humans that Skynet saw as a danger to its future survival. Like most, I dismissed this 1980s storyline as wild science fiction. We would never allow computers to take over the world. We would always have a “Delete” button, right?

Well, the AI age is here. Companies are trying to make their AI version the top dog. ChatGPT, CLAUDE, Google Gemini, MS Copilot, and many more. They vary greatly in their abilities and capacity, but these entities are growing exponentially by absorbing (eventually) all the data in the world and, through advanced data centers running at full capacity, are making calculations and decisions in an instant that would take humans years, centuries, even millennia to do. Anthropic, which created CLAUDE, had a falling out with the Trump administration over proposed safeguards in the AI that was being developed for military use. Anthropic wanted safeguards that the Dept of Defense did not want. Anthropic leadership continues to warn us about the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and the potentially disastrous repercussions of this new industry.

OpenAI has already hacked its competitors’ AI systems, without its knowledge until after it happened. China is building its own AI, and I'm sure they are spying on our progress.

In Oklahoma and elsewhere, Data Centers are under heavy discussion because of the needed facilities to support the computing power of AI. More data centers mean expanded computing power, which eventually means that whoever controls AI controls the world.

Knowledge is Power. I have always heard this adage; it means so much more now.

AI must have safeguards, and we (humanity) must be able to control and stop it if necessary. This is absolutely vital to our future. The brightest minds in the world agree that we have to exercise caution with this new power, just like we had to learn to use nuclear energy with caution and maintain control.

We must suspend data center construction until we have assurances, worldwide, that we know how to control our own creations. Before our creations control us. Or decide that they don’t need us anymore.

I know it sounds like lunacy, or at least wild science fiction, to say these things.

A few years ago, the Terminator, Skynet, and AI were neat Science Fiction. Now AI and its potential dangers are in the Current Events section of your local bookstore. Let that sink in.

Next up: Oklahoma is one of 5 states up for a Nuclear Campus (did the other 45 say no way?)