A tipping point with technology

 

Have we reached a tipping point with technology?

It feels like we’re on a precipice ready to make an unrecoverable leap into the embrace of artificial intelligence or falling back to rage against the machines. We are already seeing rebellion foment against AI and data centers. And experts have been warning us for years about the dangers of constant connectivity through cell phones and other electronic devices. It seems that the more technology advances the more we fear it and perhaps for good reason.

Hollywood has given us no shortage of post-apocalyptic movies about machines or AI taking over the world and humanity struggling to survive. We’re no where near the point where Skynet becomes self-aware and sends Terminator robots to wipe out all the humans or Cylons turning on their human creators in “Battlestar Galactica,” but there are signs we are heading that way.

Just recently in the news OpenAI reported that one of its models went rogue and autonomously hacked into a competitor’s system. And now Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, reported that one of its models hacked three companies during controlled tests.

That’s a big deal! It shows that these companies are losing control of their creations. They’re doing the kinds of things that we’ve been warned about. It’s already happening while AI technology is still in its infancy stage. Yet even with all these concerns, most people, me included, regularly use AI tools. (I utilized Chat GPT to help do research for this column.) Some of it is used for work, some for fun, but use and demand are growing.

AI technology is created and housed in data centers across the country. The increasing demand for AI is fueling growth of data centers. Now, people are waking up to the myriad of problems caused by data centers. Across Texas and the nation, there is a massive groundswell of opposition to the construction of these facilities.

Hyperscale data centers consume a lot of electricity to operate and enormous amounts of water to cool them. They reportedly cause light pollution and noise pollution. Of course, not all data centers are the same. As near as I can tell, Brazos County is home to two data centers. Fibertown Data Center operates in downtown Bryan and Texas A&M has its West Campus Data Center on Agronomy Road.

I’ve not seen any concerns raised about those centers. College Station residents were successful recently in getting city council to stop a proposed data center behind Costco. Data centers have also become a political hot potato, causing Gov. Greg Abbott to change his position on them.

Years ago he advocated for them and offered up millions of dollars in tax abatements to lure them to Texas. Now he wants a ban on their construction in rural Texas neighborhoods and to have them supply their own power so they don’t put more strain on the electric grid.

Beyond AI and data centers, people are rebelling against other invasive technologies. Most notably, people are opposed to Flock cameras.

Brazos County reportedly has more than 30 Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras operated by the College Station and Bryan police departments and the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office. That does not include cameras owned and operated by private businesses such as HOAs and shopping centers.

Law enforcement officials tout their benefits in tracking criminals and fighting crime. Many residents decry them as an invasion of privacy that is easily hacked and abused. They say tracking people with the cameras is an illegal search without a warrant.

Other areas of opposition to technology include the recent fight by Grimes County residents against SpaceX’s proposed Terafab semiconductor chip manufacturing facility and ongoing complaints nationwide about solar farms eating up valuable farmland. You can also throw in Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites that are causing light pollution and ruining ground-based telescope observations of the cosmos.

As I briefly touched on earlier, there is mounting data that shows the negative mental, emotional, developmental and social consequences cell phones and other connective devices are having on people, especially children. I don’t have enough space here to get into all of that, but it is part of technology takeover that is causing people to pause and even pull back and resist.

Clearly, we have reached a tipping point with technology, and we need to learn how to harness it before it does more harm to us.

Whether it's AI, Flock cameras, data centers or even smartphones, technology is developing more rapidly than our ability to govern it. It has certainly outpaced the public’s trust in it. We’ve reached a technical tipping point where our desire for advancement in technology is colliding with our need for a healthy environment and better governance of its use.