Our Response to AI
By Rebecca, Northeast PA
Put People First! PA
Governor Shapiro has repeatedly stated that building AI data centers will bring ‘economic prosperity’ to Pennsylvania. Politicians are scrambling to change zoning ordinances to allow this to happen. Emergency Town Hall meetings are being held left and right as powerholders attempt to steamroll over the will of the People. Notably, these efforts have been bipartisan.
The state of Pennsylvania has infinite money to spend on “AI readiness” but nothing to keep our hospitals open. Governor Shapiro pledged 10 million of our tax dollars specifically to train workers for Amazon’s data center in Berwick. That money would have been enough to continue running Berwick Hospital for over ten years. Instead Amazon – the second largest employer in the world – doesn’t have to pay to train its own employees. Big Daddy government is footing that bill for them. Both parties of Wall Street (Democrats and Republicans) are united in their desire to convert as much of our land and our workforce over to the service of AI as possible. They spout big scary talking points about “winning the war of AI supremacy” without even being clear about who we are fighting against.
What even is an AI data center? A traditional data center is just rows of CPUs and servers sitting in a warehouse. An AI data center also houses much more advanced devices called GPUs and TPUs which are built to handle the larger volumes of unstructured data necessary for machine learning. They require significantly more power and advanced cooling. The extra power usage can be so intense that it causes blackouts for local communities. The cooling systems require vast amounts of water that is mixed with refrigerants, making it impossible to be used for human needs.
We are all too familiar with the false promises of big business that destroy our beautiful woodlands for their own profit. The natural gas industry, the lumber barons, and big king coal, ALL promised to lift hardworking Pennsylvanians out of poverty. Each time it was a lie, each time the only reward for our hard work was ecological devastation. These bloated profiteers abandoned our communities the second there was no more money to be made, leaving us to live with polluted waterways, deforestation, black lung, and crushing poverty.
Genesis 1:28 says that we are to be good stewards “over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” The Hebrew word “radah” which we translate as “steward” literally means having the responsibility of ruling, managing, and having wise oversight over the natural world. It means we are to act as God Himself would when we cultivate His creation. This command is not one of exploitation, but of responsible care for the Earth and its inhabitants. I cannot help but worry that our pursuit of the new technology of AI will lead us away from this sacred responsibility. I am not saying new technology is evil. I think it can be a great blessing in our lives and God has promised us great blessings. But we must not forget that we belong first to our Creator and have been entrusted with safeguarding His Creation.
In a few short years, after all of these AI data centers are built, will we say it was worth the destruction of our natural landscape to further enrich the already unfathomably wealthy like Jeff Bezos? These data centers will steal hundreds of thousands of gallons from our water table. Will our local farmers say this was an “economic windfall” when their land cannot support the crops we need to survive?
Funny how these politicians wanna try to sell us lines about “good jobs.” They must think that we were born yesterday. Make no mistake, AI does not create jobs. It is LABOR-REPLACING technology. For every person who sits in an AI data center babysitting machines, thousands, even millions, of jobs are destroyed. AI is being trained to take jobs from artists, writers, customer service, accountants, administrative assistants, cashiers, paralegals, and reporters. There is not a single sector of labor that won’t be affected. A McKinsey report projects that by 2030, 30% of current U.S. jobs could be automated, with 60% significantly altered by AI tools. That’s 50 million jobs that the ruling class projects they will be able to wipe out in the next four years.
Will we still be saying that we are “winning the AI war” when more and more healthcare decisions are made by AI? I personally don’t want to see a future where algorithms decide to deny healthcare… but that is already happening. Six states are going to start using AI to reject Medicare claims. In January this new program will begin rolling out in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington. The big tech companies who run it will be paid kickbacks for each rejected claim that their AI justifies. A 2023 Lancet study estimates 25% of medical administrative tasks could vanish by 2035. Diagnostic AI and robotic surgery are also advancing in an effort by corporate greed to remove even doctors from our healthcare. At the personal care home my kiddo worked at, they have started integrating AI to watch the residents while they sleep. This is happening right in our backyards, not some far off place.
In 1967 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” With the rise of the labor-replacing technology like AI, his call to action is more urgent than ever before. We must acknowledge the personhood of each human being. This thought process of treating people as things, comes from a false scarcity mindset. That scarcity mindset has got to go! We live in overwhelming abundance. We are on the cusp of an incredible technological revolution that is going to make it so we don’t have to toil endless hours of every day just to survive. That should be a cause for celebration, not worry and certainly not the false shame of “not working hard enough.” We don’t have a resource problem, we have an ownership and distribution problem. There are no “deserving” or “undeserving” poor people. We are all deserving of food, of housing, of healthcare, of all of our human rights, just by the virtue of being an alive person. In Matthew 25:40, Jesus called us to care for the “least of these”. If we are truly a Christian nation, we will heed His command and care for other poor people as though each and every one were Jesus Himself.