The war over artificial intelligence is playing out largely at local zoning board meetings. More than a dozen A.I. data center projects have been blocked or delayed because of local opposition, often motivated by environmental concerns. Last week Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York signed an executive order halting construction of the state’s largest data centers for one year — the nation’s first such moratorium. According to a March Gallup poll, 71 percent of American adults said they opposed the construction of A.I. data centers in their areas, and worries about the environment were the most common reason.
I empathize with the environmental opposition to data center construction, but the arguments are shakier than they seem. The battle over where A.I. data centers are being built is really a battle over what role A.I. should play in our lives. And that’s a battle that critics can win.
Many people feel that A.I. is being foisted on them by a handful of tech billionaires, in ways that are incorporeal and difficult to resist. Data centers, on the other hand, are physical structures that are subject to zoning regulations. So it makes sense that anger toward and anxiety about A.I. are manifesting as opposition to the buildings that house it. Regular people can’t tell Sam Altman what to do, but they can kick him out of their towns.
Data centers should be held to the same environmental standards as any other project. However, according to the researcher Andy Masley, giving up a lifetime of interacting with large language models would make a negligible difference in emissions compared with avoiding one trans-Atlantic flight or switching to a hybrid car. By his estimates, sending a prompt to ChatGPT is about as carbon-intensive as running a clothes dryer for a single second.
Communities have long tolerated wasteful projects that take up tons of space, consume lots of natural resources and serve the whims of wealthier people. They’re called golf courses and backyards. The 14,000 golf courses across the United States used nearly 550 billion gallons of water in 2020, and the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans use over three trillion gallons of water on “landscape irrigation” each year. No one knows for sure how much water data centers use in total. One reasonable estimate from Brian Potter at the Institute for Progress put it at about 100 billion gallons in 2023. Even if the number of data centers increases tenfold, we may still end up using less water on artificial intelligence than we use to keep our grass springy.
Everybody deserves a say in the future of A.I. We don’t have to resort to NIMBYism and questionable environmental arguments to get it. Even if one community succeeds in keeping the data centers out, another community — probably a poorer and more desperate one — will let them in.
Whether we realize it or not, we are all, right now, writing the rulebook for what A.I. should be allowed to do and how humans should interact with it, through the choices we make for ourselves and the choices we praise or criticize other people for making. Every time you tell your troubles to Gemini or use Claude to write a birthday card, you’re tacitly endorsing A.I. for these practices. But every time you close the chat window and think for yourself instead and every time you razz a friend for relying on ChatGPT summaries, you tighten our social norms around the use of A.I.
I am a scientist and a writer, and I’m happy to use A.I. to do my job better: I’ll let it write code, fetch articles for me to read or flag errors in statistical analyses for me to investigate further. A.I. is a tool. Its purpose is to serve our purposes. If it does that well, it might be worth the water and electricity it consumes.
I refuse to let A.I. evolve from a tool into a partner. I won’t let it write my sentences. I don’t share with it my fears, hopes or dreams the way I would with a friend or lover. I don’t trust its factual claims unless I can check the sources myself. I ignore it when it praises my ideas, since it can’t tell the difference between insight and nonsense.
It should be humiliating to choose A.I. friendships over human ones. It should be cringe to willingly consume computer-generated slop. Trying to pass off a large language model’s words as your own should be seen not just as cheating but also as loser behavior.
It might sound idealistic to suggest that every person has some influence over the future of technology. Yet this has proved true over and over again, even in the recent past. Plenty of expensive tech ventures have failed. They weren’t banned, voted out or blocked by zoning laws. They failed because people refused to reward them with time and attention: The Metaverse. Quibi. Nonfungible tokens. A.I. is unlikely to disappear, but the form it takes is up to us.
Tech companies may have deep pockets, and they may be able to overcome the environmental objections to data centers. They can’t dictate how we use the tools they provide. Ultimately, the role that A.I. plays in our world will be determined not so much by what is legally allowed but by what is socially acceptable.
Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and the author of the science blog Experimental History.
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