by michaelt | 2025-08-26 21:34:19+00:00
As you might imagine, a two-hour-long podcast in a series named "Tech Won't Save Us" has time to explore many avenues of criticism.

Obviously, to summarise I have to remove the supporting examples, and the dozens of different people being interviewed. To be clear, the journalists aren't personally making all the criticisms, just interviewing other people, so if some of the following seems to contradict itself, that's why.

A fair chunk of the podcast involves explaining the context to a broad audience. You know, explaining what a data centre is, outlining the cloud market and its major players, etc.

The criticisms outlined in the podcast include:

* Data centres produce very few jobs for the communities they're located in.

* They are often built in struggling communities where 'enterprise zones' offer big tax breaks, hoping to attract employers.

* They consume quite a lot of power - not as much as, say, an aluminium smelter, but perhaps as much as 150,000 homes. Few cities have that much spare grid capacity, and some have warned about risks of rolling blackouts.

* 20 percent of Ireland's electricity is used for data centres (they're something of europe's data centre capital due to their attractive tax rates)

* Energy demand at data centres leads to greater emissions at power plants. Even if the data centre contracts to only buy renewable power, that might displace less-eco-friendly buyers of renewables onto non-renewable power sources. And a lot of things like 'carbon credits' are based on rather creative accounting.

* One high-profile data centre (in The Dalles, Oregon) is in a town suffering a drought, and consumes quite a lot of water, considering it's a drought area. Grass on the local golf course is completely dead.

* Land and tax breaks are often acquired through secretive shell companies that insist on secrecy agreements with desperate local governments; in one case the government didn't even know they were dealing with Google. This secrecy extends to agreements about things like water usage.

* As you can imagine, a local community suffering a drought sees the local data centre's water consumption being kept secret by elected officials, they assume the worst.

* Some data centre builders, like Elon Musk, have a history of making legally non-binding promises, then not bothering to keep them. And of running large gas generators without permits.

* The kind of distressed post-industrial communities that welcome data centres often have high levels of pollution and cancer, making those unpermitted generators particularly bad.

* Many of the hyperscalers are also big AI boosters, so it's not like the datacentre operators can disclaim responsibility for the power needs of AI.

* Many people have criticisms of AI, beyond energy consumption. Such as huge centralised LLMs transferring more control to huge tech firms; getting things wrong; AI friends being an alienating concept; having heavy-handed censorship; widespread use of bots on platforms like twitter and reddit; risks of job losses; being trained on pirated ebooks without authors' permission; being a really shitty therapist; producing mediocre art; producing porn depicting real people without their consent; producing creepy underage porn.

* Or AI might be a bubble that's about to burst, which would also be bad but for other reasons.

* Tech business leaders like Sam Altman are on record saying some pretty wacky things about AI power consumption, like that the high power demands of AI will force us to invent fusion power. A load of them also have weird, messianic ideas about "the singularity", or think we're all in a simulation already, or think living in a Matrix-style simulated 'metaverse' sounds like a great thing.

* Many of the highest-profile tech folks - the billionaires - have very right-wing politics. Such as opposing all regulation as a matter of principle, except on the occasions when it works for their benefit. Some people think expecting these folks to regulate themselves isn't the best idea.

Overall this is all stuff that followers of tech industry news will probably have heard before; the podcast just adds context, draws it together, and finds sources in the form of interviewees.