The Insiders Report: 02 Part 2

AI: What Does it Mean for Society?

[Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay]

After publishing The Insiders Report 02, we received a follow-up question from a reader. One requesting the Insiders to expand on the answer they last provided.

Here is the reader’s question and the response from The Insiders…

READER’S QUESTION: I have an additional question or something that The Insiders could perhaps expand on from their last communication. One area of interest is the incredible build-up of data centres that is going on at the moment and it seems to be almost exponential. Is there anything that they can expand on about this with regard to why the massive build-out is happening at the moment?

THE INSIDERS: There are in effect two different types of centres being built. One being for storage; what is commonly referred to as ‘The Cloud’, and it is indeed so, that there are vast resources being channelled into this type of centre. Now on the face of it they are used to store data, both as a backup to the data that individuals and organisations store on hard-drives, but there has been a fundamental change that has occurred, and data is more often not stored locally, but is stored in one of these data centres and is retrieved and altered as it is required. And there are reasons for this change coming about that we will go into momentarily.

The second type of data centre as you term it, that is undergoing rapid infrastructure build-out is the training and processing capacity for AI. Now the two are for different purposes but are in fact linked. The neural nets that are required to create these artificial intelligence tools are essentially many thousands of processors, such as you might see in an advanced computer, linked together to process vast quantities of information and to do so very rapidly.

These centres require, as do the cloud storage ones we referred to a moment ago, very significant amounts of energy to operate the system itself. However, as a result of the processing that is done, which in physics terms is basically work, that is, information is being changed you might say, and because energy is neither created nor destroyed in the Standard Model, this work results in the release of energy as heat, and so further energy is required to cool this equipment. And this is why you are seeing the large tech companies locating their centres adjacent to existing nuclear power sources, but also making significant investments in the development of new nuclear technologies, to supply the required quantity of electricity, consistently and without interruption.

Now we alluded a moment ago to a connection between these two. The tech companies that operate vast cloud storage facilities have at their disposal enormous quantities of information that their AI models can train on. Whether customers would view this particularly favourably, if they knew this was occurring, is questionable. But it provides a very valuable resource for training these AI models that, rather than come at any cost to the tech companies, in fact create a source of vast revenue for them.

Another point that relates to the very significant investment in infrastructure for these AI systems, should give the reader some pause to consider just how extensive those behind the development of AI intend its role to be. If AI were merely intended to be a means of providing chat-bots and more advanced internet banking services for example, investments in nuclear power to run these systems would not be necessary. But such things as this tip towards how vast and consuming the use of AI is intended to be.

It is safe to say that the general public are really very much in the dark about this, this has not been a point of public discussion. The public do not have ready access to reliable information, and most media organisations do not cast a critical eye towards this developing technology.
One can understand that critiquing the business plans and indeed the morality of the world’s tech elite, the world’s giant tech companies and those behind them, may not be a great career move for the average journalist. But really, what is required is for the brave journalists to come forward and to ask such questions about what is intended for the future with these technologies and the huge investments and technological changes that come with them.

There is more to this than there would seem, and certainly more than the average person, so to speak, would care to contemplate. The potential changes to societies around the world are practically beyond imagination. And the intended changes are indeed beyond what the average citizen would wish to imagine.

And so, it behoves the citizens of these societies to demand more of journalism. To demand more of media organisations. To demand more of governments and their oversight on behalf of society of these technological developments, because they threaten to change the balance of power within society. Changed from one where these societies are composed of and for the members, the citizenry of those societies, and where there are systems in place in terms of representation and government to guide and supervise this in accordance with the wishes of the members of each society. But if the balance of power tips towards these artificial systems, and the organisations that develop them, then that is not in line with how most members of these societies would wish their societies to be structured.

And unless these discussions are held before such a change in the balance were to occur, unless some guidance is applied before such time, then the odds of it occurring and being an effective counter after such a change in the balance of power has occurred, are remote indeed.

This should give all citizens a moment at least of concern and reflection on what they individually and as a group value and wish to see as the structures and hallmarks of the societies of which they are a part.