Tech Bros want all the electricity and money

 

Of course data centers take a lot of electricity. I saw an Amazon center someplace and it was huge, like big mall size. All the searches you do, all the shopping you do, all the email spam you get, your google maps directions, that all goes through a data center. So ok, we need those.

But on top of these data centers, we have spam, bots, viruses, scams, etc. going on too, with their own systems, and in fact it was just announced that there are more bots than humans on the internet now. That uses up a lot of electricity and bandwidth.

Then along comes krypto currency. Bitcoin, for example, is created by a huge amount of computation. So if you want to make money here, you need a lot of computers chugging away doing essentially useless calculating until you wind up with a new Bitcoin yourself. The Tech Bros built a way for themselves to make money by sucking up electricity into their computers. There are huge warehouses of Bitcoin mining all around the world.

Then along comes AI. While data centers do things like searching for the price of some socks you want to buy, finding some sites that cover a query you may have, or calculating a potential trip’s mileage; AI, or Artificial Intelligence, goes beyond just doing searches or calculations. It tries to tell you a definitive answer rather than how to find resources. It tries to be jack-of-all-trades with superior knowledge to humans, or at least it comes up with answers faster than a human could. It wants to be your doctor, your accountant, your architect, your artist, or anything else you need. It wants to replace human thought with digital thought. Not help. Replace.

Remember too, that AI requires training, which in itself takes a lot of electricity and computing power.

“By 2028, the researchers estimate, the power going to AI-specific purposes will rise to between 165 and 326 terawatt-hours per year. That’s more than all electricity currently used by US data centers for all purposes; it’s enough to power 22% of US households each year.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

And AI is just getting started! The goal is to replace human thinking and doing with AI thinking and doing. Right now people are mostly just fiddling with it to see what it can do. Imagine the needs from AI to do most of what people do. No pizza and energy drinks powering AI. Warehouses, electricity, water, and computer chips instead.

Is all this just inevitable and we just have to give in to what the Tech Bros are pushing on us? I don’t think so. This is not just a case of buggy whip makers whining about cars taking away their jobs. This is more about oligarchs finding a way to grab every last ounce of value from society for themselves, no matter the cost to the environment and society. It’s not a battle we can ignore.