Federal officials say fast development of data centers is vital to the economy and national security, including to keep pace with China in the artificial intelligence race.
Exactly how are data centers "vital to the economy"? If they were, wouldn't the economy be in some kind of serious predicament now? Maybe it is but how is the absence of data centers responsible, since there haven't been any in the past or present? Keeping pace with China? Why?
The data center problem is mostly about doubling the production of electricity in the country so that existing demand can be satisfied while stoking generation of power for artificial intelligence. The phony computer filing systems are an even bigger bonanza for the Whigs than the anti-CO2 renewable energy fiasco that's getting smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror. The design, financing and construction of the monstrous semi-conductor warehouses means huge dollars for those involved. The financing is the most interesting part in that the guys with the money aren't physicists and need to believe the spiels they're told about the potential profits of pixel storage, retrieval and reassembly. Nobody seems to have come up with an estimate of how many data centers will be needed to keep the economy chugging along while relegating China to an inferior position in the world hierarchy.
How many data centers will be needed to accomplish the goals? Since they will all be finding and storing the pixels off the internet, isn't it likely that there will be considerable redundancy in their inventories? Isn't it almost a sure thing that every data center will have a digital copy of Thomas Frank's "What's The Matter With Kansas?", Barak Obama's "The Audacity of Hope", and Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" among all the other screeds in the history of publishing? If they are providing answers to questions, how are they different from a number of supermarkets in a neighborhood that sell the same brands of breakfast cereal and other products with different names but identical qualities? Sure, one data center could provide more accurate and valuable information than another but how would the buyer know this?
The construction of the data centers, their consumption of immense amounts of energy, the costs of the jobs promised, etc. mean that if the data centers are going to be businesses, some one will need to pay for the product they produce. Who will that be?
Imagine that an automobile manufacturer pays the operators of a data center for information on the prospects of a kind of drive train. That's the sort of thing that will be sold, information on the possibilities of the future. Relevant knowledge of the past in such a situation is easy to come by, predicting the future has never been guaranteed. If a business buys a scenario of the future from a data center operator, how does it know that this info is exclusive or even correct? Won't the cost of that knowledge need to be added into the price of the car? In a capitalist system technological advances are meant to make products cheaper.
A different aspect of the AI program could be the total digital operation of a business, let's say an outboard motor manufacturer. A data center would have a digital interface with every moving part in that plant, no humans would be needed. Trucks would arrive at the loading dock with all the necessary raw materials and robots would unload them and direct them to the correct entry points in the continuous assembly process. Once completed the engines would be tested and then shipped maybe to dealers or directly to consumers. The role of contractors who supply various components may change or expand.
The market for information that will subdue the advance of China is basically limited to the US government. That's an important point for the Whigs since at least at this time the government has an unlimited amount of money to advance Whig operations. The validity of information needed to counter the godless commies, based on digital sources, isn't something that the US should base its foreign policy upon.
No comments:
Post a Comment