Opinion: Who’s in Charge? Humans or Machines and Corporations?

This opinion piece was originally printed in the Hartford Courant

By Dr. Kimberly Stoner, CT NOFA Director of Policy and Advocacy

In “Artificial Intelligence means farewell to ‘Net-Zero’ fantasy,” Peter Murphy celebrates a prediction by the RAND Corporation that by 2030 AI will need more than 300 gigawatts of power, over 3 times the power used by the state of California. He asserts that renewable energy sources are incapable of providing this amount of power, and so we should abandon renewable energy mandates and net-zero goals. He doesn’t bother to give any reasons why we would want to foster AI’s continued expansion.

We’ve seen this movie before. Murphy’s portrayal of AI is reminiscent of the plant ‘Audrey’ in the musical, “The Little Shop of Horrors.” Audrey is a plant that feeds on human blood to survive and keeps begging “Feed Me!” As Audrey gets larger, she consumes more and more blood, and then entire human beings. Her caretakers realize the danger and try to kill her but end up being killed and consumed themselves. Her popularity is so great that at the end of the musical, her cuttings are being sent around the world, and Audrey is on her way to world domination.

AI has already consumed every human creation available online — all our words, music, science, and art. Its corporate owners want us to serve it by giving it more. It is hungry for our energy, begging us to mine more coal and gas to burn and uranium for nuclear power to feed its maw. Murphy doesn’t mention this, but it is thirsty for our water, too, to cool all those machines.

Who is in charge here? The human beings or the machines and the corporations that profit from them? Are we going to dig up every crumb of coal and uranium to feed the AI beast? Are we going to pollute the air we breathe? Destroy the climate that allows us and all of nature to thrive? Give away all our water? And then what?

Fellow human beings, we must take charge! We must make AI serve human needs rather than sacrificing humanity to feed the AI beast. We the people need to stand up for our fundamental human rights to clean and healthy air and water and a safe climate. We cannot allow the government to sacrifice the Earth for AI.

One way to defend our rights is to put them into law at the highest possible level. CT NOFA has been fighting to put the CT Environmental Rights Amendment into the Connecticut constitution.

Putting into law our basic human rights to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and to live in a climate that isn’t killing us is only the start. We need a government that serves the people, actual human beings, not corporations or their AI beast. Once we establish those rights, we will still have to defend them, but fighting for our environmental rights is a core part of asserting that we the people are in charge, not corporations, and not the AI beast they have created.