Lights! Camera! Action! Roll the Data Centre Sell Job!

Premier Danielle Smith, I just watched your latest video pitching the transformation of Alberta into an industrial AI powerhouse. I have some notes.

Just saying, your performance is truly hyperscale. But it’s as genuine as AI slop and as deceptive as a chatbot. And given the desperate tone of your nine-minute sales pitch, it’s pretty obvious you’re stuck with a thorny political problem that is squarely of your own making.

No slick video can now make up for past rushed legislation, lack of public review and unbridled boosterism on this issue, which, by the way, largely affects your base: rural Albertans. The reviews are in on your embrace of Meta’s $13-billion facility, along with your government’s “concierge service” for some 39 different data projects needing some 20,000 megawatts of electricity — twice the provincial demand. People are pissed.

Rural Albertans, like working people everywhere, are asking why their communities should become sacrifice zones for multinational corporations hell-bent on constructing ugly windowless boxes to house computing power that will toss many out of work while sucking up capital, fossil fuel and water.

Your video begins by trying to explain exactly why the Alberta government wants all these giant AI data centres. You say they will add value to the province’s natural gas supplies. Gas makes electricity, the electricity makes computing power, and the computing power turns into “intelligence,” you beam with the enthusiasm of a grade school keener. Not only that, but machine intelligence will provide “the answers, the predictions and the tools the whole world is lining up to buy.”

First, there’s a great debate about the risky economics of AI and whether these centres will ever make a decent return on their investment.

Second, there’s an even deeper debate about language models and whether they are at all “intelligent” versus just regurgitating and guessing based on whatever data they’ve been fed. According to Gary Marcus and many other cognitive scientists, AI chatbots are merely great mimics, clowns, sycophants, parrots and chaos makers. Not only that, they can hallucinate, lie, cheat, blackmail and go rogue.

Heck, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently boasted that we are “close to a world where a descendant of ChatGPT can watch you screen, record every meeting and call, and have perfect context of your whole life.” Which is why Marcus refers to AI as it is now constituted as “1984 in a box.”

You say a lot of things in your video but none convincingly convey why you want Alberta to lead the country in bringing about such risky and potentially catastrophic developments.

Back to your offered reason that AI centres add value to natural gas by using it to enable massive computing stations — all owned and operated by foreign companies. Let’s be clear: no value is being added. You are only accelerating the rate at which a finite resource is being burned to create clouds of pollution so increased demand can drive up the price of natural gas and put more moolah in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. That’s your game.

You move on to rhetorically asking if other jurisdictions got burned by data centres.