Americans voted against AI. More precisely, against what you have to pay for it.
In the US midterm elections, voters supported restrictions on the construction of data centers: in Ohio, 15 municipalities introduced bans or other restrictions. The issue of artificial intelligence infrastructure has also become a political factor in several countries.
The reason is clear: data centers consume huge amounts of electricity, occupy large areas, are noisy and raise concerns about rising service costs. Silicon Valley promises a future, but residents want to know who will pay for its present.
And there is an interesting paradox here. People willingly use AI - they ask advice from chatbots, create texts and images. But when the technological revolution comes to them in the form of a huge complex outside the window and the rising electricity bills, the enthusiasm drops sharply.
It seems that the problem is not so much with artificial intelligence itself, but with the distribution of its benefits and costs.
The tech giants reap the profits, while the environmental and infrastructure impacts reach local communities.
Of course, this does not mean that the Americans have stopped the development of artificial intelligence. But they reminded the industry of an important thing: technological progress does not exist in a vacuum. It needs land, energy, water and social harmony.
It is this invisible physical side of artificial intelligence that we talked about in our series "The cloud stands on the earth": why behind every request for a neural network there are servers, power plants, grids, water and vast areas, and whether the continued development of AI can eventually encounter physical limitations.