By Townhall Chicago News Staff
Communities across the country have voted down proposed data center projects in recent weeks, part of a wave of local opposition to the facilities that power artificial intelligence systems. Donald Kendall, director of the Heartland Institute’s Glenn C. Haskins Emerging Issues Center, says that opposition could reverse once AI companies deliver results that match their promises.
Kendall’s center studies emerging technology and energy policy, work that put him in a position to discuss both the public reaction to data centers and the infrastructure behind them. He says the current skepticism toward artificial intelligence stems partly from how the technology has been introduced to the public so far.
“When artificial intelligence really broke into the mainstream, it came along with a lot of baggage,” Kendall says. “The use cases of this artificial intelligence are things that are a little bit below what the rosy things that these companies have promised have the potential for. You’ve got these silly memes being generated online, these fake videos, fake news text being generated by all of these things.”
According to Kendall, the technology’s bigger promises, such as curing diseases, have not yet materialized, but he expects that to change.
“What we haven’t seen yet is the actual outcome of these promises that these AI companies say are inevitable, like curing all diseases and bringing upon great economic prosperity,” he says. “I think those things are coming. If it occurs that there’s some big breakthrough with some new cure for Alzheimer’s or cancer, I think you’ll see a massive popularity swing with artificial intelligence.”
Kendall describes the data center construction underway now as one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in history, with costs reaching into the trillions of dollars. He says the facilities represent the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing and e-commerce systems that are often discussed only in abstract terms.
“All the data centers, all of the server farms and all of this stuff is really the hard infrastructure of all of these systems that we hear about that are kind of in the cloud,” he says.
According to Kendall, power supply is a major constraint on the buildout, one he attributes to years of energy policy aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
“We have been pursuing this kind of net-zero, carbon-neutral agenda for decades, and all that has done is stunted our ability to produce the energy that’s needed to power these things,” Kendall says. He says the companies building data centers are responding by building new natural gas power plants and upgrading grid infrastructure. “What we’re actually seeing is a strengthening of our energy systems,” he says. “It’s actually going to be, in the long term, a very big boon for the American economy.”
Kendall also addressed how artificial intelligence could change education and career paths. He agreed with comments attributed to Elon Musk that students should pursue a broad education rather than narrow technical training, since fields like programming could be automated. Kendall says skilled trades are likely to remain in demand.
“I’ll throw in some of these other jobs that probably won’t be automated away anytime soon, like engineering, plumbing or electric work,” Kendall says. “I’ve got a couple of young kids, and I think that’s probably a little bit safer of a future in terms of vocation than some of these other things.”
Kendall says he expects the economy to shift toward workers managing teams of AI agents rather than performing tasks directly themselves, describing a research effort in which he said an AI system used thousands of agents working in parallel to solve a long-unsolved math problem. He did not cite a source for that claim, and it has not been independently verified.
“I think the implications of that, probably, we can’t even fathom,” Kendall says.
