Is AI becoming self aware? This question haunts the US amid the push for more data centers

**Christy Strawser** (0:01)
Welcome to On Deadline, your radio news from Audacy newsrooms across the country. I'm Christy Strawser, Audacy's managing editor of news. The AI boom is driving an unprecedented expansion of data centers, rooms of computers sucking up as much electricity as a city. Who pays for it? Where do they go?
It's a bold new frontier, and here with the latest is KCBS in the Bay Area.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Andrew Chen, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago.
A layman's term definition. What is a data center and why are they so important to the growth of AI?

**Andrew Chen** (0:38)
Data centers are basically buildings to hold computers. Think of it like a home for computers. It turns out the way that AI works is it works by doing a large amount of mathematical computation that is used to both train these chatbots and as well as to answer these questions and provide AI services. So you need a lot of computers to do that and they consume a lot of power, so we have really, really large data centers. The growth has been remarkable.
We're seeing literally tens of gigawatts of data center capacity being added over the next few years. They're the single largest growing source of power consumption in the United States and they've been projected to reach about 12% of total electricity consumption in the US by 2028 and I expect will go much higher than that in following years. You hear people talking about there was a new data center built in Texas that was already 1.2 gigawatts that are online, growing to 5, famous project called Stargate. There's another project planned in Ohio, which is a 10 gigawatt complex.
For comparison, a typical home might be 5 or 10 kilowatts. It's almost hundreds of thousands to millions of homes for those data centers.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:46)
Wow. It is like a small town. Now, the anti-AI crowd has environmental concerns. Data centers can cover a footprint of what? Like a football stadium or larger, right?

**Andrew Chen** (1:57)
Oh, definitely. Many of the sites are expanding to hundreds of acres. So the buildings, you might think of a basic data center building block as being the size of a Walmart building. You know, a big box store, except it's full of computers. And then they put a whole bunch of these next to each other.
And then they typically don't have parking lots because not that many people go to visit them. Right.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:16)
So are these big data centers taking away jobs or are they creating them? Somebody's got to build them and design them and so forth.

**Andrew Chen** (2:23)
It's probably very important from a community point of view. Where are the jobs that are being created being created? If you have a data center in Chicago or a data center in Virginia, if it doesn't create those jobs locally, the community is bearing the cost of that in some sense without directly getting the benefit. And I think that's one of the challenges, right? So the people in the community are reacting to the fact that, man, maybe somewhere good jobs are being created, but we're not seeing them here. Right.

**Jason DeRusha** (2:48)
Right.

**Christy Strawser** (2:49)
So now you know the toll that creating AI can take on communities. But are we misinterpreting what artificial intelligence should do for us?
Here's Jason DeRusha on WCCO in Minneapolis.

**Jason DeRusha** (3:01)
A lot of people that are freaked out about it. And understandably so, right? It's an emerging technology that can do incredible thing. When you don't understand a technology that can do incredible things, that automatically creates fear, right? We just, we fear what we don't know, what we don't understand. A lot of what people are upset about focuses on the data centers, right? The environmental impact of the data center. And I'm not saying that's the wrong thing. It's just not the main thing I think we should be concerned with. I think we're sort of missing something here. I think, again, the environmental concerns about water and about power and who's paying for what and how much is being taken away from other resources, those are all valid concerns. But of greater concern to me is the human element in all of this. AI is going to force us and is forcing us to confront what does it mean to actually be human. When you have these machines that can do so many different things that humans have done for a very long time, in a way that seems autonomous, in a way that seems like the machines are thinking for themselves, how do we distinguish after a point what does it mean to be human versus what does it mean to be an artificial intelligence? That may seem to be a silly question on the surface, but I think if you really dig into it, it's an important question that we need to be asking ourselves. To a degree, AI is a tool, right? It's a computer program written by human beings and designed in some special way to operate semi-autonomously, to operate where it can eventually fix itself, so to speak. But it's still at its core a tool created by human beings. And tools aren't necessarily inherently evil or inherently good. Like any tool, anything that's revolutionized society, as I hold up my cell phone as an example, it can be used for good things and it can be used for very much not good things. The difference is I have control over my phone, right? I can turn it off.