If you want to, yeah, just go ahead
and say your name and then your
position or title here at the
university.
My name is Annette Zimmerman.
I'm an assistant professor of
philosophy and an affiliate
professor of statistics.
Actually, sorry, could you move a
little bit closer to the camera just
for the eyesight, Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I was just thinking,
reflexively I looked at that, but I
know I have to look at it the whole
time.
And then you can repeat whenever you
want.
Totally, yeah it's not like one
straight.
Yeah.
So I guess my first kind of question
is, yeah, the use of it and
excitement around AI just seems to
be constantly accelerating,
thinking about AI being incorporated
more into schools or different
sectors.
So as this is happening, what
environmental impacts are you
thinking that AI could
bring with it?
AI requires the use
of massive, finite natural
resources.
Think just of data centers.
In order to run a data center,
turns out we need resources to
cool it.
And so that requires massive amounts
of water.
Water is one of our most valuable
resources on this planet.
And unfortunately, it turns out that
in many cases, companies prioritize
their needs over the
collective needs to have
access to these resources in an
equitable way.
So we see that more and more.
There were recent cases
of American companies buying
land in
various places in the global South,
which is obviously cheaper than
doing that over here in the US,
and just using local
resources there to power
AI innovation that benefits
American companies first.
Before those ostensible
benefits reach everyone else
in society.
So thinking about that, more data
centers are popping up a lot in
Wisconsin and Midwest.
We have Microsoft in Mount Pleasant,
also making plans for Kenosha.
I read also this week that Metta is
thinking about investing nearly a
billion in data centers in central
Wisconsin.
So my first question is,
why are those companies making
a shift from outsourcing and
other countries to the United
States.
Yeah, in a way, it's a positive
development to
move these data centers
to places in the world
that are just naturally colder
because then, of course,
fewer resources are required to
keep them cold.
On the other hand, we
shouldn't be entirely naive
about these developments.
Obviously, the environmental concern
still remains.
If AI innovation requires
massive amounts of resources,
whether we take those resources
here in Wisconsin or in other places
of the world,
that's still a moral and political
problem.
So it's not plausible
to think, in my view, that merely
moving data centers to a different
location gets rid of
all of the ethical and political
problems.
However, I think one important
justice-related constrain.
Gets addressed when
we try to internalize
the environmental costs of
AI innovation in this way,
rather than expecting countries
in the global south to simply
bear the burdens of American
companies innovating in the space
without actually getting those
benefits in return.
Very often, people who work
in data centers outside of
the U.S.
Operate under very exploitative
labor conditions.
They're underpaid for the kind
of work they do and of course the
local population at large also
doesn't benefit in a proportionate
way from the fact that these
companies are going down there.
So in a way it
seems more intuitively fair
to move these operations to
colder locations including in the
US.
But again we shouldn't be too
optimistic about that being
necessarily an ethically
unobjectionable solution.
And what makes Wisconsin,
or specifically the Great Lakes
region, such a prime target and so
attractive for these companies?
Well, I think there are multiple
reasons.
I think one reason is just the
climate-related reason of
fewer resources are required to
operate here in comparison to
operating, say, in Texas.
But there are other reasons, too,
and these are more political
reasons.
AI innovation has been
accompanied with a lot of anxiety
about people losing
a lot of jobs to automation.
And this has triggered a lot of
political conflict as
well.
My guess is that American companies
hope to get a lot people on
their side politically by showing
that them innovating
doesn't necessarily mean that
large swaths of the population
will necessarily lose their jobs,
but that instead, those populations
can keep being employed
in jobs
that don't require, say, a PhD.
But that still, you know,
are well-paid positions that are
relatively secure, such
as people who would work in a data
center or in other parts
of the AI innovation pipeline.
And so that's not an apolitical
move. That is a move that calculates
that the local population in the US
is very concerned about job
losses coinciding with AI
and especially the loss of jobs
that are not...
Extremely highly technical
or extremely highly skilled
jobs, but that are nonetheless
important.
So those two reasons, I think, are
the main drivers of this move
to locate
data centers here.
Do you think the jobs that these
data centers could provide would
outweigh the jobs that AI automation
would take away?
Sorry.
Distracted.
I just remembered something.
Yeah go for it.
No okay yeah let's keep it under
wraps right now.
I always have to like double check
that I'm not saying something that
is like under a friendly, eh?
Sure, sure.
Yeah, okay, tell me again.
Sorry, would it
be possible that the jobs that these
data centers could be providing
would outweigh the jobs that
it's taking away?
Is that something that could benefit
these customers?
That is hard to predict.
Sorry, can we restart
that now? Oh, sure.
It's very hard to project whether
the benefits of
moving operations here to the
Great Lakes region will necessarily
outweigh this risk of
AI-related job loss.
AI has shown that very
few things are predictable.
This is a highly heterogeneous,
rapidly evolving field.
Where things can change in
a matter of days, not months.
And so it seems
very difficult to
guarantee that X number
of jobs will be secure just
because some American companies
are moving operations here.
That being said, currently
with the information we have,
it looks like there's
a great promise in this idea
of having.
More local operations here
in the region, because this is
a region in which people worry
especially about automation-related
job loss, much more so
than in many other parts of the
country.
So right now, things
might be more promising on that
front. Certainly, it's better for
the local population
than a model of outsourcing
all operations elsewhere outside
of the county, outside of United
States.
And it might be better for everyone
globally as well, given that
whenever American companies go
outside of the US,
they are not under very stringent
requirements to avoid exploitative
labor practices.
So in a way, this could be a
win-win, but given
that the power of these corporate
actors remains largely
unchecked, it's impossible
to predict whether they will
be acting ethically as
they embark on this move.
Jumping back to what you were saying
earlier, why do you think automation
issues are more prevalent here
or for Wisconsinites than, say,
other parts of the country?
Oh, right.
Well, because here in
the region, previously,
a lot of jobs had to deal with
manual labor and
manufacturing.
And so these are
jobs that are crucial for
the American economy, but
that are particularly vulnerable
to ongoing waves
of technological innovation.
And so the question that a lot
people locally, I think,
were asking themselves was Well, do
I now need to train in
some completely different profession
in order to have a secure source of
income?
So that's a very real concern.
I think it would be unreasonable to
expect large parts of the
population to suddenly become
coders, software developers,
and other jobs like that.
Not everyone needs to have computer
science or data science PhD
in order have
a stable income.
And so...
Moving data centers here to
the region could be a good way of
giving opportunities to people who
maybe don't want to do a PhD,
but who do have something to
contribute to this
process of innovating in the AI
space in other ways.
That's something to think about,
too, that a lot of these data
centers are popping up faster
than a lot people can keep track
of that someone I talked to at Clean
Wisconsin said.
So, what are the implications of
so many data centers popping up from
Mount Pleasant to Kenosha,
there was Foxconn in the past,
and using water resources in
kind of this time of uncharted
territory when there are very few
regulations about what they can do?
The question of regulation is
arguably more pressing now
in recent weeks and months,
given that it's currently
unclear if America will
in fact adopt comprehensive
AI sector regulation.
There's a lot of disagreement in
this policy space.
One core problem is that
the main actors in this
space are just a handful
of companies.
These companies are so powerful
that they have an
oligopoly.
So it's not a
type of market where there's
thousands of different actors
competing with each other.
It's just the top five, to
put it crudely.
And so when we have just
a handful of very powerful
companies, it's actually
extremely difficult to
legally regulate that market
effectively.
Unless our elected public
officials are willing
to put guardrails
on this oligopoly.
Whether our public officials will be
willing to do so, however, is
exactly the open question right
now.
A lot of this question depends on
different political ideologies.
And so it seems that right now,
big tech leaders have actually
swung significantly to
the right end of the political
spectrum.
That tends to be rather
hostile against too
much government regulation.
It would be foolish though, to just
view this as classic
libertarianism,
as we saw it even in
previous iterations of technological
innovation.
Silicon Valley has always been known
for being quite libertarian
ideologically.
What we're seeing now is actually
something much more pronounced
and much more politically active.
It's not just that big tech
CEOs are telling elected officials
hands off, please don't regulate
us.
Instead, it's
more like we want to
collaborate with public officials
to end up with exactly
the kind of minimal regulation that
we want. And this is why we see
so many powerful tech leaders
in active conversation
and in close collaboration with
people who currently hold public
office in this country.
So that's
a reason to remain skeptical that
very comprehensive AI
policy and governance
will be implemented rapidly
enough and strongly
enough across all of these
different domains, including in
domains that pertain to
environmental damages.
Do you think a lot of these
lawmakers have a responsibility
to hold firm and make sure that
these companies have regulations?
Well, I think all public officials
have that responsibility.
As a political philosopher,
a lot of people in my field
talk about how the
duties that one incurs when one
holds public office are
not just duties to fulfill the
promises that
your own platform,
your own electorate prefers.
It's actually a much more
comprehensive duty.
To protect and promote the interests
of all those who are governed
by you.
And so with that in mind, that
suggests that actually good AI
policy in governments can't
be partisan politics.
It has to be responsive even
to the interests of those who
disagree with particular other
policies or who disagree with
the political preferences of
big tech CEOs.
And so that's a duty that only our
elected officials can fulfill
because of course, corporate actors
are not incentivized to
bear civic interests in mind.
Thinking about how much power
these companies have,
Microsoft Water Consumption, they
said they have plans to be water
positive by 2030,
but in 2022, their global
usage was 1.7 billion
gallons, which was actually a 34%
jump from the prior year,
and also reading off of the World
Wildlife Federation, they say by
this year, 2025, nearly two-thirds
of the world could face water
shortages.
So, what are the ethics of...
These companies being able to choose
who gets access to water,
whether it's these data centers or
everyday people, you know, farmers,
everyday households.
What are the ethics of that?
One key problem in this area
is that the people who currently
have the power to decide how
finite resources are allocated
are actually just
these oligopolistic corporate
actors.
That's because nobody has
thought about intervening
from the side of government
to vaculate the space
ex ante.
So what happens is that
corporate actors Go ahead.
And decide to deploy
some new innovative tool and
to create the infrastructure that
is required for say
training of powerful new AI
model, including massive
data centers everywhere.
And of course other resources
get used for that too.
Think just of the kinds of
resources that we need to
create cables and chips.
All of these technologies
that we just imagine as
being in the cloud.
Are actually these embodied
things that require real kind
of tangible materials, right?
And so these decisions are
largely made by whoever
has the power to deploy some new
innovative tool.
So we're dealing with a kind of
very asymmetrical distribution
of power.
We're dealing with a small number of
people and companies who
are able to decide, oh, we're
now going to operate in this
environment and nobody really
can. Argue against us because
we have very limited competition and
almost no regulation.
There's a regulatory and
kind of competitive vacuum around
us.
And so that seems
very unjust.
From the perspective of political
and moral philosophy, the
first question that I think we
should ask is why
is that power distributed so
asymmetrically?
Normally, when we think about
making decisions as a collective in
a democracy.
We think that everyone whose
interests are affected by some
decision also have a say in that
decision.
Now, this whole dynamic that
we see in the AI space completely
turns that logic on its
head.
Now we have the few deciding
that they have some beneficial
idea that of course
might benefit everyone down
the line and thus promote their
interests somehow, but of
course it'll benefit them first.
It'll benefit that particular
company first.
And so that's a very unfair
distribution of benefits and burdens
that we normally don't accept
in the same way in other domains of
collective decision-making.
So applying these core
democratic values
would actually require
rethinking exactly that asymmetry.
So it would require putting
that initial decision- making power
back into the hands of our
elected officials and or
us just as citizens.
And being able to make an
initial judgment call about just
where exactly we want to innovate,
how exactly we wanna innovate,
what resources we're willing to
dedicate, and what risks we're
comfortable taking, rather
than just waiting and seeing
whatever company decides to
do whatever new
innovative jump next.
So it's very dangerous from
an ethics perspective to just wait
and see. It's much better
to decide early
and often as a
democratic collective.
Absolutely.
So, tell me a little bit more about
Google's water usage
in Uruguay, what had happened
there during the year of drought.
Yes, there was a disturbing case
fairly recently where
it had turned out that Google
had built data centers
in Uruguay at
a time where Uruguays local
population was experiencing
one of the worst droughts
in their history in
comparison to the last 75 years,
this was the worst droughts ever
experienced there.
And so there
were these really shocking images
coming out of Uruguay of people
protesting in the streets because
they just didn't have access to
clean water, while Google
was innovating
and developing their
fancy AI tools by
using all of these local resources.
And so that's the perfect example of
how
a company's initial decision
to unilaterally decide to
deploy their tool in some place, or
to... Build a data center in
some place, that can have these
vastly unjust implications
that actually threaten the
core basic interests of
people on the ground.
Not just, you know, some political
preferences that they might have,
but really the kinds of
interests that are actually
necessary for basic human survival.
And so that showcases just
how morally and politically urgent
this problem actually
Thinking ahead in the future as more
of these companies come into
Wisconsin, you know, that might
be an extreme case of something that
had happened but could something
similar, similar incidents happen in
the Great Lakes region as these
companies are coming in for the
potable water here?
One thing I've learned about the AI
space is never say never,
I think these risks are
always there.
It's also important to appreciate
that not all risks associated
with AI innovation are properly
understood at all.
There's just a lot that we don't
know and that's because
we can't fully predict what
the next wave of innovating
in the generative AI space will
look And because we can't
predict that, we don't actually know
what resources will be required to
power that next wave.
And so even if we are pretty
confident right now that,
you know, the same thing that
happened in Uruguay won't happen
here in Wisconsin,
it's not clear whether that will
always remain true because it might
be that the next generation of
powerful AI tools requires even
more resources.
That being said, things could also
turn out very differently.
Presumably, innovation means finding
less resource-intensive ways
of powering technological
progress.
We just don't know.
So it could be that the next
wave of AI is actually much more
eco-friendly than the last one.
And that would be good.
It's just that we have to think
about how we as a society can
create the right incentives to
actually get there.
So how can we as a society
put the right incentives in
place on these powerful
corporate actors to pay attention
to these issues pertaining
to environmental damage.
Often, there are not enough
incentives in industry to do
that.
And so what we can do locally,
as well as on a federal level, is
to emphasize to our public officials
that we as citizens or
as residents are concerned about
these questions and to really
prioritize that.
When we set an agenda for
ourselves as a democratic
constituency.
Absolutely.
So thinking about that, what are
questions that everyday people
should be asking themselves?
Do you think about the ethics of AI,
whether socially or environmentally?
I think the biggest question that
everyone should ask themselves is
do I need to automate this task
in the first place?
I think it's very easy for people
to assume that they
will increase the quality
of whatever decision
they are trying to make just
by using AI, because
it's common to think AI
as this all-powerful,
highly objective, politically
neutral tool.
It's important to realize, though,
that no technology is neutral and
perfectly objective.
And AI is not necessarily better
than human reasoning in all cases.
It really depends on what kinds of
questions we're trying to answer and
what sorts of tasks we're are trying
to solve.
And it looks like, in some cases,
our human ability to appreciate
complexity and to wrestle with
ambiguity is actually what's
required for success in a
complex task.
So it's good to outsource particular
mundane tasks to AI
that are easily computable,
where we're fairly confident that we
can delegate this.
But any task that requires
reflection,
disagreement, appreciating
uncertainty and ambiguity,
that's very hard to replicate
just by automating
that task. Yeah,
I just realized that.
The lamp just went out, I'll
switch the batteries.
I was gonna say that's perfect, I
actually, that was my last question.
Oh, cool. Oh, you're done?
Yeah, I was going to say, is there
anything else that you want?
No, I think that was good.
Did it go out like before?