Karen Hao

So in Memphis, Tennessee, where Musk built Colossus, the supercomputer for training Grok, he used 35 methane gas turbines to power the facility.

This is a working class community, a black and brown community, a rural community that was not even told that they would be the hosts of this facility.

And they discovered it because they literally smelled what seemed like a gas leak in all of their living rooms.

And that's when they discovered that these methane gas turbines were taking away their right to clean air.

And this is a community that's already been facing a history of environmental racism.

They had already had lots of struggles to access their right to clean air.

And now there's this huge supercomputer that's landed in their midst that is pumping thousands of tons of toxins into their air, exacerbating the asthmatic symptoms of the children, exacerbating the respiratory illnesses of other people.

It's one of the communities that has the highest rates of lung cancer.

And then they also have supercomputers taking your job.

So this is what I mean.

It's like the haves and have-nots are fundamentally being pulled apart even further.

Like, if you in this version of Silicon Valley's future are in the misfortunate category of being a have-not...

We are talking about you now getting a job that is way worse than what you had because you might be doing data annotation and you might be treated as a machine rather than as a human to extract value, the value of your labor for perpetuating this labor automating machine that these people are building.

You might be competing with these facilities for fresh water resources.

They're also polluting your air.

Your bills have increased, so the affordability crisis is getting worse.

Like, how is that making people able to be more human?

Yes.

Okay.

So one of the analogies that I always use is AI is like the word transportation.