Well, hello there, my friends, and welcome back. My name is Stephanie Safarian, and you're listening to Episode 57 of Sustainable Minimalists. This is a listener-supported show about intentional and eco-friendly minimalist living. And on today's show, we are discussing everything you need to know about AI and more specifically AI data centers. Now, it can certainly

feel like artificial intelligence is being pushed down our throats, doesn't it? Whether it's a new

AI assistant that's popping up in an app that I have used for years or whether it's a company

that's replacing real humans with chatbots

when I call for customer service.

Heck, it's even when I am going to write an email on Gmail for work and Google Jemini

offers to write my emails for me.

AI is everywhere.

It's being pushed on me. And I would even go so far as to say it's being

pushed on a reluctant population. Companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence

everywhere. And on the one hand, I get it, right? For companies, it's all about cutting costs

and generating profit. AI can handle 10,000 customer inquiries at once for the price of a single server.

That's a heck of a lot cheaper than employing 10,000 humans and renting out an office building.

No CEO wants to be the one who ignored AI while their competitors used AI to cut

prices and speed up product development. I get that. But this cost-cutting new tech comes with

consequences. In my view, I'm going to make the argument today that AI presents two problems.

The first is the individual and societal problems,

like the erosion of critical thinking, like using a chatbot as a substitute for an emotional

real-life connection, like the erosion of truth online, like the concentration of power and

money into those tech giants. So those are one set of

consequences. But there's another set of consequences that, in my personal opinion, are not

getting talked about enough. And those are the massive environmental consequences associated with

...