“Idon’t like to see anyone upset,” said Nick Farris of Provident Real Estate Advisors. He was sitting in the front of a crowd of roughly 150 inside Valley View High School’s auditorium in Archbald, a town of about 7,500, huddled between two mountain ranges in Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley. Farris was there to represent the developer for Project Scott, one of many data center campuses coming to…
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“A lot of people in power view knowledge as dangerous,” says organizer Mariame Kaba. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes speaks with Kaba and organizers Alison Macrina and Katie Clark about why public libraries matter, not just as places to borrow books, but as vital public infrastructure. They discuss libraries as spaces where people can gather without spending money, learn together…
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As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran continues, we look at how the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence in its operations. The system, known as Project Maven, relies on technology by Palantir and also incorporates the AI model Claude built by Anthropic. Israel has used similar AI targeting programs in Iran, as well as in Gaza and Lebanon. Craig Jones, an expert on modern warfare…
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The recent explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers has created a litany of environmental and cultural issues for Native people and Tribes across the so-called “United States.” This, in turn, has sparked intense debate and prompted conversations on tribal digital sovereignty and a call for regulation that controls the data, infrastructure, and networks.
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This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission.
A bit less than 20 years ago, a nationwide housing bubble collapsed, giving us the Great Recession. Millions of homeowners had their houses foreclosed. We had high unemployment for the better part of a decade. And the subsequent falloff in construction created the basis for another extraordinary run-up in house prices during the pandemic. In other words, it was pretty bad news.
The current bubble in AI is laying the groundwork for another bad story. As was the case both before and after the collapse of the housing bubble, there is a tremendous premium in intellectual circles on making the problem more complicated than it is.
My latest poster child for this point is a column in the New York Times by Richard Bookstaber, a hedge fund manager who had predicted the financial crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble. His column notes the AI bubble, but then argues that the big problem is that we are also facing risks from the private credit market, as well as geopolitical risks, like the fact that China could cut off the supply of chips from Taiwan and also the price shock associated with the cutoff of the oil flow through the straits of Hormuz.
The collapse of the stock prices of the companies that are big factors in AI will then have huge spillover effects, devastating people’s 401(k)s, as well as whacking pension funds. This will lead to a huge fall in consumption, which would likely lead to a recession.
The warnings are well-taken, but the story is actually not complicated.