My household now employs more artificial intelligence than actual intelligence, which is awkward because the AI keeps showing up for work.
At this point, I have a digital assistant for nearly every part of my life. One tells me the weather. One tells me when I have a meeting. One helps me write emails that make me sound calmer than I am. One suggests dinner based on the contents of my refrigerator, which is mostly mustard, tortillas and the accusing silence of vegetables purchased with ambition.
I have a navigation app and my girlfriend has asked me to change the voice it currently uses from a British woman who sounds a little too eager for me to make a left turn to someone more boring.
I have a search engine that now answers questions before I have finished typing them, as if it has been waiting all day for me to ask, “Can dogs eat blueberries?” I have a phone that recognizes my face, a thermostat that judges when I stay out too late and a streaming service that has known for years I really do just watch sports and karate movies even though I tell people I watch World War II documentaries and nature films.
Naturally, all that digital mind reading requires a whole lot of computers somewhere.
I have to keep my tiny invisible staff informed. I must update preferences, accept terms, reject cookies, approve permissions, deny permissions, forget passwords, reset passwords and occasionally prove to a robot that I am not a robot by identifying a bicycle in a photograph taken through a rain-streaked windshield in 2008 with an iPhone 3.
Still, I love the convenience. I love that I can ask a machine to summarize a 40-page report, translate a menu, identify a bird, find my car, remind me to buy more mustard and tell me whether the mysterious object in the back of the freezer is chili or some sort of medical specimen.
This is the modern bargain: We demand magic and then we act surprised when the magician needs a warehouse.
Because, of course, my helpful little assistants do not live in the mist somewhere above the roofline, sipping vapor and humming softly. They live in data centers. Big ones. Plain ones. Buildings that do not look like the future so much as the place where the future parks its forklifts. Buildings that need water, power and utility access.
In the Northland, this conversation is no longer theoretical. Port KC has announced plans for Project Kestrel, a six-building data center campus at KCI-29. That sounds sleek, almost aerodynamic, like it might swoop gracefully over the tree line carrying our emails in its talons. That project was announced about a year ago and is still on target to break ground by the end of the year.
Residents are … less enthusiastic. Data centers, in case you’ve been living under a rock, are about as welcome in a community as a fella with one shoe who goes by Donnie and likes to hand out toothbrushes for Halloween.
Nearly every election ad this season is about them. City council meetings are filled with concerned citizens. And every politician is running as far away from them as fast as Tyreek Hill from domestic abuse allegations.
And yet, we won’t stop asking Siri to calculate how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. And as these projects continue to land in communities around the country, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being both the concerned neighbor and the enthusiastic customer.
But six buildings are six buildings and those buildings will allow all of us to ask the internet the dumbest questions such as “If I eat pasta and antipasta, am I still hungry?” or “How many solar panels would it take to power the sun?”
This is important for human growth of the species and that computing power needs to go somewhere. So … what’s it gonna be?
By the way, the answer is “One 2-pound chunk every 10 seconds. 720 pounds of wood chunk woodchucking by the woodchuck.” (I think I drained a small lake calculating that one.)
