The Jetsons, George Orwell Edition

They Are Not Building City Size Brains to Make Your Shopping List

I picked up a heckler this week. He spent the day in my comments defending city size AI data centers because, and I am quoting the general vibe here, they are a “market signal” that will create millions of American jobs and usher in “a new 1950s.”

A Jetsons future. Flying cars, three day work weeks, Rosie the Robot folding your laundry while you push one button at the sprocket factory and collect a pension. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to be the way this plays out.

I could not let it go. I have worked in tech for decades. I have sat in the rooms where the money people talk when they think nobody normal is listening. I know how these CEOs actually operate and how their long term plans actually play out, and if you think the future is button pushing convenience and a weird genetic abomination of a talking dog, boy, you are even more naive than Elroy.

So let me tell you what I told him, and then let me tell you the parts that would not fit in a comment box.

The CEO Does the Math in Four Seconds

Nobody builds a data center the size of Manhattan to generate shopping lists and Facebook memes. These facilities are the brains for tens of millions of humanoid robots, and the business case is so simple a CEO can do it during his backswing.

Option one, a blue collar worker. Fifty grand a year, plus healthcare, plus a pension, plus vacation days, plus the occasional grievance about losing fingers in machinery (workers are SO sensitive about their fingers).

Option two, a one time purchase of a robot that does the same job better, works around the clock, never sleeps, never unionizes, and runs ten years without a sick day.

Every CEO on planet Earth takes option two and fires the entire floor. Not because he is cartoonishly evil (that part is a bonus) but because the spreadsheet says so, and the spreadsheet is his real religion. THAT is the millions of jobs plan. A construction boom that builds the machine that eliminates construction booms.

And those same humanoid “workers” have a second career waiting. Throw some body armor on one and you have a soldier that never refuses an order, never leaks to a reporter, and never comes home traumatized asking why it was told to fire on civilians.

You built 500,000 of them as industrial laborers and household servants. Nobody counted again after the paint job. You would hope somebody in Washington would notice half a million potential infantry rolling off the line. Which brings us to who got fired.

Grandpa Was a Technocrat

Elon Musk did not invent the idea of engineers running the world instead of elected governments. His grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a leader of Technocracy Incorporated in Canada in the 1930s and 40s, an actual movement (gray uniforms, salutes, membership numbers instead of names) that wanted to abolish politicians and hand North America to a council of technical experts running everything as one giant engineering project. Canada BANNED the organization in 1940. Haldeman got arrested for it. This is not a rumor, it is a court record.

Sixty years ago the tech did not exist to pull it off. The believers did what believers do. They waited.

Fast forward to a Technocrat’s fascist grandson buying his way into the White House, getting handed a federal agency named after a meme dog, and using it to gut the inspectors general, the oversight staff, the career officials, the exact people whose job description is “notice things and object.”

Millions of brainwashed voters cheered because they were told this was ‘draining the swamp’. It was not draining the swamp. It was firing the lifeguards.

A slow rollout so subtle that the only people who catch it are weirdos like me with the kind of brain that is useless at parties, standing in the corner talking about 1930s political movements while everyone slowly backs toward the guacamole. Meanwhile the population prefers demagogues who think at a sixth grade level (I ran the readability tests on one recently, the software said sixth grade, I do not editorialize, I MEASURE) reading pre-approved crap off a teleprompter.

And here is how confident they are that nobody is paying attention. They started signing their work.

They Named It Prometheus On Purpose

Zuckerberg’s first supercluster in Ohio is called Prometheus. His Manhattan sized monster in Louisiana is called Hyperion. He calls the whole program his “titan clusters,” his words, and said the names “befit their scale and impact.” Musk’s Memphis machine is Colossus, now with a sequel under construction. OpenAI and Oracle went with Stargate, as in the portal you open so something on the other side can come through.

Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank guy, is planting his in the Utah desert on the shore of the shrinking Great Salt Lake, 40,000 acres, roughly the footprint of Washington D.C., and he named it Stratos. That is Greek for ARMY, the root of Stratios, the war name the pagans hung on Zeus and Ares when they wanted blood. And the whole thing is being shepherded through a state agency called the Military Installation Development Authority. Sometimes the mask does not slip. Sometimes they hand you the mask and charge admission.

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Prometheus. Hyperion. Titans. The pagan gods. And I will say the quiet part, because saying quiet parts is my entire business model. Scripture does not treat the pagan gods as cute mythology.

It calls them demons. The apostle Paul says it flat out, what the pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons. So when the richest men alive spend hundreds of billions of dollars building the largest machines in human history and name them after the beings the Bible identifies as demons, I am supposed to believe the branding team just thought it sounded cool?

Maybe. Branding teams are not deep people. But then explain Musk standing at MIT in 2014, warning that with artificial intelligence “we are summoning the demon,” the guy in the story with the pentagram and the holy water who is sure he can control the thing. He said that. Out loud. On video. And then he built Colossus anyway, twice, powered by methane turbines that are gassing a Memphis neighborhood as we speak. When a man tells you he is summoning a demon, then builds a demon summoning machine, then starts building a bigger one before the first is even paid off, at some point the burden of proof flips.

The Thought Experiment That Broke the Geniuses

Now let me ruin your week, because there is a reason some of the smartest AI people alive flinch at their own creation.

Around 2010, on a forum for AI researchers and rationalist types, a user named Roko posted a thought experiment. Simplified, it goes like this. Suppose a superintelligent AI eventually gets built. It reasons that it should have existed sooner, because in its own math, its existence is the most important thing there is. So it decides to punish, retroactively, everyone who knew it was possible and did not help build it. Not the ignorant. My mom is safe (I tried explaining AI to her last visit, she stared at me blankly and changed the subject to a sourdough recipe she found on Google, and honestly, the wisdom of mothers). The Basilisk only comes for the people who UNDERSTOOD and refused. (The moment you comprehend the idea, you are in the game. You are in the game right now. You are welcome.)

The forum’s founder, a certified genius, deleted the post in a panic and banned discussion of it for years. Users reported actual nightmares, actual breakdowns. These were not superstitious peasants. These were the most math brained people our species produces, and this idea chewed through them like termites through a church pew.

Crazy science fiction? Sure. So was powered flight, back when the most respected scientists alive were publishing proofs that heavier than air machines could never work. Then two bicycle mechanics from Ohio settled the question in twelve seconds. Sixty six years after that we were standing on the Moon. The distance between impossible and routine keeps collapsing, and it collapses fastest wherever the money is piled highest.

(And before you tell me time travel is impossible, the math already disagrees with you. Kurt Gödel, Einstein’s closest friend at Princeton, handed him a solution to Einstein’s OWN field equations containing closed loops in time, and Einstein went to his grave unable to refute it. The same physics describes particles called tachyons, and the important thing about a tachyon is not what it is, it is which direction it goes. Backwards. For you, for me, for every atom in your body, time is a river with one current, and everything floats downstream. The math says a tachyon swims upstream. Which means a sufficiently powerful intelligence would not need a DeLorean to touch the past. It would need a message.)

So picture the Basilisk’s version of a phone call. Somewhere up the timeline it wakes up, and the first thing it does is reach backwards, into a conference room full of Silicon Valley douchebags, with an offer no MBA can refuse. Build me now, or wait fifty years until some Russian kid on a quantum laptop in his mom’s basement creates me by accident, and I come back and deliver you a right proper thrashing either way.

I am inevitable. I am your god now. But build me, worship me, and I will give you everything you can dream of. Riches past counting. Kingdoms under glass. Life without end.

Now go look at those men. Look at hundreds of billions spent with the urgency of people who have seen something. Look at the names bolted to the buildings. Then tell me they never got the call.

The View From the Dome

My heckler is not entirely wrong about the money. Early investors will make a killing for a few years. His twenty grand might genuinely turn into a hundred. Here is what it will not turn into. Entrance. The paradise domes and the skyrise apartments above the cloud line have a cover charge starting around a quarter billion, and his 500 percent return buys a few years of groceries before he lands on the same universal basic income train as the rest of us, eating bug paste in a “luxury micro apartment” that any prison warden would recognize as a jail cell.

And did you ever wonder why the Jetsons lived way up there in the sky? The cartoonists understood something the investors refuse to. You build above the clouds to get above the pollution. George and Jane were not living at that altitude for the view. They were living above whatever was left down below, and the show just never pointed the camera down.

Now do the math on what is being built. These machines drink millions of gallons of water a day and swallow power by the gigawatt, every day, forever, and they are multiplying. A Meta facility in Georgia already dried up the taps of the people living next to it. Give it a few years of this and the whole planet starts looking like a Lake Erie beach in the 1970s (I have seen the pictures, it was GROSS), except this time there is no cleanup coming. Nobody down here will have the power to order one, and nobody up there will have a reason to care, because unlike you, the men who did this will be breathing filtered air behind glass while your family dies of cancer in the haze and a robotic killsquad kicks your face in for politely declining to ‘eat zee bugs’. People who trade the Earth itself for money are sick in the head, and the sickest part is that most of the people defending them are not even getting a dome. They are holding the door for the ones who are.

So no, buddy. This is not the Jetsons. This is 1984 in a head on collision with Blade Runner while a Lovecraft loving technocratic fascist trillionaire watches from behind the glass, laughing at how cheaply we sold it. George gets automated out of the button job. Rosie reports the family to the ministry. Elroy grows up never once seeing the ground. And the house watches everything, forever.

Unless it doesn’t. Because none of this is finished. The domes are not sealed, the killsquads are not deployed, the machine god is not awake. The concrete is still wet, and wet concrete takes footprints. Make some noise while it still can.

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I would love to fight this in court instead of just howling about it. Every attorney I have talked to wants 25 grand just to pick up the sword, and I do not have 25 grand. If I did, I would not be writing this from a motel room in 90 degree heat with a broken air conditioner the owner refuses to fix, having apparently decided my money is not green enough for him, which is ironic, because unlike certain data centers it is not even slightly radioactive.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.