In addition to their energy impact, we should ask what are these AI data centres for, exactly?

Edinburgh may soon be host to two “AI data centres” that will consume same amount of electricity as more than half of Scottish households combined. Between them, they’ll demand a continuous electricity load of over 400MW - enough to power 1.3 million homes.

In one sense, Scotland should be positioning itself as a world centre of energy intensive industries, leveraging our vast renewable electricity potential to decarbonise those sectors.

But in a world of already high energy bills for normal consumers and the fuel poverty that comes with it, we must ask what is the purpose of that industry and what public good will it do not just for their customers but for the people playing host to it here.

As it stands, as transformative as the rise of AI has been, it hasn’t yet demonstrated much in the way of public good. Large Language Models require vast amounts of data to train - amounts on the order of “every creative work that humanity has placed on the internet” which then requires these large data centres to process. Most of Common Weal’s work has already disappeared down the maw of these data centres as has the personal work of most of our staff members (insofar as we can identify, at least - these companies rarely disclose where their data has come from but it is known that several have almost certainly harvested entire libraries of pirated works).

What we get in return so far are sophisticated chatbots that lie and hallucinate with ever-growing confidence and, worse for us, internet search engines that deliver worse results and actively divert you away from the source of what you are looking for. As we laid our in our response to the UK’s consultation on copyright and AI, if you ask a question like “What is Common Weal’s position on rent controls?”, a previous search engine would send you a link to our policy paper - which might convince you to click the donate button and support us which allows us to create the next policy paper that you might find useful. Now, these AIs just give you an answer that might be correct or might be hallucinated in whole or in part and even if they correctly link to the source article, they are likely to expose you to their own advertising, thus not just stealing our work but profiting from your searches too.

This appears to be the most profitable use for AI so far as their performance in other sectors (like replacing artists, or programmers, or middle managers) has been underwhelming so far - cheaper (until the AI companies inevitably enshittify and raise their prices), but far less effective. Enough businesses have reported issues with using AIs to replace humans and how much time is required to get a human to fix their mistakes that Cory Doctorow has described these relationships as “reverse centaurs” - rather than a human using a tool to improve their own productivity, companies are using humans to improve the productivity of their tools while cracking down on any sense of autonomy the human might have in their work. This dramatically reduces the power of workers in the workplace and shifts the balance of that power firmly in the direction of the owners of the AIs.

The final question to ask in this story is on who profits from these data centres in particular? Neither of the companies involved in these projects are based in Scotland (both have their HQ in England). Neither of them are AI companies either - they are development agencies attempting to build the centre first and then rent or sell it to an AI company later. Given that Scotland has few - or any - major AI companies based here either then those companies, too, are likely to be foreign-owned. Thus, we have a situation that Scotland will play host to hugely energy intensive AIs that are actively seeking to undermine workers and organisations while placing a huge strain on Scotland’s already underdeveloped energy sector with the goal of producing work that is less good than that of the workers they caused to be fired and the profits gained from all of this won’t even stay in Scotland.

And that’s all if it works as designed and we don’t end up just playing host to an abandoned, half-constructed data centre because the AI investment bubble burst.

Does this sound like a good deal to you?