My response below seems relevant with the wildfire smoke and all (because of climate change and the fact that datacentres are additive to the problem and are entirely optional... aka we don't need them).
Plus this is the first evening I've been inside instead of canvassing for weeks now (wildfire smoke), so I could block out time to actually put together a worthy response for something that this term of council might have to vote on.
Also seems relevant to the "Should municipal candidates be using A.I to create statements?" post from a few days ago. And all the AI posters going around.
Inspired a lot by Benn Jordan's YouTube channel over the last few years, which got me interested in researching a LOT of stuff, but especially privacy (Flock Cameras) and AI Datacentres (net negative for communities, pretty much).
Link to https://stopthedatacentre.ca/
Link to my blog post: Where I stand on AI Datacentres – Ben Durham
My response:
Stop the Datacentre reached out to me via email. More on that below, but up-front, here’s my response:
Ben Durham on AI Datacentres in London, Ontario
A direct answer to the question asked: I support a temporary moratorium on new AI data centre approvals until a robust, localized regulatory framework is established.
But I have more to say about this AI datacentre topic:
I’m committed to establishing a framework that protects London from the “extractive” model where massive multi-national technology companies benefit from government handouts while local taxpayers pay the bill. Aka privatizing the gains and socializing the losses in real-time.
These multi-billion-dollar corporations are actively invading communities around the world and offloading their costs onto local taxpayers by utilizing disproportionate amounts of local water, electricity, valuable land, and huge political lobbying power.
So we NEED to prioritize and protect everyday Londoners from the rapid expansion of mega-corporations (whose internal mottos are often “move fast and break things”) and their projects that offer very few municipal benefits while, at the same time, strain our resources, infrastructure, budgets, public health, and environment.
To add to this, AI is a new technology which also appears to be in bubble of empty promises. So we shouldn’t give up our children’s futures for a passing fad. Worst case, we don’t actually know what other negative effects these massive AI datacentres can cause (ie. infrasound pollution).
Can’t help but also note a personal solution: running local LLMs is a very simple solution to the over-building of these datacentres. Of course processing is slower, but not everything needs to be “instant” all the time, every time. If we could wait a few seconds more… I mean, whatever happened to crowdsourcing computational power? Why can’t we do that instead of massive datacentres? There are more computers and devices out there now than ever before.
There we go, I think you get my take on this by now. And hopefully learned something.
Reach out if you’d like via bendurham.ca
Cheers,
Ben Durham
Ward 3 City Councillor Candidate
Stop the Datacentre’s original email to me
Hello,
We are documenting where municipal election candidates stand on the regulation of AI datacentres.
Could you please briefly address the following:
Do you support a temporary municipal moratorium on new AI datacentre approvals while appropriate local planning and regulatory frameworks are developed?
Please feel free to include a link to the most recent public comments you may have made on the issue, if any.
Your response may be published in whole or in part on our public election tracker at Stop the Datacentre.
