Jeff Whitten

Local Columnist

There’s good news and bad news afoot these days.

The good news is OpenAI wants to build a data center somewhere not far from my house over in Effingham County.

That’s also the bad news, by the way, but more on that shortly. I’ll open with the good stuff.

For starters, there will have to be air conditioning. The AI servers in this $19 billion data center will need to be kept cool and happy else the AI overheats and escapes whatever it inhabits and ultimately takes over the world.

To prevent that happening means the need for giant fans and maybe other stuff like diesel generators that make a lot of noise.

With luck the generators and giant fans will ultimately create enough of a hum to drown out the steady racket already a part of everyday life.

As you probably know, that racket emanates from our daily dose of planned-unit-development -creating backhoes, bulldozers, dump trucks, cement mixers, and is augmented by roundabout builders and road wideners as well as by the thousands of 18-wheelers rolling from and to the port and into our neighborhoods on a weekly basis.

And I’m not even mentioning the mass of commuters pouring in and out of the county at all hours of the day and night trying to be the first one there and back again because, well, there’s a prize for the winner.

Hopefully, AI can take care of that too. It can make traffic lights that actually sync. Or take over and manage the inactive blinker systems in every vehicle made after, say, 2000.

Also good news is that the AI center news has gotten the social-media-community- page-knickers-in-a-twist crowd all riled up, again. Actually, not again. They stay riled up. At one point it was warehouses and way back it used to be landfills and condominiums on the rivers and truth is you can’t turn around without somebody getting worked up over something seemingly unrelated but usually precipitated by developers, the cads.

But I suspect at least a portion of the regular online bunch are AI-generated bots. The mean ones, which for some reason I always tend to picture looking sort of like Mini Me with lipstick. Driving a Ranger Rover.

Note: I’m not talking about the good bots, the electronic elfs that make your selfie look better than you do in real life. Those bots do important, even noble, work, because what good is artificial intelligence if it can’t make us look online like we’d really look if we only looked like we should look in real life if we didn’t look like ourselves?

Another note: I probably should use AI to spruce up my look a tad, but nobody cares what I look like except my wife, and at this point she’s just happy I remember to put on pants before I go outside. Maybe AI can draw some on me so I don’t have to worry about it. My Google has AI. I might give that a try.

Oh, and the mugshot the editor of this paper uses is about 12 years old. These days I look like a troll with an inordinately large head who got into a fight with a possum.

And lost. But I digress. Of those online community page warriors who are real, I’ve always believed at least half if not two-thirds are transplants from elsewhere (that means up north, mostly). Which is cool. And while I personally think anyone complaining about growth, for example, should at least be from a place that’s growing, unlike the experts on Facebook I’m not about to tell anyone how to behave.

Still, maybe this AI data center will be the last straw for the perpetually disgruntled. Maybe they’ll get so disgusted with the AI data center approving good old boy system in Effingham County they’ll go away and stay there.

Which will kill two or more birds with one rock.

For one thing it will get the online whiners off the backs of the folks trying to run this place and stay sane at the same time. For another, it will leave behind a less crowded, more peaceable world, like it was before the developers got hold of it 30 years ago and slowly turned it into one vast Pooler.

Also good news is the possibility population loss sparked by a data center backlash could help lower property taxes, since they didn’t start going up until the developer crowd took the keys to the Coastal Empire in the 1990s and drove it til the wheels fell off.

The resulting — and ongoing — population boom has created a need for more and more of a lot of government stuff, like schools and teachers and cops and ambulances and roads and water and sewer infrastructure. More people, more demand, more revenue required for services, you see, so it stands that fewer

people means less demand for services and less money needed to fund them.

Ah well. There other positives to the data center being located nearby, including the fact OpenAI chose a good spot for it. The thing is not only near a lot of residences, some less than a year old, some much, much older, it’s apparently also going to be fairly close to a couple of elementary schools.

That makes sense. The kids there could well be the only ones in Effingham County smart enough to figure out what to do if the AI pitches a fit, so might as well have them close by in an emergency.

Another note: I know me and my neighbor Bill would have no idea what to do if the local AI ran amok. Can we just unplug it? And what happens if we take it apart, put it back together again and leave a part out? And what if that part we leave out is what makes it not want to destroy the whole galaxy? Will we be held responsible? Can we sign a waiver first?

Which reminds me. Some of you might be old enough to remember the 1983 movie “War Games,” in which a high school kid accidentally hacks into a secret military computer and almost starts a nuclear war.

One wonders if AI can do that, and if it can, will it want to just because it doesn’t like people, or it has a bad day and is tired of answering stupid questions. Or if it’s really hot outside and somebody didn’t turn on the fans because the neighbors complained.

One should worry, I think, because AI evidently can make up its own artificial mind what it wants to do and then go ahead and do it, and how it thinks depends on who created it and their motives when they programmed it. It’s sort of like a modern day congressman.

An acquaintance recently mentioned the “Terminator” movies as indicative of a future that might be here before we know it, which isn’t good news. Terminators are scary. Plus, I tend to recall 2001: A Space Odyssey and Hal. He was a bad computer.

Also on the bad news side is the data center’s potential demand for water to help cool itself, given the continual stress that has been placed on local water supplies since the 1990s.

But then, we’ve been paper cutting ourselves to death for decades when it comes to water. Even now some of my neighbors run their water sprinklers like there’s all the water in the world, and every time you stick up a 100-plus home subdivision you’re adding more folks wanting to run their sprinklers like there’s all the water in the world, and every time you turn around somebody’s building another 150-home subdivision, so which is worse? Another 50 or 100 subdivisions or a data center?

At least one doesn’t generate traffic, or provide an overabundant supply of overworked parents who turn their loutish, sugared-up kids loose on the rest of us at Walmart, or people who buy up all the bottled water and toilet paper every time it rains hard.

Perhaps the worst news so far to come from this story involves the folks who’ve made death threats at officials in Effingham County over this thing. That’s not even close to being acceptable.

That said, I heard a preacher say Effingham officials should be ashamed at how this OpenAI deal was done.

Perhaps they should, though I don’t think he should limit that particular sentiment to the Effingham County Board of Commissioners. There’s plenty of shame to go around, these days. Ever hear of the Epstein files, preacher?

Truth is, government is people, and people are human, and most of us are human. That covers a lot of territory, some good, some bad, some both at once.

AI, meanwhile, isn’t human.

Whether that’s ultimately good or bad or some mix of both remains to be seen. If any of us are still around to see it.

Jeff Whitten is a fat little retired guy and former BCN editor who actually resembles the seedy sort of garden gnome you wouldn’t want in your garden.