Isaac Greene has the human interest angle on data centers through the lense of his brother, a farmer, who will have his farm surrounded on both sides by new data centers. Greene highlights the trivial or destructive ways A.I. is used to show the trade-offs we are making.

But for everyone else, there is such pressing need for data computation. Are we expected to make our memes by hand? We couldn’t live in a world that doesn’t know what Donald Trump Jesus would have looked like. We couldn’t create fake versions of loved one’s voices to scam grandmothers out of their life savings without these vital calls. Who will make all these robocalls? People? The indignity. We couldn’t surveil our citizens going about their days with flock cameras, or permanently save the footage of everyone who appears on our ring cameras. What would we do without these data centers? Do we expect corporations to employ humans (with their expectations of salary and benefits) to do their work? There would be no slop to post to Facebook, no way to adjust our faces and bodies so they look their best when we post our selfies and gym mirror shots. Someone must pay the cost for these essentials, and that someone is a family in Pennsylvania trying to live their life on a little bit of land.

It’s a compelling read if you want to know how the data explosion is negatively impacting real people.