Big Tech is coming to Minnesota, and they want to drain our aquifers, gobble up our farmland, and hand the bill to taxpayers. Most AI corporations are fighting to remain completely unregulated, with no safeguards against the potential existential risks AI poses to our planet, our economy, and our democracy.
A single hyperscale data center can consume as much water as 12,000 households. A proposed data center in Farmington alone is estimated to drain 900 million gallons from the community’s aquifers – roughly double the water consumption of the entire city.
Meanwhile, one hyperscale facility could increase Minnesota’s electricity demand by 4% – the equivalent of adding 285,000 homes. Data centers threaten to drive up energy bills for working families and businesses.
I’ll ensure that if data centers want to operate in Minnesota, they pay their full costs. No taxpayer dollars should go to the world’s richest corporations. No draining our aquifers. Transparent, public decision-making – not secret NDA deals. And if we’re going to build them, they must be powered by clean energy and meet our environmental standards.
That’s why I’ll fight for a national data center NDA ban, moratoriums on building data centers to let local and state governments assess the real costs without being rolled by mega-corporations bullying them, and serious environmental protections that safeguard our neighborhoods and peaceful communities.
And for the AI images and content these data centers produce? I’ll require companies to build guardrails, and I’ll fight to create public-interest safety oversight agencies for these groups and to establish legal causes of action to hold corporations accountable.
The US needs to lead the way in creating binding international agreements that establish a global AI safety regime as we do with many other dangerous technologies, such as those used for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons and energy technology.
Deepfake videos are often deceptive attempts to mislead constituents, undermine elections, cheat consumers, and harass children and adults with nonconsensual sexual content churned out by these AI companies with little to no recourse. The concerns about AI taking jobs are real, too, and we have to find ways to balance the real-world use of AI with the outright harm it causes to working families and individuals.
The ability to create highly realistic images and sound, combined with the ability to transmit them to millions instantly, poses risks to our democracy and to all free societies worldwide. Only governments have the resources and power needed to hold in check a potential tide wave of lies, deepfakes, identity theft, and disinformation that threaten our nation.
AI technology holds the promise of accelerating many beneficial discoveries in fields as far-ranging as medicine, engineering, and urban planning. But none of that promise can be realized without government safeguards and public input. Many of these mega-corporations possess more money and power than many entire nations. Left on their own, they have proven inconsistent in self-regulation at best, disastrously reckless at worst. A consistent, public-first set of guardrails is a vital prerequisite for making AI safe enough to actually serve the public good rather than only AI’s billionaire (or trillionaire!) shareholders.
By creating legal guardrails and oversight, we put AI where it belongs: back in the hands of public accountability, not in the hands of malicious actors and corporate bosses seeking to mint more billions for themselves.