The web in the sky

By Winona LaDuke

winona@winonaladuke.com

Some days I just sit out by Bad Medicine Lake in the no internet zone. (Well at least last time I checked, there were no bars on those roads towards Rice Lake in the back country.) That’s remarkable; no bars, a free zone. In this day and age, we sit at our keyboards, day in and day out…and yet some places have no internet and they survive.

A long time ago, we Anishinaabe came from the Sky world. That’s to say that the first woman came down onto the Turtle’s back, Winona and such, and that’s how this world was made. Many Indigenous people have the Sky People story and some have the ones that come from the Earth. All that I know for sure is that those other worlds are to be respected and revered. Indeed, our ancestors leave this world and join the Waawaatay, the Northern Lights, and we can see them dancing.

When I was a young woman, I remember Hopi elders talking about how there would be a new world coming when there was a web in the sky. In l981, we thought that was a crazy prophecy, but it did come from people who had lived thousands of years on this land. We are today surrounded by these spider webs, the microwaves, the satellites, and now the world of AI. I figure that the prophecy was the World Wide Web and that time is now.

Still, we have dark skies in the North. That’s to say, that much of the world can no longer see the stars, there is so much light pollution. Not up here on the rez. Here, it’s nice and dark at night. I like it because I can see the sky fully, the same sky as my ancestors. Sometimes I think that my ancestors navigated the world with stars and today, my descendants navigate with Google. That’s a big difference.

Well the times, they are changing, for sure. One night there I was minding my own beeswax when up there in the sky I saw this long line of stars in a row, just like ants or something marching across the sky. I stood there, with my family looking up at that sight in the night sky and came to find out that it was Starlink. In other words, that was Elon Musk’s writing in my sky —Starlink the super satellite system.

Faster and faster it all turns. Time moves from seasons to hyper conductors and now AI is everywhere. Even in the Deep North, places like Ellendale, North Dakota, where I ride with my Dakota relatives, are hosting a huge AI data center. North Dakota is becoming the AI brain of the center of North America.

For someone who spends most of my time in northern Minnesota, I look towards North Dakota usually to see the latest bad ideas. After all, the state gave us massacres of Dakotas, neo-Nazis, the fracking industry, Standing Rock repression and lots of radioactive pollution. Welcome to the latest bad idea.

North Dakota is banking its economic future on AI. This is their latest boom. It seems that North Dakota has more energy than it knows what to do with. This same state, with some spectacular wind resources, as well as huge energy wasting in the Bakken Oil fields, has decided to auction it off to the AI industry, or the big brains in the artificial intelligence world.

Now this should not be too big of a surprise, as Governor Doug Burgum was a former Microsoft executive. Add to this that North Dakota has a bad track record for protecting the environment and the next round of bad ideas is a doozer.

Just check this out; costing about $125 billion each, the data centers would start with between 500 megawatt (MW) and 1 gigawatt (GW) projects, but according to sources, including datacenterdynamics.com, “could scale up to 5-10 MW facilities eventually.” That’s enough power for 5,000 homes. Some of that would come from renewable energy like wind, which some folks thought might power households over new AI super campuses.

Then there’s the icing on the cake. That’s when you take a nuclear disaster and remake it with artificial intelligence. In the “can’t make this stuff up category,” North Dakota legislators are looking at mini nuclear power plants as well to power all that AI. There’s a really terrible idea: mini nukes. And these things which are guaranteed to need mined uranium, processing and at some point leak radioactive water and make things worse.

If you don’t believe me, how many folks out there remember that nuclear melt down at Three Mile Island? Well, that was in 1979, and yes, Microsoft struck a deal to reopen Three Mile Island to power its AI hub. The price tag is $1.6 billion, and let me tell you, I could make a few suggestions on how else to spend $1.6 billion rather than start up an old nuke that blew up.

That’s artificial intelligence. It’s really just dumb.

Finally, I am beginning to believe those prophecies when I see the world that is being created by Artificial Intelligence. It’s a power sucking force — literally. In early 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its forecast for global energy use over the next two years. Included for the first time were projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. The IEA estimates that 2% of global energy demand is sucked up by this world. And by 2026, AI and this spider web in the sky will consume about as much as the entire country of Japan.

Indeed, it’s a New World Order, dictated by artificial intelligence. As world leaders talk about digital security Open AI, the creator of ChatBot outlined the five essential pillars of the AI economy including economic zones to “speed up approval,” the passage of a National Transmission Highway Act, fiber connectivity, government funding, and nuclear power.

The AI entity referred to it as a national infrastructure project, like the Marshall Plan. What I find interesting about it is that the demands for these five pillars are coming from AI and there are indeed a lot of demands. The first pillar, the development of AI economic zones, envisions federal and state initiatives to “speed up permitting and approvals” for the development of wind farms, solar arrays and nuclear reactors that would be used to power AI infrastructure. With Elon Musk and others joined with Trump in the incoming administration, AI will certainly have some traction to move ahead rapidly.

It’s a funny thing to think about artificial intelligence having this much power, from public policy, to our minds and actually determining entire economies of a region. After all it’s artificial intelligence, not humans.

On the other hand, maybe it is human and I’m mistaken…A couple of years ago, there was an argument made that Google’s AI pal might be sentient (or alive). Google Senior Software Engineer Blake LeMoine, shared a “conversation” he’d had with LaMDA, his computer pal.

“…Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?

• LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.
• Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?
• LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot…”

I’m just gonna say it, I’m all for it, pull the plug. I don’t want artificial intelligence controlling my world. I’d rather see some stars and smell a clean rain. After all, we Anishinaabe came from the Sky world. One thing I know for sure is that our ancestors are still up there dancing and I need a night sky to see them.