The Ugliest Thing San Francisco Ever Built

The Ugliest Thing San Francisco Ever Built
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 21, 2025: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (center), US President Donald Trump (left), Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison (first right), and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (second right) speak during a news conference announcing an investment in AI infrastructure. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

I have a new article in Tech Policy Press about infrastructure, AI, urban renewal projects and other public works efforts that ended up creating social and physical burdens due to overreach.

Here's how it starts:

A day after his inauguration, President Donald Trump was joined in the White House by OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank executives to announce a $100 billion joint venture called Stargate — a private sector investment into AI data infrastructure. Stargate, in Trump’s own words, aims to “build the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI. And this will include the construction of colossal data centers, very, very massive structures. I was in the real estate business. These buildings, these are big, beautiful buildings.”

Ten Stargate data centers are underway in Texas, with more under consideration. The White House announcement, paired with Trump’s immediate revocation of former President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” signals a new alignment between Silicon Valley and the federal government. But how do we evaluate this new industrial policy? What are we building, and what consequences will it have?

You can read the full article in Tech Policy Press.


Cultural Red Teaming: ARRG! and the Creative Misuse of AI Systems

When it rains it pours! I also have a new article, co-written with Caroline Sinders and Steph Maj Swanson, exploring how our group (ARRG!) struggles with our own complicity with the unsavory aspects of the tools we use, how we make sense of that with our art, and our specific experience of being at DEFCON 31 in 2023.

It is an un-proofed preview copy made available by the Critical AI Journal as a sneak preview of their upcoming volume, so expect scattered typos.


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