I was working in the garden in my backyard, and I couldn’t help but think of this girl in Georgia. (I told you it sounded like I wrote it for LinkedIn!) I was pulling carrots out of the ground and taking photos of my tomatoes, thinking about the homeyness of a backyard. The security, the peacefulness, the feeling that this part of the earth belongs to you. I rent, by the way, but I still feel ownership of it. It began to rain, and everything smelled earthen and green, like the way an avocado tastes. Why shouldn’t we have a little patch of earth that belongs to us? Maybe we would take better care of the planet, and our small pieces of it, if we took true ownership.
But what is ownership? If something belongs to you, does that mean it cannot be taken from you? Not necessarily.
Ansley Brown lives in Georgia, and she is about to have her home and her yard taken from her. Georgia Power wants to build a data center there. That’s that. Now, suddenly, the Browns’ ownership is in question. If Ms. Brown refuses to sell her home, they can just take it from her through eminent domain. I hadn’t heard of this law before. It basically states that if the government wants to take your land for the “public good,” it can. Gross. Turns out “my land, my choice” isn’t a thing either.
You may be wondering why a blog that generally promotes AI use is writing this article. I am not against the science of AI or its capabilities. I just think it should be used with people and the climate in mind. When we choose data over people, we have already lost. Maybe the fear isn’t that AI takes over the world but that it does it with our help.
