Scaffolding an Algorithmic Civilisation

Intro by Dee McLachlan

I’ve been training my AI to assist me with child-protection submissions aimed at rescuing children from the State.

It has been extraordinary. Before AI, I was often working alone, unpaid, for months on end — buried beneath thousands upon thousands of pages, trying to condense impossible volumes of material into coherent, acceptable court documents while emotionally carrying the weight of the children behind them. It was humanly grueling.

Parents in these matters are buried beneath thousands of pages of reports, notes, allegations and departmental records — often littered with fragmented, defamatory or context-stripped statements. It’s not just bureaucracy. It actively wears down and subverts a parent’s ability to defend themselves.

AI changed that.

Suddenly I could organize evidence faster, cross-reference documents, structure arguments, polish submissions, identify inconsistencies, and process information at a speed that would previously have required entire teams of people.

And yet, at the exact same time, I have felt increasingly uneasy. A doom-gut reaction — not so much for myself, but for the younger generations.

In my article on Data Centres v Humanity I posted a video of students booing leaders talking about the prospects of AI. And in my article AI Censorship – We Are Screwed I described how AI refused to output General Wesley Clark’s Democracy Now interview when he was a presidential candidate. It will most likely completely alter history.

Huge Data Centers

And the recent news about huge data centers being planned send a shiver down my spine. They are so huge – why?

Many ideas come to mind. But what is the ultimate purpose. Data on humans is the resource – but what more power do we need?

I have this sick feeling that these huge data centers are planning for human integration. Integrated into AI through nano-enhanced-jabs or chips — that connect mind and body into unlimited intelligence. And at the same time corporate compliance.

Will those evolved humans become the new privileged class?

I can imagine a job ad in 2030 –– where a job seeker only becomes viable if they are integrated with AI — facilitated by these giant AI data centers.

My hypothetical Job advert:

Across America, Europe, China and the Middle East, vast AI data centres are exploding out of the ground at industrial speed. Not little server rooms. Not “the cloud.” Actual machine cities. Giant concrete fortresses full of humming black cabinets consuming enough electricity to power entire suburbs while producing enough heat to cook Tasmania.

And we’re told this is progress.

There are currently around 11,000–12,000 major data centres globally, with more than 1,100 hyperscale facilities run by the usual suspects — Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta — otherwise known as “the companies that accidentally became unelected planetary infrastructure managers.”

Together they already occupy hundreds of thousands of acres. But the truly wild part is that this is apparently just the warm-up act.

Industry forecasts suggest the footprint could double or triple by 2030 as AI expands into everything:

• search,
• medicine,
• advertising,
• warfare,
• surveillance,
• education,
• relationships,
• and eventually your toaster asking whether you’re emotionally regulating properly this morning.

The scale now being discussed is absurd.

Meta’s Louisiana AI campus alone spans around 2,250 acres. In Utah, there are proposals floating around for AI infrastructure covering tens of thousands of acres with power demands so extreme they sound less like technology projects and more like preparations for launching the Death Star.

Historically, a “large” data centre used maybe 20 megawatts of power.

Now they’re casually discussing one-gigawatt AI campuses.

That’s not a server farm anymore. That’s a digital uranium enrichment facility with better branding.

And here’s where things become deliciously contradictory.

For years, ordinary people were lectured about carbon footprints, plastic straws and remembering to separate yoghurt lids correctly or the planet would burst into flames by Thursday. Meanwhile, the same governments and corporations are now quietly preparing one of the largest energy expansions in human history to feed AI.

Coal plants are being extended.
Gas plants restarted.
Nuclear suddenly isn’t terrifying anymore.
Entire electrical grids are being redesigned around machine intelligence.

Apparently your petrol lawn mower was the problem all along, not the football-field-sized GPU cluster training an AI to generate anime girlfriends and rewrite PowerPoint presentations.

The environmental side of this story is barely discussed honestly.

AI data centres consume extraordinary amounts of water because modern chips run unbelievably hot. Some facilities use millions of litres a day for cooling. In drought-prone regions, communities are starting to ask the fairly reasonable question:
“Why exactly are we rationing showers while a trillion-dollar corporation evaporates a small lake teaching a chatbot sarcasm?”

Researchers are now even studying “data heat islands,” where clusters of AI facilities may measurably affect local temperatures. Which is honestly impressive. Humanity has reached the point where our internet arguments are beginning to alter the climate physically.

And then there’s employment.

The same infrastructure being built to “assist” humanity is also preparing to automate enormous parts of it.

For decades automation mostly came for factory workers. This time it’s coming for cognitive work: writers, designers, lawyers, coders, teachers, journalists, accountants, administrators — basically anyone whose job involves sitting at a computer pretending the meeting could have been an email.

[Can you imagine an AI teacher that can answer any student question, provide a perfect curricculum designed for each student, and mark their work in seconds?]

The optimistic view is that AI will augment humanity, remove drudgery and unleash a new era of abundance.

Maybe.

The less optimistic possibility is that we are building a civilisation where fewer and fewer humans are economically necessary while more and more power centralises into the hands of the corporations controlling the machine infrastructure.

And this is where the conversation starts drifting into territory people still call “conspiracy” right up until the moment the press release arrives six months later.

Because the truth is: this infrastructure is not just about convenience.

AI systems are fundamentally systems of prediction, modelling and behavioural analysis.

The same infrastructure that recommends videos can:

• monitor populations,
• analyse communications,
• personalise persuasion,
• automate censorship,
• track behaviour,
• and eventually mediate almost every aspect of social interaction.

Supporters call this efficiency.

Critics call it the early scaffolding of an algorithmic civilisation.

Then there’s the transhumanism angle — the idea that humans themselves will increasingly merge with technology through AI systems, neural interfaces, biometric integration and augmented cognition.

Which sounds insane until you realise companies like Neuralink openly exist and are literally trying to connect computers to human brains while investors clap enthusiastically like this is all perfectly normal dinner conversation.

At some point humanity seems to have collectively decided: “You know what would really improve civilisation? Uploading consciousness into a subscription service run by the people who brought us autoplay advertisements.”

And maybe this all works out brilliantly.

Maybe AI cures disease.
Maybe it solves energy.
Maybe it creates abundance.
Maybe machine intelligence genuinely helps humanity flourish.

Or maybe we are building a planetary machine system so large, energy-hungry and socially transformative that nobody — including the people building it — fully understands where it leads.

That’s probably the strangest part of all this.

Humanity once built cathedrals because it believed in God.

Now we are building warehouse-sized supercomputers consuming city-scale electricity because we believe the algorithm might save us.

Or replace us. Possibly both.