Thank goodness Earl Warren Showgrounds — known for antique shows and carnival rides — will not morph into a data center to hoard our water and pollute our eardrums for the burgeoning AI frenzy. I doff my vintage beret to showgrounds CEO Ben Sprague for saying a big fat no dice to Global Stack USA, the company on the prowl across state fairgrounds for parking lots to house mini-data centers.
Now if only we could stop the growth of AI-driven autonomous warfare and rocket launches along our coast. The dolphins, whales, and birds would be so happy.
Hold the celebration.
REACH, a public-private partnership based in San Luis Obispo, has convened the “Uplift Central Coast Coalition” to promise a job bonanza with expansion of aerospace, weapons production, precision manufacturing, and other industries across a six-county area, from Ventura to Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo to Monterey to San Benito to Santa Cruz.
The policy people, with more than $23 million in state grants, received $250,000 in seed money in 2021 from the County of Santa Barbara to fill the anticipated job loss resulting from the closure — which never happened — of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
Nevertheless, REACH (Regional Economic Action Coalition) and the Uplift Coalition seek to unlock $800 million in federal funding for Vandenberg’s “Spaceport of the Future,” to add new launch pads for Elon Musk to annually blast 200 Falcon-9 AI-guided booster rockets into low earth orbit by 2030, sending more sonic booms across the Central Coast to rattle windows, crack foundations, and terrorize marine life. Each rocket carries dozens of satellites that burn up in two to five years.
Picture swirling space traffic colliding into satellites and the burning aluminum oxide eating the ozone layer.
The spaceport will also further accommodate testing of ICBM dummy nuclear warheads known as The Sentinel, a Minuteman replacement with 20 times the lethality of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima. Such testing is arguably a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which obligates the U.S. to pursue nuclear disarmament. In the meantime, with the expansion underway, Vandenberg Space Force Base searches for an AI agent that “can centralize various data streams” to keep 400 nuclear Minuteman missiles ready for launch — just in case Dr. Strangelove orders the obliteration of humankind.
A REACH webinar on October 7, “Autonomous Systems and Advanced Air Mobility,” tossed around politically correct buzz words — ecosystem, footprint — while touting partnerships with the Navy at Point Mugu and the Space Force at Vandenberg, as well as “opportunities” in the labor pipeline: UC Santa Barbara, Cal Poly, and Cuesta College — to steer students into careers that service the military-industrial-surveillance complex.
Autonomous systems include AI-driven drones that, with minimal or no human intervention, can target military and civilian operations during war and genocide.
Proponents of artificial intelligence and machine learning list benefits that range from cancer screening to climate prediction to wildfire prevention — all of which sound fantastic, but — to invoke a cliché — the devil is in the details. AI should never be used in warfare unless we want the whole world to look like Gaza under rubble.
When a member of the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition asked the REACH webinar hosts if there would be a Q and A session, the answer was no.
Nonetheless, we all must ask questions — of REACH, as well as lawmakers, local, state, and federal, who perhaps with the best of intentions endorsed further commercialization and militarization of space.
It’s time to reconsider blanket support for autonomous drones and increased rocket launches that could pollute the cosmos, target innocents, and train our youth for an AI world in which their labor becomes obsolete.
Let’s press the pause button before our coastal electeds rush to the finish line — one that in Musk’s Orwellian world includes a constellation of orbital data centers.
Marcy Winograd is the co-chair of the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition.
You must be logged in to post a comment.