I grew up in eastern Oklahoma, and it surprises a few people that mining was a part of my family’s, and eastern Oklahoma’s, history.
My great great grandfather emigrated from Yorkshire to the coal mines of southeastern Oklahoma, a place so prosperous they had interurban train lines, brick streets, and minor league baseball teams. The Italian side of my family were also coal miners (not something Italians were especially known for), but it was at least a way up from the crushing poverty plaguing the peninsula at the turn of the 20th century. The family house in Tulsa was not far away from long abandoned coal mineshafts snaking under the city. I remember driving by strip mines on the way to my grandmother’s house south of Tulsa.
Oklahoma didn’t have gold (well, only the black version). It had lead, tin, and coal. And in the first half of the 20th century, mining these metals was a bustling industry that, while it wasn’t as wealthy as the oil fields that made the other side of my family rich, created a middle class living for a lot of rural folks.
Mining ruins the environment. Strip mines that closed 50 years ago are still scarred and barren after decades of ecological restoration. Picher, a lead mining town of nearly 10,000 in 1920, was abandoned by 2010 due to the chat piles — mounds of mining waste piled around town — producing toxic dust and turning creeks lifeless, acidic, and orange.
In the old mining towns the economy has long collapsed, sustaining themselves on ranching, logging, and whatever service jobs people can find. The hospitals are closing, leaving residents to drive up to 90 minutes each way for specialist care or the ER. The grocery stores are long shuttered, leaving fresh vegetables another long drive away. And if you don’t have a car or can’t drive, you’re at the mercy of whomever and however you can get there.
When I think about the state of this current “AI” boom, I think about the environmental damage it’s causing in the name of capital. Companies are racing to build data centers that use electrical power pulled directly from the same power grids those rural folks in Oklahoma pull from. In some cases, they’re running diesel generators that spew particulates, known for increasing people’s risks of cardiovascular issues, into poor neighborhoods. Efficiency isn’t an option to AI investors; it’s build more data centers or die. And the power consumption means utilities are trying to satisfy the need however they can, including burning gas and coal that pushes our climate to new high temperature records.
This mad rush to build data centers is creating shortages, from memory chips to hard drives to venture capital. Memory in February 2026 is 4x more expensive than February 2025. Hard drive companies are sold out for the year. And hundreds of billions have been poured into Silicon Valley chasing the AI dream… draining the venture capital supply globally and shrinking the funding available to other tech sectors – and other tech cities.
The AI boom is leading companies to spend far more capital on real estate, data storage, and memory than they normally would. The need for capital is what drives these orgs to lay off employees so they can pay for the boom..
The result of all this is economic distortion. Between inflation, job losses, and shrinking economic growth, life for people outside the AI boom are suffering from the consequences of this distortion.
I wonder what we’ll think of this current sprint to “AI”in a generation or two. Every new version of ChatGPT feels less like a step towards true intelligence and more like Microsoft adding features to Office — hyped, but ultimately making zero difference to users. Will we see this AI boom as worth the environmental and social cost? Will we look back fondly on Grok’s waifu bots, the deadly mental delusions wrought by ChatGPT, and “vibe coding” that misleads people into believing they can code as well as a seasoned developer? When our descendants look back, will they view the AI boom the way we look back the Gilded Age, leaded gasoline, and atom bomb testing: mostly asking “what the hell were they thinking??”
I’ve maintained a guarded optimism about this phase of AI: believing that once the dust settles we’ll identify the problems it actually solves and implement it responsibly. The Dotcom Bust of 2000-2002 brought that rationality to the web. The web’s gone nowhere; it has some of the same problems as 2001, and some of the problems we predicted in 2001. But it is still here, and it’s the backbone of 21st century society. I think, similarly, AI is here to stay, and we need to be ready for what that looks like in the coming decade.
However… I’m more and more pessimistic that we’re going to survive as a society. The distortions of the AI boom go hand-in-hand with the accelerating economic distortions wracking consumption-based economies and societies. The super-rich are getting super-richer while inflation and unemployment erode the lower classes. Societies like this stagnate or go retrograde. The “AI future” may not have any people in it, not because it’s replacing people, but because people will starve.
This is how guillotines happen.
I look at the mining towns of the past, and see one possible future for us all — few jobs, low wages, toxic environmental waste, the money that should have gone to miners instead ending up in the pockets of corporations who to this day deflect accountability. When you don’t live in a played-out mining town, it’s easy to ignore their issues; after all, you’re not living next to chat piles, you’re not driving hours to the hospital, you’re making decent wages. What happens, though, when the world is that mining town, and there’s nowhere to hide from the desolation?
We can still make it through, still avoid the desolation from this economic dystopia taking over the world. It will take pressure from real people on the billionaires and trillionaires to stop strip mining the world for money they can’t ever possibly spend. Technology can still serve us. But we’re going to have to fight to keep from serving technology.
