The Invisible Neighbor  ## Metadata - Author: [[IRL: Online Life is Real Life]] - Full Title: The Invisible Neighbor - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/1117a0e8-03d8-498b-a194-d318fa19dbae ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Gunshot Detection Escalates Policing** - Nat Palmer shares how AI gunshot detection led to armed police responses in Chicago neighborhoods. - This technology escalated tensions after high-profile police violence cases, fueling activism against the system. Transcript: Bridget Todd In 2021, a 13-year boy named Adam Toledo was shot by police on Chicago's west side. They came in response to a gunfire alert. Nat Palmer And they were out there. They were shooting guns. You know, like, let's not act like that isn't a thing. But, like, white kids shoot guns in the country all the time. Bridget Todd That's Nat Palmer, a community organizer in Chicago. Nat Palmer So, like, they were out there shooting guns. And ShotSpotter heard it and sent the police there. Bridget Todd ShotSpotter is an AI security system that uses acoustic sensors that listen for gunshots. The company behind it is called Sound Thinking. Nat Palmer And then if they think someone's shooting, like, they come in there ready to shoot. And they did that. And that really pushed a lot of folks. That's Nat to the edge, especially, like, this was right off, like, George Floyd and a year after the 2020 uprisings. And, you know, thankfully, like, organizing doesn't stop after the uprisings, like, no matter how small they are. So, you know, people picked it up and were like, no, we need to get this out of here. This can't happen again. Nat ([Time 0:01:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/01b0e444-7b3b-4bda-b5ea-304e6bd3f89f)) - **Community-Driven Surveillance Resistance** - Fight AI surveillance by engaging with your community's perspective on public safety. - Avoid relying solely on data arguments; focus on redefining safety beyond policing and surveillance. Transcript: Bridget Todd What advice do you have for people who are interested in fighting AI surveillance tech in their city, like from Chicago to D.C. And anywhere and everywhere in between? Nat Palmer If you're like me and you want to build a new world where public safety is not based on exploitation, don't use data arguments. We're not fighting for a more efficient shot spotter. We're not fighting for a more efficient police response. We are fighting for a brand new way to keep our people safe. So get into your community, figure out how people feel about public safety. And I promise you, you will find all of the understanding you need around why surveillance is not safety. ([Time 0:07:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/228cb3d2-2b14-47c0-98a1-28549568b49a)) - **Rethinking Data Center Impact** - Data centers underpin AI but consume massive energy and water resources, impacting environments. - Architect Marina Otero Verzier envisions data centers integrated locally, reusing heat and decentralizing to empower communities. Transcript: Bridget Todd AI is everywhere now, right? Not just up in the cloud, down here on the ground, and in our cities. And more AI means more data centers, those giant warehouses full of computers that crunch the data to make our chatbots chat. We imagine that all the digital infrastructures are floating over our heads. Marina Otero Verzier AI, and in general, every aspect of the digital world, needs vast amounts of physical infrastructures, not only cables, but also huge infrastructures, buildings that are called Data centers. And those consume incredible amounts of energy and water, emit and heat. Bridget Todd Marina Otero is an architect from Spain. She researches the impact of digital infrastructures worldwide and currently teaches at Columbia University in New York. Marina Otero Verzier The weirdest thing I saw in a data center, it was wonderful. It was that the surplus heat coming from servers was used for growing mealworms. And those mealworms were later fed to chickens. So I was very impressed by this combination of, you know, machines and living organisms. So I happen to live near one of the biggest data center hubs in the U.S. Bridget Todd And they look like nondescript office buildings. You wouldn't have any idea what goes on there. It almost has a militaristic vibe. Not so welcoming. Marina Otero Verzier Every time that we are connected to our phones, that we are watching TV, like that is streaming, all the time we are actually connecting with data centers. Those are the places where all the information is stored and is processed. The reason why cities want to have these infrastructures is because generally the closer they are to us, fastest the connection it is. So it's a question of latency. So that's one of the reasons. The other is that with the development of artificial intelligence, many countries don't want to be left behind. And they are constructing new infrastructures to be able to train and work with AI. Bridget Todd Marina says there are well over 10,000 data centers around the world, and right now, construction is booming. I bet there'll be one close to where you live too. Environmental groups everywhere say companies are not transparent enough about just how much energy and water they're using. Marina Otero Verzier If a new data center will be built in Madrid, where I live, I will be very concerned about the water usage, especially in places that are affected by drought, like Spain and Chile and many Other places in the world. These infrastructures consume millions of liters of water. And most of the time, populations are not aware. But also governments tend to overlook these questions because they prefer to have investments. And they very easily give licenses to companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon. Bridget Todd It's possible to design data centers that have their own sources of energy, but that rarely happens. And even then, the scale of water pumped through pipes around the servers and other equipment to keep them from overheating is incredible. Just 60 data centers can consume the same amount of water as New York City in a year. In Chile, Marina mediated policy talks between environmental activists, the government, and tech companies around Chile's capital city, Santiago. Marina Otero Verzier It is fundamental that architects start to understand and also intervene in the design of data centers. The reason is that, so far, data centers have been primarily designed by engineers. We don't have anything against engineers, but the question is that most of the time data centers are constructed as architectures that have no relation to the environment around them, Although they very much depend on them and depend on their water and the energy, etc. So this is where I think architecture comes to reimagine how these infrastructures could be, you know, part of the cities, could be much more integrated in our daily lives. Bridget Todd For example, Marina says residual heat from data centers could be used more often to warm homes or greenhouses. And here's a fun fact. In the Paris 2024 Olympics, one of the swimming pools was heated by a data center. In one of my trips, I went to Sweden. Marina Otero Verzier And in the north of Sweden, near the Arctic Circle, is Luleå. And in the city is one of the most important meta data centers, and many of their data centers are located there because of the cold temperatures, because the amount of energy that you Have to put into the system in order to cool down the server room is minimum, because the surrounding climate, environment is already very cold. So Luleo is also the site of one incredible institution called RISE, where new prototypes for data centers are being built. So when I visited, I saw some of the most amazing prototypes. And one of them was the reuse of surplus heat from servers to, you know, grow worms. But there were also the possibility of reusing surplus heat for growing vegetables, creating a circular economy in the region. Marina has visited data centers float on a river. Bridget Todd She even talked to a company with a prototype for a data center that orbits in outer space. But lowering the environmental impact of data centers also means thinking differently about how we use data and computing power. Marina Otero Verzier Some of the designs that also I found more exciting are decentralized designs. For instance, the company Carnot has developed a small data center that you can have it in your living room. So instead of having these incredible huge warehouses full of servers, you have something that is very similar to a heater that is able to heat your living room. And it does so because it's a small data center. And the functioning of this server is actually generating heat for free for you in exchange of having this data center in your living room. So there are so many different ([Time 0:09:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d2336a4e-903c-41e8-8687-3e14c2585259)) - **AI Misrepresents Dakar's Reality** - Linda Dounia Rebeiz found AI image generators poorly represented Dakar, showing outdated and decayed scenes. - This mismatch sparked her to create a custom dataset reflecting the real vibrancy of her city. Transcript: Linda Dounia Rebeiz To beautiful cities around the world, I just want to come home. Linda Dunia-Rabez lives in Dakar, Senegal, a country of 18 million people on the coast of West Africa. It's the biggest city in Senegal, but it's still so chill compared to other cities that I've visited. And I think the ocean has a lot to do with that. You can almost always go to the beach. Like if something is bothering you, you just take a five-minute walk and you're in the ocean. Literally in the ocean, right? Bridget Todd Back when AI was becoming popular, Linda was playing with image generators like DALI and Stable Diffusion. An image generator is a generative AI model that creates images based on text prompts. Linda was interested in what's behind an image that gives it meaning. With an AI generator, that can be a bit opaque. She was already training AI models as an artist, but this was different. Linda Dounia Rebeiz Maybe this is a common experience, but the first thing I tried to do was to just prompt for things that I was familiar with to see how good it was at representing them. I literally just rode Dakar and then I sent in the prompt. That was the only prompt. And the images were cartoon images. And it was this dusty road and palm trees but the architecture was like I was like this is nothing I've never seen anything like this in the car it would always look it didn't look like there Was any activity like it looked like someone tried to make a building and then stopped halfway through there was a lot of, for lack of a better word, like decay. A lot of buildings going bad, roads not being good. Even in the embodiments, like the people, the cars, everything looked rusty and old and bad looking in general. ([Time 0:17:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/956e341d-16ef-4d2e-8c7e-4b2fb85ce3eb)) - **AI Data Bias as Historical Artifact** - AI training data reflects historical and cultural biases embedded in internet archives. - Linda likens localized AI models to varied gardens, cautioning against monoculture that erases diversity and context. Transcript: Linda Dounia Rebeiz We are starting to see more content coming from countries that are not at the center of tech development and tech evolution. But we're sort of presented with a historical artifact of the internet with AI, which is that for the most part, a lot of the internet was very skewed towards very specific communities. What AI is trained on today is almost like a time machine. Like it's an archive of who we've been online. So if you think about archives that have been digitized and that have been put on the internet, then you realize that the problem doesn't start with the internet. The problem starts with way, way before that. It's how we collect data and how we store it. And where we care to do that in the first place. Bridget Todd Because she wanted a better representation of the real, vibrant and colorful place Dakar is now, Linda developed her own data set of images for an art project called Blur Theory. She blends her own photos and sketches of Dakar with synthetically generated ones. The results are impressionistic portraits of her city. Linda Dounia Rebeiz If I can't prompt for my city and have an accurate depiction of what it looks like, or at least close, what does it say about how others perceive where I live? What does it say about people who have come around, taken pictures, put it online? I try not to throw blame around. So it's not just on the people training these models. It's also on us, people living here, to realize that we just don't have a lot of that data online. And maybe there are national archives with photographs sitting somewhere waiting to be digitized. Or maybe the models are just biased, even if they have the right data. They just project certain biases on how places like the car are perceived in the world. A lot of Linda's art is about exploring alternate realities using AI. But she also imagines a different future for AI itself. If one person is to make a decision of how do you build a data set to represent an entire city, you're bound to run into this very complicated question. What do I show? What don't I show? But if you open it up to more people to do it, you get that multiplicity of perspectives. It shouldn't be one person doing this kind of work or one entity or one company. What I want for the future of AI is more data agency in the sense that I want people to be able to determine how they want to be perceived and to have control over how they want to be perceived. Bridget Todd Large mainstream AI models depend on gathering as much training data as possible. Linda Dounia Rebeiz Linda says smaller, more specific models would reduce bias. And she has a message for Silicon Valley. You've decided that you have created technology that is so-called universal. And it couldn't be from the truth. And that's always been the case. So I think the philosophy and the ideals and the narratives that accompany tech needs to be examined and unpacked and also debunked, right? For people to know that using Midjourney, using Dali, whatever, comes with an asterisk of a strong leaning and bias towards a particular way of life and a particular kind of person, Particular cities. I would compare homegrown AI models to tending to gardens. And it's a very fun and relevant analogy because we're now in the phase where the internet, everything looks the same. ([Time 0:19:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e4c34a1c-3b68-4c1d-99ac-c0559bc34612)) - **Personal Take on AI City Images** - Bridget tested AI image generators with the prompt Washington, D.C., yielding generic government buildings. - She contrasts this with her real city, which is diverse, colorful, and vibrant. Transcript: Bridget Todd Would you plant in your AI garden? The time for us to plant the seeds together is now. After talking to Linda, I went to ChatGPT and wrote Washington, D.C. As a prompt. And it generated an image of a bunch of U.S. Government buildings as seen from above. And I mean, okay, that's not totally wrong, but that's certainly not my D.C. My D.C. Is a colorful, dynamic, vibrant city full of people from all countries, all walks of life. And that's how I want my A.I. To be. ([Time 0:24:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/43ba7e6b-b7d4-4d6a-b3fa-38f26fac4dd1))