The building and location of data centers is one of the few political issues that can cut across party lines and get people to pack town hall meetings. NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is perhaps the most powerful driver of public opinion, as people contemplate their quality of life, access to clean water and reliable energy, and effects on property values. That’s why there is talk of launching data centers into space or submerging them undersea to hide their hideous appearance and mitigate noise and pollution.

No doubt, the explosion of A.I., with its insatiable appetite for gigabytes and sprawling secret “agents,” is driving the expansion of data centers across our land. When I drive through the more rural areas of Virginia these days, my appreciation for nature is ruined by the thought that this Edenic scene may be swallowed up by some tech behemoth. But I temper my doomsayer tendencies by recalling the “Babylon Bee” satire bit suggesting that the majority of data centers are built simply to store your wife’s pictures of the children.

This is meant to be funny but also somewhat illustrative. You, an average Joe or Jane in Anytown USA, at any random moment of any ordinary day, can join millions or billions of other Anyones around the world in entering the most silly questions into your search engine. And you will get an answer in mere moments in the best traditions of GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out). You can even use A.I. to spoof A.I., such as searching for “Ridiculous questions to ask A.I.” A whole host of “Top 10 Questions” will come up along with websites devoted to the senseless topic.

Is this the inane face of A.I. that has launched a thousand data centers? TMI, anyone?

But there are many important and edifying uses of A.I., as Pope Leo XIV stated in his encyclical (Magnifica Humanitas), which also warns that such powerful technology threatens to replace the human factor in various fields. How to use A.I. while avoiding the real and present dangers to our dignity and humanity is not an easy task. Things apparently are moving so fast, even the experts are rattled.

Still, we should not miss the amazing fact that whole libraries and much of the best thinking of humanity are now online and accessible in seconds. While we should not trust A.I. with uniquely human activities such as moral and personal judgments, it is very good at unearthing forgotten facts and computing complex equations. Even with everyday questions, the answers are pretty accurate, or at least on-target enough to lead you toward a reasonable conclusion. Well, most times. The other day I entered two lines of a poem that I wrote on Abelard and Heloise, just to see if anything like it had ever been composed; I was told that the lines came from a 17th century poem by an anonymous author. Well, I guess that proves time travel is real, I chuckled.

Like it or not, we all signed on to the good, the bad, and the ugly of the over-information age when we clicked “Agree” to privacy and user disclosures we didn’t read. Yes, I confess, it’s all my fault. It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch in which a proper British insurance executive sits behind a desk and calmly informs a poor chap that in the teeny-tiny type of the 100-page policy, it clearly says that “any claim you make will not be paid.”

I suspect we will hear those exact words from our tech overlords when we complain that an A.I. bot raided our 401K or stole our identity.

So when you see the ugly steel-and-cement buildings that look like abandoned nuclear fallout shelters advancing on your backyard, go ahead and blame them on your wife’s photo-posting practices. Open a bottle of wine and sit on the porch with her, laugh, and cry as you try to read the small online print of what we’ve brought upon ourselves.