Last month, Meta launched an "AI is good, really" PR campaign. My response: Words are fine, but why not cut people checks?
On Monday, Meta announced it's taking my (free) advice: It says it will create a $1 billion fund to boost communities where it is building AI data centers.
There's very little public detail about the fund. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentions it briefly in a long memo explaining (again) why "The Future is for Everyone" (the memo literally recycles lines from a WSJ op-ed Zuckerberg published last month called "The AI Future is for Everyone").
There's no mention of how many communities or people this is meant to help, or over what period the money is meant to be spent. But a person familiar with the plan tells me the idea is to spend the money in addition to the investments Meta is making directly in its data centers.
That would be different from what happened in rural Richland Parish, Louisiana, where teachers are getting a one-time bonus of up to $50,000 because of a Meta data center: That money is coming from a tax bill Meta paid in conjunction with its construction costs. Writing a check directly to communities and the people who live there, over and above what Meta spends on data center construction, staffing, and taxes, seems like money well spent.
And it's definitely money Meta can afford. Last year, the company reported profits of $60 billion.
None of which means this will work. There is deep-seated anger, mistrust, and fear about data centers (I highly recommend the recent reporting about communities responding to data centers in Michigan and Wisconsin by journalist Jasmine Sun). There are also deep-seated bad vibes about Zuckerberg and Meta in particular, and about Big Tech in general.
And there's also the fact that social networks — the products that give Zuckerberg and Meta the money to invest billions in data centers — are the same products that make it easier for people to organize against the data centers. And which can also be blamed for people being dubious of… everything.
As technology columnist Max Read puts it: "The low-trust environment cultivated over the past couple decades by the tech industry's flagship companies has now created real obstacles to its ambitions. Now that tech giants are the institutions—and effectively in charge of US industrial policy—they are getting a first-hand lesson in how corrosive to long-term planning institutional mistrust can be."
But again: While AI can be legitimately scary for lots of reasons, almost all of them have to do with what might happen, one day. Putting cash in people's pockets today may be the best tool the tech guys have. And they have plenty of cash to spare.