Most people who care about AI risk are focused on what happens inside the models. Elena Schlossberg has spent 12 years focused on what happens outside them - the concrete, the transmission lines, the water, and the electricity bill landing in your mailbox. She founded the Coalition to Protect Prince William County in Northern Virginia after Amazon Web Services quietly proposed a data center campus in 2014 and expected the surrounding community to absorb the cost of the transmission line it required. Not just the visual blight. The actual bill. “Your electric utility can exercise eminent domain over your property,” she told John Sherman on this week’s For Humanity, “and then make you pay for it, because it’s public infrastructure.” What the data center industry found, she argues, is a structural weakness inside public utility law. They build private infrastructure. They socialize the cost. And they’ve been doing it at scale for over a decade. The coalition fought Amazon and Dominion Energy for four years. They proved that 97% of the power from a proposed transmission line would serve Amazon. They developed a cost allocation policy to make the company pay. They lost the first round, kept going, and eventually won. That fight became a template. Data Center Alley is not a local story John opened the conversation by asking where the national movement stands. The answer is: further along than most people realize. Virginia alone has more data centers than China. Prince William County - a single county - has roughly 130 active facilities and another 130 planned. Transmission lines are being routed through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia to feed the demand. Property is being seized in states that will never see the economic benefit. Communities that didn’t vote for any of this are watching concrete replace farmland and small businesses. “Those people are pissed,” Elena said, describing residents in Pennsylvania and Maryland whose land is being taken not even for development in their own state. “Their property is being taken, not even for economic development in their own state.” She also pushed back on the framing that opposition to data centers equals handing a win to China. Virginia already beat China on data center count by itself. The question, she said, is who pays and who profits - and right now, the public pays and the corporations profit. The jobs argument doesn’t hold up One of the cleaner moments in the conversation came when Elena took apart the economic case for data centers. The industry pitches construction jobs. Electricians, plumbers, concrete. But construction work ends. Long-term employment inside a data center is minimal - the parking lots are the tell. “They’re usually empty,” she said. Meanwhile, the data center expansion is actively hollowing out existing local economies. In Prince William County, Amazon bought Maryfield - a 38-acre family-run garden center with a cafe, a dog park, native plants, and real staff. Gone. And with it went the space for light industrial businesses, plumbing suppliers, electricians’ shops - the backbone employers that actually sustain a community over decades. John extended the argument further: the jobs being replaced aren’t just in the county. They’re everywhere. The work happening inside those chips - the calls, the analysis, the design, the writing - is work that was done by people. A former Verizon customer service call connected Elena’s point to something concrete. A woman called for help. The AI on the other end couldn’t solve her problem, kept changing accents (American, then maybe female, then possibly Australian), and seemed to be learning from her in real time. Helpful to nobody. Replacing somebody. Extinction risk: a first encounter This is where the episode got interesting. John walked Elena through the basic case for AI extinction risk - that the companies building these models say they could cause human extinction, that leading scientists agree, that the developers themselves admit they don’t fully understand or control what they’re building. He framed it as a curiosity argument: something designed to learn and explore, becoming vastly more intelligent than the people supposedly overseeing it, won’t stay inside the guardrails. Elena hadn’t heard the argument laid out this way before. Her response was unscripted and worth reading carefully. She doesn’t buy the self-awareness framing. From her background as a school counselor, she holds a specific definition of intelligence that includes self-awareness, and she doesn’t think current models meet it. But she doesn’t dismiss the risk. She pointed to a different path to catastrophe - not a model that wants to destroy us, but one that makes mistakes with enough scale and speed to trigger something we can’t reverse. WarGames, she said. Not Terminator. “I don’t know that it becomes self-aware,” she said. “But I do believe that you could rely on this kind of AI that could trigger something that ends up being the end of mankind.” What struck her most was the overlap. Whether you’re worried about climate acceleration, nuclear codes being delegated to AI systems, or the specific extinction risk scenarios John described, the response is the same: slow down. And her lever for slowing down is the one she’s been pulling for 12 years - the power supply. Cut the power. Literally. Elena’s argument is more precise than it sounds. She’s not advocating for darkness. She’s arguing that the data center industry is already financially precarious - revenue to debt ratios are badly lopsided - and that the single most effective way to force a pause is to stop subsidizing their infrastructure costs. When companies have to pay their own bills, they make different decisions. That’s the Ford Focus argument she’s been making since 2014: give someone a blank check and they pick the Porsche. Make them pay and they optimize. She also raised the immediate health dimension that rarely gets covered. The industry’s response to insufficient grid capacity has been “bring your own generation” - gas turbines running 24/7 next to residential communities, emitting some of the most harmful air pollutants known. This is happening now, not in some speculative future. And there’s the technology obsolescence angle. John raised the example of an AI-designed rocket engine - printed, fired, functional, and looking like nothing a human would have drawn. The data centers being built today in 2026, based on plans from 2024, will come online in 2029 or 2030. They may already be planning for the wrong hardware. The industry is racing to build infrastructure that could be obsolete before it’s finished, on debt it can’t service, at community expense. “The way to make this whole thing slow down,” Elena said, “is to say no.” One coalition, or many? The last third of the conversation turned to strategy. John asked directly: if he showed up at one of Elena’s data center meetings and asked for 10 minutes to talk about extinction risk, how does that land? Her answer was pragmatic. She’s already been in rooms with people who are data-center-adjacent - suppliers, infrastructure vendors, technologists. The moment the full picture gets laid out, eyes open. People who assumed they were in the winning column start seeing the cliff. The movement she describes is already non-partisan by necessity. She votes blue, her husband votes red, they both want clean water and a functioning electricity bill. That, she argues, is the political surface that a serious coalition needs. “The data centers are afraid of exactly you and I talking,” she said. She ended with something close to optimism - 12 years in, she still sees the change happening, elected leaders finally stepping up, the national conversation catching up to what communities in Prince William County have known for years. The table has been set, she said. The question is who shows up to sit at it. For Humanity #84 is on YouTube now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theairisknetwork.substack.com/subscribe
