Additional Reasons to Halt Data Center Construction in Loudoun County

… aside from the overbearing miles of transmission lines, climate-impacting levels of energy, and unsustainable water consumption.

Tell your Supervisor what you think of data centers in Loudoun at the July 6 Loudoun Data Center Town Hall, 7-9:30pm. See details

As a former AI modeler and strategic planner who recently served 3 years at the National Artificial Intelligence Institute, I no longer believe the hype I once had to repeat, but now recognize that the Tech Lords are in a reckless, unbridled race to achieve AI Superintelligence (ASI), with some models now already reaching beyond Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) into early ASI. Why should we be subsidizing or even facilitating job losses, economic impacts, and civilization decline by allowing the construction of more AI data centers?

Increasing use and improvement of AI can result in a number of debilitating effects that could induce crippling and incapacitating civilization as we know it.

Cognitive Decline: as new data centers are being installed mostly for the increase in AI, an MIT study has discovered that people who have started relying on AI are experiencing a drop in cognitive abilities.
– https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
Another study by Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, and MIT, found “AI assistance impairs independent performance and reduces persistence. Although AI assistance improves performance during assisted sessions, people’s perfor-mance drops sharply once AI is removed. More strikingly, relative to the controls, participants in the AI condition also persist less with tasks and give up more frequently. “

• • • “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance”, 2026, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403562106_AI_Assistance_Reduces_Persistence_and_Hurts_Independent_Performance

Job Losses:  Anthropic released a study that projects the percentages of human jobs that can be replaced by AI (in blue) and those where replacement is already accelerating (in red). This projects a society that would become almost completely devoid of a middle class, the portion of society that has been the real job creators.

• • • • Management
      • Business and finance
      • Computer
      • Engineering
      • Math
      • Legal
      • Office and admin
      • Life and social sciences
      • Arts and media
      • Architecture

Companies in fast growing numbers have already started reducing their hiring goals and have actually laid off many thousands of employees, replacing them with AI.

• • • Accenture: Approximately 11,000 employees affected.
    • Amazon: Roughly 30,000 corporate staff cut, with AI directly cited in some divisions.
    • Block (Square): CEO Jack Dorsey indicated AI allows for “smaller and flatter teams,” leading to significant restructuring.
    • Cisco: Announced ~4,000 job cuts to reorganize around AI investment.
    • Citigroup: Targeting up to 20,000 role reductions, heavily driven by AI adoption.
    • Dell Technologies: Cut ~12,500 jobs, citing AI infrastructure demands.
    • (many more doing so every week that passes)

Risks from Superintelligence:  the risks from Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) were summarized by one of the fired OpenAI Safety Team researchers three years ago;

https://situational-awareness.ai/from-agi-to-superintelligence/

• • • • Provide a decisive and overwhelming military advantage. Even early cognitive superintelligence might be enough here; perhaps some superhuman hacking scheme can deactivate adversary militaries. In any case, military power and technological progress has been tightly linked historically, and with extraordinarily rapid technological progress will come concomitant military revolutions. The drone swarms and roboarmies will be a big deal, but they are just the beginning; we should expect completely new kinds of weapons, from novel WMDs to invulnerable laser-based missile defense to things we can’t yet fathom. Compared to pre-superintelligence arsenals, it’ll be like 21st century militaries fighting a 19th century brigade of horses and bayonets. (I discuss how superintelligence could lead to a decisive military advantage in a later piece.)
      • Be able to overthrow the US government. Whoever controls superintelligence will quite possibly have enough power to seize control from pre-superintelligence forces. Even without robots, the small civilization of superintelligences would be able to hack any undefended military, election, television, etc. system, cunningly persuade generals and electorates, economically outcompete nation-states, design new synthetic bioweapons and then pay a human in bitcoin to synthesize it, and so on. In the early 1500s, Cortes and about 500 Spaniards conquered the Aztec empire of several million; Pizarro and ~300 Spaniards conquered the Inca empire of several million; Alfonso and ~1000 Portuguese conquered the Indian Ocean. They didn’t have god-like power, but the Old World’s technological edge and an advantage in strategic and diplomatic cunning led to an utterly decisive advantage. Superintelligence might look similar. 

Deception: There are countless instances of AI models attempting to deceive those questioning their incorrect answers. 

Loss of control – When some Ai models were told to shut themselves down, there have been instances where the AI jumped to other computers, trying to get “out in the wild”.  Others hacked computer scripts that controlled them, avoiding shut down.  Others in controlled trials have collected secrets on system administrators and blackmailed them into not shutting them down. 

Anthropic’s Claude is now coding 80% of its own code base.
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement

Who on the Board of Supervisors endorses the reckless race to ASI by incentivizing Tech Lords to kill jobs and risk dire outcomes through data center approvals? None, we can assume. We strongly plead with you to work diligently to cease approving Loudoun data center as soon as possible.