With all the hype around AI and data centers today, the power and potential for AI to solve our problems sometimes gets lost in the message. So here is my take on the potential of AI to solve a few major problems and a suggestion about the data center location issue facing our country.
This is not an article about the causes of those failures, the countless amounts of money that have been spent trying to remedy the problem, or the efforts of people that (mostly) have been motivated to change outcomes for those that are being failed by the education systems in our cities. Instead, I focus on the outcome side of this issue and suggest that AI has the potential to finally bridge the education gap in the US.
For far too long, our urban centers (i.e. our cities) have been failing to educate large swaths of children in those cities. There is a documented difference in educational outcomes for residents of our cities with access to private education and those that are dependent on the public school systems to educate them. This is the “Education Gap”, although greatly oversimplified in this article.
As AI progresses, there is a conceivable future where every student is provided with an AI tutor that knows each student personally, their individual learning styles, and possible impediments to learning such as dyslexia or other learning disabilities. This AI tutor will not take the place of the classroom teacher, but instead would supplement the instruction that the teacher provides and tailor its assistance to the individual student. Many teachers try to accommodate this need, but there are far too many students and far too few teachers to meet this need.
In my hypothetical, a teacher focuses on providing the core components of the learning objective (i.e. arithmetic) to the entire class. Then, instead of the traditional boring repetitive homework, quizzes, and examinations to determine if the student learned what the lesson intended, the student would engage with the AI tutor as “the homework.” The AI tutor would engage with the student and identify any issues, tailor supplemental activities that are intended to raise the learning level, and report back to the teacher when additional assistance may be needed. This is possible today with AI technology as it currently exists.
But AI requires processing power from data centers. Data centers require infrastructure and adequate facilities. Many US cities are plagued by miles of empty buildings in industrial, residential, and mixed-use areas. In addition to the massive data center projects being undertaken in our suburbs and rural areas, we should construct data centers in our cities. These projects would bring needed jobs to the economies of these areas, bring much needed tax revenues that can be used to enhance the budgets of these cities, and they would also provide new uses for buildings and land that are sitting vacant as our economy continues to evolve.
Locating data centers in our cities would bring a dual solution to two of the issues facing those geographic areas in the US today. These new data centers would be located in the same places where the AI they provide will empower a new generation of students that will no longer be constrained by where they live.
