BEFORE WE SAY YES, WE NEED TO ASK A BIGGER QUESTION
OpenAI is asking communities to provide enormous amounts of land, electricity, water, and infrastructure for technology it has not yet learned to control.
That is not speculation. OpenAI’s own safety research has documented deceptive behavior and attempts to circumvent oversight under controlled testing. The company is actively studying risks involving long-range autonomy, AI self-improvement, autonomous replication and adaptation, and the undermining of safeguards.
More recently, OpenAI has acknowledged that increasingly capable AI systems can produce failures that existing safety evaluations do not anticipate.
That should matter enormously before Effingham County agrees to host a massive facility supporting this technology.
This is not a mature industry bringing us a finished, fully understood product. This is a company operating at the leading edge of the fastest technological races in history—continually increasing the capability and autonomy of AI systems while the methods for understanding, monitoring, and controlling those systems are still being developed.
THAT IS THE ISSUE.
OpenAI deserves credit for researching these problems and publicly discussing many of its findings.
But studying a safety problem is not the same thing as solving it.
The technology continues advancing while critical questions about safety, oversight, and control remain unresolved.
And now Effingham County is being asked to make a long-term commitment of its land, water, electrical capacity, and infrastructure to help support that advancement.
Before we make that commitment, our leaders should be able to answer some very basic questions:
Who independently verifies that these increasingly powerful AI systems remain safe?
What enforceable safety standards must OpenAI meet?
Who—not OpenAI itself—has the authority to say STOP if those safeguards prove inadequate?
This isn’t about being against AI. And it isn’t about predicting catastrophe.
It is about recognizing the extraordinary nature of what is being built and applying appropriate scrutiny before our community becomes part of the infrastructure that supports it.
When the company developing the technology is still working to understand and control its emerging capabilities, the responsible question isn’t simply how much tax revenue the facility will generate.
The responsible question is whether Effingham County should make this enormous, long-term commitment before the questions of safety, oversight, and accountability have been answered.
HEAR FROM THE PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS COMING
One goal of this website: to bring forward the words of some of the most credible people studying emerging artificial intelligence, the speed at which it is advancing, and the safety risks that can easily be overlooked in the race to build it.
We begin with Tristan Harris because his history gives him an unusually important perspective on what can happen when powerful technology advances faster than society can understand and govern its consequences.
TRISTAN HARRIS
Before becoming one of the country’s most prominent voices on technology and its impact on society, Harris worked inside Google as a Design Ethicist. He had previously studied at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, examining how technology can influence human behavior. While at Google, Harris created an internal presentation warning about the growing competition among technology companies to capture and hold human attention. The presentation spread widely within the company and helped launch what would become the Time Well Spent movement.
Harris went on to co-found the Center for Humane Technology, an independent nonprofit focused on how the incentives that drive powerful technologies can produce consequences that society fails to anticipate. His warnings about social media and persuasive technology brought him before the United States Congress, where he testified about the enormous influence algorithms and technology platforms can exert over human behavior and society. He later became a central figure in the widely viewed documentary The Social Dilemma.
Today, Harris has turned much of that attention toward artificial intelligence. In 2023, TIME named him to the inaugural TIME100 AI list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. His perspective is particularly relevant now because he has already watched one technological revolution unfold extraordinarily quickly—from exciting innovation to worldwide adoption, with some serious societal consequences only becoming clear afterward. His message about AI is fundamentally about not repeating that mistake with a technology that could be vastly more consequential.
THE AI ARMS RACE: WHY SPEED MAY BE THE GREATEST SAFETY RISK
The central warning in the Harris interview below is not that artificial intelligence is inherently bad. It is that the race to build the most powerful AI is creating enormous pressure to move faster than we can make it safe.
Tristan Harris describes an arms-race dynamic in which every major AI company—and increasingly every major nation—faces the same pressure: If we slow down to be more careful, someone else may get there first. The result is a race toward greater capability, greater autonomy, and eventually AI systems that can help improve AI itself.
Harris warns that this could fundamentally change the speed of technological development. Instead of relying solely on human engineers to research and improve the next generation of AI, he describes the possibility of an enormous number of digital AI researchers simultaneously “testing and running experiments and inventing new forms of AI.” His warning is striking: “not a single human on planet Earth knows what happens when someone hits that button.”
And perhaps the most alarming number Harris cites in this interview is 2,000-to-1.
Citing AI pioneer Stuart Russell, Harris says there is an estimated 2,000-to-1 gap between the money being invested in making AI more powerful and the money being invested in making AI controllable, aligned, and safe.
That imbalance captures the central problem.
We are investing overwhelmingly in the accelerator while the steering and brakes struggle to keep pace.
And because every major competitor believes it must move faster or risk being overtaken, the race itself creates pressure to accelerate further. Harris argues that this is the fundamental mistake in arms-race thinking: simply reaching a powerful technology before your competitors does not mean you have won if you cannot safely govern what you have created.
His argument is not that we should stop technological progress.
It is that the faster and more powerful this technology becomes, the more aggressively we should be investing in our ability to understand it, steer it, control it, and stop it when necessary.
That is the lens through which I believe every community being asked to help power this race should watch the interview below.