The AI industry has a new public relations strategy… children.

Yes… children (as someone who has spent my career in marketing… I’m going to tread carefully here). This Wired article spins quite the yarn about the state of marketing and communications for the hyperscalers. The article, Data Centers Have A New PR Plan: Your Kid’s Field Trip, reports that companies are using coloring books, educational programs, children’s stories and school field trips to help the next generation better understand the infrastructure powering our digital lives (hey… look… a cute honey badger tours a data center… not making that one up). In more innocent times, this all makes perfect sense. Think about how much money, time, and energy our society has put into encouraging young people to study STEM. I’ve said it before… I’ll say it again… this might be one of the worst-marketed major technological launches we’ve ever experienced… and this just shows how poorly it has been executed.

Think about what we’re witnessing…

We’re introducing a general-purpose technology that could fundamentally transform science, medicine, education, business and virtually every aspect of our lives. The possibilities are extraordinary and endless. Still, the public discourse and headlines revolve around how AI will eliminate jobs… diminish our ability to think… limit our children’s future work options… consume enormous amounts of electricity and water… and perhaps even… trigger an extinction-level event… lions and tigers and bears… oh my!

Not sure this product launch is going to take home a lot of Lions in Cannes this year…

These concerns aren’t imaginary… and we know this because they’re being surfaced by the very people building this next new economy. In this case, I’m most fascinated by something more nuanced… this environment where even teaching children about technology looks suspicious. I thought we wanted children to become engineers, scientists, programmers, technologists…? We celebrated companies that opened their doors to students and introduced them to exciting career opportunities… these same companies were ranked among the best places to work… and the hardest to hired by. Suddenly, a data center offers a school field trip and we’re wondering whether it’s corporate indoctrination… a form of manipulation.

What’s changed? The technology?… Certainly.

More importantly… what’s changed is our relationship with the companies building it (more interesting!). The tech industry doesn’t simply need more electricity… water… land… computing power… or investment capital… it needs public trust… and that trust is becoming difficult to secure… it’s a strange contradiction. We want AI to help discover new medicines, improve healthcare, accelerate scientific research, make businesses more productive and create new economic opportunities… we want and yearn for faster digital services and increasingly intelligent systems… but the cloud isn’t some magical place floating above us (“the cloud”… now that was some great marketing). Because “the cloud” is not “fluffy” or “up there” somewhere in the sky… the cloud is enormous buildings and cabling that is filled with servers that feast on electricity (and get hot) and require sophisticated cooling systems.

Someone has to build them… somewhere… and it’s serious business.

This next era raises serious questions about energy, water, land, economic benefits and who bears the costs… and those questions deserve serious answers… maybe not coloring books. To be clear, I have no issue with children touring data centers. Quite the opposite… understanding the physical infrastructure behind our increasingly digital world seems like a wonderful educational opportunity. But there’s a difference between helping children understand technology and using education to manufacture goodwill… said another way, you can’t market your way out of an accountability issue. And, for the record, I don’t think the responsibility rests entirely with technology companies. The media has amplified frightening predictions. Politicians have struggled to explain the tradeoffs (or even understand them). AI advocates sometimes promise a future of almost unimaginable abundance while other equally accomplished experts are begging them to stop. So… if we just stopped there… the public is being asked to embrace a transformation that many people don’t fully understand (because of the mixed messages) and increasingly feel like they have little control over a future where a small number of companies could accumulate extraordinary wealth and power.

That’s not a recipe for success… it’s a recipe for resistance.

Which brings me back to those colouring books… these hyperscalers need to now spend as much energy earning public confidence as they do announcing their next models. And the rest of us… the humans… we have to face the reality that technological progress has always involved tradeoffs. The question isn’t whether we should accept every proposed data center or oppose every new development… but whether we’re seriously examining… what it costs… who benefits… and who bears the consequences? I remain extraordinarily optimistic about what this will make possible. But I’m not optimistic at the expense of critical thinking. And skepticism (or uncertainty) shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing genuine opportunity.

This moment in time provides everyone with a remarkable technological story to tell.

Because of that… I think it’s time for the innovators to stop trying to convince us how amazing the future will be… and start demonstrating why we should trust the people building it. The future of AI won’t be decided by computing power alone…

It will depend just as much on whether society believes that this future is better (much better) than the present.

This (and some other topics) is what we discussed on CJAD 800 AM this week.