Source: Robertreich
Robert Reich quantifies water depletion, rare earth mining, and labor exploitation in AI supply chains—costs that efficiency gains in compute cannot offset. Major cloud providers are locking in long-term power agreements and water rights in water-stressed regions, shifting the burden of large language model training onto communities facing actual scarcity while companies capture the value. The question is not whether better chips can solve this, but whether societies will demand that computation be priced to reflect its true cost rather than tolerate AI's material footprint.