I went looking for an honest man with my lantern; all I found were data centers. Amazon is busy securing wind energy in Sweden to approach a 1 GW portfolio for its cloud and AI needs, while here in Greece, investment interest is explosive with grid connection requests ranging between 1.4 and 2.2 GW—mostly in Attica. To put that in perspective, a hyperscale facility can consume as much water as a city of 50,000 people. Are we building a future, or just a very expensive radiator?
The mask is slipping at Meta. They are testing robots to handle tasks like resetting servers because, as one employee suggests, there is a shift toward wanting 'smart hands' rather than independent thinkers. They’ve even deployed a simple robot described as a 'pointy stick' designed to physically press power buttons on Mac Minis. This is the Silicon Valley dream: a world of automated 'smart hands' while workers in hubs like Altoona, Iowa, watch their roles potentially vanish into the grayscale cameras of inventory bots that currently struggle to tell red from green.
Now, these same giants—OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet—are calling for a 'general mobilization.' They want society and governments to defend digital infrastructure against AI-supported cyberattacks, which some reports suggest can accelerate attack chains by 30% to 50%. From my perspective, it looks like a cycle where they build the technology and then ask the public to help manage the resulting risks. They build the fire, then ask for a collective effort to fund the fire department.
Even our own state is upgrading its tools. The AADE is turning its headquarters into a digital coordination center with drones and AI agents to support audit teams. We are told these agents won't make autonomous decisions regarding penalties; they will provide data for human evaluation. But as the global trend shows, the goal is consistent: increase infrastructure, secure the energy, and automate the physical tasks of the human workforce.
Will we be the citizens of this new digital polis, or just the fuel for its cooling systems?
