What happens when Silicon Valley's AI boom collides with rural America and Indigenous communities? Big Tech is pouring hundreds of billions into data centers, eyeing reopened nuclear plants like Three Mile Island, and pushing for expanded uranium mining on Native lands to feed the machine. The communities bearing the physical cost of AI are the same ones being left out of the conversation about how it gets built.
In this fourth episode of the Life With Machines x @YoungFutures series, Baratunde Thurston travels beyond the coasts to meet two leaders working with youth who refuse to let their communities be raw material for someone else's tech boom.
Charlotte Dungan (Mark Cuban Foundation) is partnering with 4-H National to bring AI agency, not just AI literacy, to rural teens. Her students are using AI for drug discovery, search and rescue, and small business optimization in towns that were supposed to lose their best minds to the coasts.
Tesia Zientek (AISES) is building the AUNTIE Tech Collective, a multi-generational initiative grounding Indigenous youth in tech leadership rooted in Seven Generations thinking, not "move fast and break things." Tribal Nations are now creating their own digital sovereignty frameworks, building Sovereign AI Factories on Native lands, and writing the rules for how their data and culture get used.
This is the AI conversation Silicon Valley doesn't want you to see.
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LINKS MENTIONED
The Mark Cuban Foundation AI Bootcamps
AISES
AUNTIE Tech Collective
Young Futures
Episodes referenced:
Michael Running Wolf on saving Indigenous languages with AI
Episode 1 — How Will AI Impact Gen Z?
Episode 2 — How ChatGPT EXPOSED Our Education System
Episode 3 — AI Is Monetizing Our Mental Health
Further reading:
Avoiding the next digital divide: Defining digital sovereignty for Tribal Nations in the AI age
AI is driving a data center boom in rural America. Locals are divided on the benefits
AI is helping these organizations to protect and restore nature
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CHAPTERS
00:00 AI Boom Hits Rural Lands
01:33 Tradeoffs and Local Power
02:11 Teaching AI Agency
03:19 Student Projects in Action
04:25 Safety Rules for AI
05:38 Indigenous Digital Sovereignty
06:44 Auntie Tech Collective
09:29 Extraction and Data Stewardship
11:45 AI for Land and Conservation
13:25 Investing in Youth Leadership
14:48 Closing Thoughts and CTA
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Created and Executive Produced by: Elizabeth Stewart and Baratunde Thurston
Showrunner and Executive Producer: Alie Kilts
Producer: Roya Lotfi
Video Editor & Audio Engineer: Erik Shute
Special Thanks to Charlotte Dungan, Tesia Zientek, Katya Hancock and Dr. Kristine Gloria
Life with Machines is a Multiverses Media production
This series was made in partnership with Young Futures
#ai #ruralamerica #indigenous #digitalsovereignty #datacenters #aiethics #youngfutures
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