"It seemed like such a _good idea_ at the time!"

And... thus... the Great Depression V.2 begins... companies still sell products, companies still make products, nobody can afford to buy the products.

But... then they'll be polluting!
And, we're talking GW... how big does the solar field and warehouse-sized battery backup have to be to keep it working 24/7?
If the grid can cover the shortfall?? The grid is basically lamp cord and wire nuts (they might even have a ground wire). This ain't NYC we're talking about, here.

Exactly... those are all temp jobs.
They'll have a couple guys posted as security on a 12-hour shift, and like one technician who monitors the site remotely, and only shows up when a drive needs replacing.
And, I wouldn't doubt that there would be the occasional piece of hardware that makes its way out the backdoor for a good cut of yak or something.

Run off-grid?
I assume you think solar and wind? Only if there is a decent-sized military standing guard 24/7, or you protect them somehow... otherwise, the panels and wind turbines will get taken overnight. The DC will need guard towers like a prison has.

So... revolt against America while being an American? Yeah, that ends really well!

The only thing you have to lose is your freedom (jail, prison) and maybe your life (back then, they had muzzle-loaders... nowadays, 9mm semi-autos with extra clips on their belt along with pepper-spray, and SWAT on speed-dial, National Guard nearby).
Even if you don't end up in jail/prison or gunned down, you're labeled as a dissenter (maybe violent, won't listen to authority, any number of things) and nobody will hire you for life, nobody will rent an apartment to you, your pic ends up in the paper and in a database.
But, yeah... otherwise a great idea!

At the end of the day, what matters most is how much money a 'humanities' student makes for someone else, who in turn pays the student something.

And, what bearing does that have on a factory installing more robots and adding AI to their programs just so they can save money on paying the meat-sacks a check and benefits? The factories will keep doing that, regardless of what the student says. Factories in China will keep paying the poor residents pennies and a handful of rice... and the world keeps turning.

Remember, this is all "in the name of progress"! (insert big s**t-eating grin here)

The carpenter takes a few days to make the chair and has a backlog of 500 chairs.
The factory makes 500 by lunch, for cheaper, and without paying a person once everyone's favorite AIs take over.

If it's not marked on the utilities map that the company has, then it's someone else's fault for not marking it on the map... same as an old ships charts back in the tall ships days (the mapmaker and the navigator).

Plus, there's ways they can find stuff underground from a satellite or a drone, so that could be applied to the maps and everything sent to the digger... the automated truck could have the scanner built-in, or launch the drones equipped with GPR... remember, tech is being applied to everything, so building everything into the digger should be easy.

Latency is still latency, though.
You can shrink the processor as much as you want, but the more processing power you pack into that AirPod or smaller device, the shorter the battery life.
That's why you'd have your phone handle the heavy-lifting in the processor department.

The "Me Too" products will, of course, be the junk that's sold on Temu or similar for a fraction of the price, and doesn't have the functions that the expensive ones to, even though the listing 'claims' to.
The legit ones will still be well out of range of anyone, the same as an unlocked Galaxy S28 is to someone flippin' burgers.

If this hearing aid actually is controlled by the brain (somehow), it'd basically be Sony's Zoom Mic contained in a hearing aid... that'd be cool, but you'd have to shrink the hardware significantly and have enough battery life to last the typical day (not have to recharge every 4 hours, because the thing can't have a sleep function).

My Sony camcorder has a function called Zoom Mic that does just this... the camcorder came out in 2008.
Turn the function on, aim it at something and let it focus, zoom in... you'll hear what it's focused on pretty damn well.

The more processing applied to the hearing aid, means more delay, and most likely it'll have to offload that processing to the cloud through your cellphone over Bluetooth, which introduces more delay.

Still, though... do we need these data centers?
Remember, before it goes into the cooling loop, they add a bunch of chemicals to the water so it doesn't corrode the copper water lines or aluminum heat blocks, and doesn't leave any water scale or anything else. So, when they dump that water to change it out, have to wonder how good those chemicals are for the environment.

Well, the good news is that we're already on track to get there, and the engineers are slowly speeding the train up.
Between pollution, the taking of all the jobs by AI (even the ones you think can't be automated, can be automated... bet Henry Ford didn't think most of the jobs he came up with on his assembly lines would now be done by robots), losing forest land to renewable power farms and data centers and more commercial farming, the next genetically-engineered plague, and the rising oceans... it'll become Waterworld, and we'll launch the Axiom from Wall-E to preserve humanity.

And, I suppose you/rsilvergun believes that all LLM-AI/AI companies are 1,000% honest!
*dies laughing*

That's why ABB robots don't have hands... they have 'end effectors'.
It can just have a hook to grab the fry basket and tip it into a funnel that empties into the fry box, it can have a 'burger flipper', the 'perfect wrapper mechanism' can be a thing in the counter that flips up.
The robot could have a plastic bootie over it, like the paint booth robots do, or just shields around all the joints.

Oops... cut'em a coupon for free McD's for 6 months and pay their moving expenses. They can afford a new place (because everybody makes $100k a year)!