Just as Fox News sometimes runs segments with exactly one viewer in mind (President Donald Trump, these billboards have a target audience that runs in the low double digits. For all their parochialism, these billboards stake a claim to the world. It's unlikely there are billboards for these companies anywhere else in the world, but these companies nevertheless claim world domination.

They can justify their valuations only by promising to destroy not just your job, but your entire line of work. They can justify their high-flying claims only by strip-mining your posts, comments, photos. And they can scale only by building a gigantic data center near you, sucking up your water and polluting your air.

These billboards are claims to dominance, but those claims are not addressed to you. You are a mere onlooker to your own domination. There is something deeply unsettling about a power that seeks to justify itself but doesn't seek to justify itself to you. Such is the power of Silicon Valley. We can all opt out of caffeine, frame, C3.ai, and together.ai. Whether our opting out has any effect whatsoever is another story entirely. In many ways, witnesing the Al boom feels like driving along this forest of billboards: it's the dubious honor of getting to watch money fornicate with money.

Even Chevron's billboard along 101 is AI themed, emphasizing how many data centers run on burning oil and gas. Amid the glitter of solar panels to the left and to the right, the billboard is almost sneering in its petro-masculinist swagger: our Al is so important, we're feeding it your environment.