There was a reference in the Corner yesterday to the “panic over the building of data centers across the country, [with people] citing a variety of resource and environmental concerns as their reason for wanting to shut down construction.” It was described as a “panic on the left.” And so it is, but the panic is spreading far wider across the political spectrum than just that.
Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.
Seventy-five percent of Democrats would oppose such construction, as would 63 percent of Republicans.
Superficially, such opposition often involves local worries. These can range from the drain on water resources to higher utility bills, as well as more lurid fears.
A proposed mega-scale datacenter in the US state of Utah has caused controversy after a physics professor estimated that the facility and its associated power generation could dump 23 atomic bombs’ worth of energy per day.
For some reason, memories of fracking hysteria come to mind.
But lurking just below all those issues is the fear of AI, some of it based on superstition (no, it’s not going to evolve its own consciousness), some of it based, much more realistically, on anxiety over what this technology could mean for jobs.
Comments such as this from Microsoft AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, are not calming nerves:
“White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Hype? Some, probably, but people in work — or hoping to be in work — are paying attention.
In a commencement address at the University of Central Florida this month, Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive, called A.I. the “next industrial revolution” and was met with a loud chorus of boos. Stunned, she asked, “What happened?”
On Friday, Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google, was booed repeatedly when he began talking about A.I. during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona. “I know what many of you are feeling about that,” Schmidt said. “I can hear you.”
Ned Ludd’s ghost is stirring. And we should remember that the old wrecker was not entirely wrong. As I wrote back in 2017:
Yes, in the long term the disruptive technologies of the industrial revolution created jobs and increased real wages, but it took over half a century — the so-called Engels (yes, that Engels) pause — for the standard of living of most British industrial workers to start increasing, too late for those who had taken the hammer to the looms.
It became a time of political turbulence. As I had written some months before that:
These were the years not just of the Luddites, but also of the Peterloo Massacre, the Swing Riots, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the 1842 General Strike. By the time of the Chartists, a mass movement of the working class, an explicitly political agenda had evolved alongside struggles over pay. Engels took things even further. In 1848 he co-wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, not an encouraging thought.
In April, a 20-year-old Texas man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman’s home and made threats at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, according to a federal complaint filed against him. A few days earlier, someone fired 13 shots at the front door of an Indianapolis councilman who had recently approved a data center.
This discontent is spreading through our politics too, ready to be harvested. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are working on legislation to impose a moratorium on the construction of data centers associated with AI. At the other end of the horseshoe, Josh Hawley is putting forward legislation of his own.
The Wall Street Journal:
Voters in Festus, Mo., ousted four city council members a week after they approved a $6 billion data center. Dozens of communities in states from Maine to Arizona are trying to ban new data centers.
The political stakes are going to keep rising, and the financial stakes are huge, too. How many billions have been invested in AI? And just how much of the stock market’s valuation is resting on AI?
And Xi Jinping, I suspect, is watching with interest.