Jasmine Sun writes:

Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity—the reasons that people resist. They ask if it’s a problem of benefits not being generous enough, or else a big misinformation campaign. (By the end of the trip, my friends and I felt slightly ashamed of the caricatures we originally believed in. In general, one should be cautious about assuming your opponents are just reading fake news.)

When I visited DC in February to start researching the brewing AI backlash, I found that the top two uniting issues were kids’ safety and data centers. These were very different concerns from those I hear in San Francisco—a city with no kids and no data centers—which preoccupies itself more with fears of strange, self-propagating machine species, or the more workaday concern of your startup running out of cash.

My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.

Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities—forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI’s wealthy user base—resembles a classic story about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It’s not Skynet: it’s the oligarchy.

This message was nowhere clearer than at a Lansing rally for Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, featuring Bernie, AOC, and Sunrise cofounder Will Lawrence, a very tall man running for a House seat in Michigan’s District 7.

Lansing Center was filled with an eclectic mix of t-shirt slogans: NO KINGS and UAW FOR ABDUL and SOCIALIST ANGEL. The crowd leaned mostly very young or very old. Someone told me that one of Will’s core campaign planks is a data center moratorium, so I go to ask him about it.

“The proponents of these deals are untrustworthy from the jump. They’re saying, ‘DTE and Consumers Energy have assured us that your rates will not rise,’ which nobody trusts, because they’ve experienced DTE and Consumers raise rates repeatedly,” he said. DTE, Michigan’s monopoly electricity provider, has in fact raised rates four of the last five years, yet has some of the worst outages in the country. Its PAC has given millions to the governor and state legislators, inspiring a popular citizen ballot initiative to get the money out.

Will continued: “There tends to be a lot of condescension from AI developers. ‘Don’t you folks know you don’t have a lot of money out here? We’ve got a lot of money in California, and you’ve got to get on this train now, or you’re going to lose out on the wave of progress for the 21st century.’ And that pitch lands like a lead balloon.”

While AI is far from the centerpiece of the rally, it came up in nearly every speech. Bernie dedicated two minutes to decrying AI’s impacts on jobs, privacy, and mental health. He mentioned Mark Zuckerberg to a chorus of boos; the audience booed even louder at the name Elon Musk.

When Abdul stepped onstage, I found myself impressed by his swagger. He’s casual, confident, and knows how to work a crowd. “When DTE spends money to buy a Senate seat, they’re buying a quiet tongue when you lose your power for five days because of a mild storm. When Blue Cross tries to buy a Senate seat, they’re buying the ability to raise your premiums again and again and again. When Big Tech buys a Senate seat, they’re buying a data center in your backyard.” [Continue reading…]