Eduardo Porter writes:

The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like. The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”.

When Reich asked whether this state would be a democracy, he got a cool no. “Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back,” he was told. “To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.”

The technos were onto something. Silicon Valley’s power players have just been blindsided by democracy, which has slammed into their program to transform the world with artificial intelligence. A cabal that never doubted the greatness of their ambitions unexpectedly finds their project in the hot seat, forcing them into the unusual position of having to persuade the great unwashed of the merits of their endeavor. So far, the public is not buying. And for all their blindingly high IQs and their massively endowed wallets, Silicon Valley’s greats don’t quite know what to do.

Everyday Americans are up in arms against the AI datacenters sprouting across their communities. Villages, counties, cities and states are imposing moratoria and bans on further development. While the backlash has largely focused on stopping the proliferation of sprawling sites packed with energy-guzzling computer servers, the revolt is not merely nimby opposition to local development.

Public opinion has also turned decidedly sour on the AI project that has called these datacenters into being. Some 73% of Americans think the costs of datacenters outweigh the benefits, according to a survey by the Marquette University Law School. The same survey found that 70% of Americans think that AI is bad for society.

Americans were not always this down on the tech. In 2021, only 37% declared themselves more concerned than excited about the technology, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center. But the share has climbed to 52%. Even 55% of young adults – usually the most excited cohort – have soured on it. And this is not a partisan fear. Democrats and Republicans alike are vastly more concerned than excited. Interestingly, Americans are generally more mistrustful of the technology than people in other countries.

This surely has something to do with the terrifying announcements that have come out of Silicon Valley recently. A widely shared belief that there’s at least a 10% chance that AI could cause human extinction has, rightly, scared the bejesus out of many and follows repeated statements that artificial intelligence will end all jobs as we know them. Assuming we do avoid an AI apocalypse, vague promises of an AI cure for cancer and a universal basic income or some such to replace wages across the economy sound hollow coming from a clutch of out-of-touch billionaires with questionable moral codes in a country with huge holes in its social safety net.

The political backlash is built on a deeper discomfort, though, beyond fear of the dystopia threatened by the masters of the valley. A fear built in the here and now and fueled by a brooding mistrust in US democracy itself, distrust of a political system that allowed a clutch of weird, sci-fi addled plutocrats to pursue a civilization-threatening project behind people’s backs. As noted Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, “the push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives.”

People are not wrong about this. As AI ethicist Rumman Chowdhury points out, the dominant narrative out of Silicon Valley, that AI systems are becoming so powerful that nobody – including the companies that developed them – can stop them, is a stratagem to avoid responsibility for whatever harm their products may cause, depriving meat-and-bones humans of any recourse to law. [Continue reading…]