The A.I. Revolt Is Here

0:00What is big, ugly, and has united Republicans and Democrats

0:30at a time when it has felt like nothing else could? AI data centers. Last August, a heat map news poll found that about four in 10 voters would oppose a data center being built where they live. By May of this year, opposition grew to seven in 10. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, of course, has proposed a new citizen's bill of rights for AI. The incentives of big tech are not the same as what's in the interest of the people and the public. Senator Bernie Sanders called

1:01for a national data center moratorium. This moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing and make sure that the benefits of these technologies work for all of us, not just the wealthiest people on earth. There are over 100 local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. And here in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul, not usually thought of as a hardcore populist, just imposed a one-year moratorium

1:32on data center construction. These hyperscale AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, truly threatening to outpace our grid's capacity. And they drive up costs for local rate payers. And I refuse to let those costs be passed on to New Yorkers who already pay too much for their utility bills. So I wanted to get into the fight over data centers. How much of this is really about water or electricity or aesthetics?

2:02And how much is about AI itself and the companies that are behind it? My guest today is Jasmine Sun. Jasmine has been doing excellent coverage of both the culture inside the AI companies, unusual culture, and the anger that is building against them in the rest of the country. I highly recommend following her sub-stack, but right now she just finished a reporting trip in the Midwest, talking to the people organizing against these data centers. And I wanted to hear what she learned.

2:37Jasmine Sun, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be here. So you just got back from a reporting trip in Wisconsin and Michigan covering the fight over data centers. Let's just start with what you see when you're near a data center. What does it look like? I think one of the most important things about rural Wisconsin and rural Michigan is how beautiful it is. I felt like I was in Eden. I felt like I was in paradise. It's incredibly lush, incredibly green. And as you get closer to a data center,

3:07you start to see more power lines, you start to see more towers, and eventually you just see what looks like an extremely large, flat warehouse. But you just see this sort of like verdant landscape give way to what is a windowless industrial park. Data centers are very ugly. I think I didn't appreciate this until I started standing in front of them, getting near them, listening to them. People will time how long it takes to drive past a data center on the highway

3:38going 70 miles per hour in Port Washington. I think it's like a minute and 42 seconds. The size of these things is- That's long on a highway. It is a long, long ride. Like these hyperscale data centers are huge. They are massive. And so I think that the aesthetic questions, right, around is this what I want my state, my community to look like, these are really salient to people. You mentioned hearing them. Yes. What do they sound like? Oh my gosh. I mean, they sound like humming, buzzing, whoring.

4:10Every once in a while, you'll hear a rattling. Residents who live next door to some of them say they're producing noise that's not only annoying, but debilitating, like this right here.

4:24But again, they're windowless. There are not that many workers inside. So they're very mechanical sounds. They are inhuman, as a lot of folks would say. So you spent a lot of time with people organizing against data centers. Who were they? You had stay-at-home moms. You had retired executives. You had farmers who didn't like the impacts on their land. You had activists, professional activists, with environmental groups in the state.

4:54It was an interesting mix of people, but a lot of women relatively more left-leaning, though definitely some right-leaning folks as well. So one question I've heard people ask is, how much is this different than other kinds of industrial installations? I mean, there are a lot of things that are built all over the country that you wouldn't necessarily want to be right next to. Are data centers unusual in this, or are they, you know, from fracking to industrial agriculture,

5:24just like the latest version of it? It's a good question. It's one I had and thought a lot about before I went. And I've talked to city officials who are confused by this question of, we had a chip fab here, we had an auto plant here, we had a fulfillment center here, and nobody cared as much. Why are data centers so much more unpopular than, say, solar farms, which also faced local opposition in places like Michigan? And so I think while the quality of life concerns around this thing is loud and annoying and ugly and consumes resources are very similar to other

5:56industrial projects, there must be some reason that opposition is so much more severe and widespread, even beyond the communities where the data centers are literally being built. And I think that question has a lot to do with the AI, with the AI industry, and sort of the way that people feel about these companies and these projects. When I read your reporting on this, when I've talked to people involved in this, it always feels to me there's sort of three layers of concerns that are converging into what we call the data center backlash.

6:26There's process. Then there's direct impacts. You know, the environment, water, electricity. And then there's AI itself. And maybe let's go through them sort of one by one. One thing that I have been hearing a lot of and I've seen in your reporting as well is the anger over how these processes are going. And in particular, the use of NDAs, which is not that common, right? I've covered a lot of what does it take to build a housing development? And you don't tend to hear a lot of the city councilmen got put under an NDA.

7:01So what is happening with these NDAs? Yeah. I mean, this is also something that really surprised me. And I think the NDAs that I should say non-disclosure agreements, right? The non-disclosure agreements. This has really inflamed the amount of local opposition that you see. And so basically what would happen oftentimes is there would be some sense starting in city council that maybe a big development project was going to show up. But because of the NDAs, the council members would not be able to disclose that necessarily it was a data center, necessarily who the customers were going to be, a company like

7:33OpenAI or a company like Anthropic or whoever. Or even the size of the project, like how much electricity is this actually going to consume? But whispers would start to get around. I was talking to a VP of a construction union and he was saying, you know, there's an old Irish saying that the only way to keep a secret between three people is to kill two of them, which I thought was hilarious. And so he's saying when these developers show up, they talk to the general contractor. The general contractor talks to all their subcontractors. The subcontractors talk to all their workers. Yes, maybe everyone is signing NDAs at every part of that process.

8:04But whispers get around. And as soon as whispers get around, you start to get social media posts. You start to get rumors. And the city council, because they are beholden to these NDAs, they lose the ability to get ahead of the social media narrative. That was something I repeatedly heard from these local government officials was we could not get ahead of social media because we had signed an NDA and rumors started getting around. But why do the companies want these NDAs signed? I mean, I think they didn't think about it. They didn't realize there would be a backlash. They just thought it would be easier in case they changed their mind.

8:35These companies sign lots of NDAs with their own workers, with anyone who works with them. I don't think there's a good reason. Microsoft has actually decided to stop using NDAs because of the level of backlash. I've heard from people managing compute at some of the other AI labs that they are thinking of making the same decision. One thing that surprised me is all of the pro-data center, pro-build people who I spoke to, whether workers or AI developers, they all regret the NDAs. They all think that they made the situation much worse. What is the impact of a new data center on water usage, water availability in the town?

9:10They do require some of it, obviously, primarily for cooling the data centers because these chips and servers run really hot and they need AC. The thing that's gone a bit wrong in the water debate, I think, is that today's new data centers are almost all closed-loop systems, closed-loop in the same way that air conditioning is closed-loop, which means they're recycling the water within the system and they use a fraction of the water that golf courses use. In fact, in places like Janesville, Wisconsin, we would often see a literal golf course right

9:40next to the data center site. But they do use some and it has sort of become a very sticky icon of these things, resource consumption. A lot of folks I talk to in Wisconsin and Michigan, they would say things like, you know, they're building right by the Great Lakes. Why would they do that if they weren't trying to drain the lakes? Why would they do that if they didn't need all this fresh water? And so your view is at this point, the technology has changed such that water is not as big of a deal as maybe it actually was a couple of years ago. I think the next thing people have heard a lot about is energy usage.

10:11So walk me through that. The electricity consumption issue is real. So data centers do, in fact, use an incredible amount of electricity. These chips and these servers that are processing gigantic mathematical calculations to make AI work require tons of energy. All these chips and clusters are talking to each other. You need the interconnections to be really fast in order to get like a Chachapitie answer really quickly with low latency. You need these super fast connections. All of that's powered by electricity.

10:41So we are talking about a really, really significant amount of new electricity that is going to require new generators, new power plants. It's probably going to be natural gas in the near future. Once the data center is fully operational, there is not a ton of air and water pollution, assuming that everything's working correctly. They are relatively clean facilities. But, you know, like a lot of folks are concerned about the electricity use. They're saying, yeah, maybe the data center doesn't use that much water. Maybe the data center doesn't pollute that much. But what about all of these, you know, new power plants that they're going to build in

11:13order to power it? So when the tech companies come into these towns and begin talking to the city council members, when they begin talking to the community, what are they sort of promising on the one hand, right? This is why this will be good for you. And what are they asking for on the other? Yeah, I mean, so these things do provide an incredible amount of tax revenue, right? And so in Mount Pleasant, the on the old Foxconn site, which ended up being bought out by Microsoft, they saw, oh, there's all this infrastructure already here. Why don't we build a hyperscale data center on this unused, industrially zoned land?

11:45Microsoft is on track to pay $19.6 million in property taxes in 2026. This is expected to continue for many years. Again, this is a small village of 28,000 people. And so there are really meaningful property tax benefits. And I do think I find it frustrating personally when anti data center organizers say that the job creation is a myth, because I think that 500, you know, maybe six figure jobs for folks who go through apprenticeships that maybe don't need college degrees that last two to six years, that's enough time to build a family.

12:17That's enough time to buy a home. I think it's super meaningful. And when I talk to technicians, when I talk to workers, clearly it was extremely meaningful work. I think one of the things that was the most surprising to me when I talked to data center activists was that they responded to so many of the pro arguments with, I don't believe them. So like this company says that they are going to treat the water with chemicals in it so that it doesn't flow into the lakes. People would say, I don't believe them.

12:47I don't think they can do it. People would say, the companies would say, we are going to cover the cost of our own electricity grid build out. We are going to ensure that rates do not go up for all Michiganders. A lot of folks would say, I don't believe them. DTE has raised our electricity rates basically every year since 2022. Why would this be the year that they decide not to do it? I do not believe them. They are going to, we are going to create 500 jobs and some of these will stick around after the data center is built. People just said, I don't believe them.

13:18It was really clear to me that data centers are showing up in an environment of extremely low trust in both governments and in corporations to the extent where the pro arguments almost do not land because people just aren't interested in anything an outside tech company is going to tell them. They say they have big PR teams. They can say whatever they want. One thing that became really obvious to me when I talked about people at the AI companies and local officials is that two years ago, no one thought that data center backlash was going to be like this. And so these companies were in fact looking for things like, does this state have a sales

13:51tax exemption as Wisconsin does to ensure that they don't have to pay sales taxes on their very expensive chips, on their very expensive GPUs? They were often looking to build in places that might even offer local subsidies to the companies for building in that area. I think that a lot of the balance of power has shifted as local opposition has ramped up. Now it's the case that I'm hearing from some local officials, if we did this again today, we wouldn't have to offer any subsidies because in fact, now there is so much local opposition

14:23that the developers are really looking, where is there going to be a local community and a government that is friendly to our project? How can we have a Christmas tree ornaments worth of community benefits agreements? And so just the nature of these deals and how much they are skewed towards communities versus the AI developers has really changed. One of the things that came up a lot in your reporting and that I thought was interesting was the fear that this is a bubble. For sure. And what's going to happen is your community will agree to something.

14:54And then in the middle, the bubble is going to pop and you're going to end up with a half-finished data center or one that is not being kept up correctly or something where the promised benefits don't emerge. I mean, you were in Wisconsin, which had a very, very bad experience with Foxconn, which seems to be structuring the way people are thinking about at least some of this. So talk to me a bit about that set of concerns. Absolutely. Yeah. I think in terms of what people in these communities with these data centers feel when they see

15:26the projects come in with their gigantic, like $2 billion of investment, like these gigantic numbers that are being dangled, it feels like a bubble to them. One, they're seeing news articles saying maybe AI is a bubble. We don't know it's a bubble, but it could be. Two, you do have experiences like Foxconn, where you have a big tech company show up in a very small community, in this case, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, a city of like 28,000 people. It's not very big. Get hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure investment and tax subsidy from the town,

15:57promise 13,000 high-paying manufacturing jobs, and then pull out because the contract wasn't set up correctly. They decided they didn't actually want to build a bunch of flat-screen TVs in Wisconsin. And the town is left on the hook, having invested all of this money in the grid and in roads. They got, I think, 1,000 jobs in the end. Foxconn is still paying back all of this debt that has been accumulated. And so experiences like that have really, really soured people on the question of when an outside big tech company comes in and promises these gigantic numbers and all of these jobs and

16:29all of this tax revenue, and it's for this technology that a lot of people, they don't see, they don't feel, they don't find personally extremely, extremely useful, not at the levels of these valuations. They have a lot of questions about if the bubble pops, are we going to be the ones left with a stranded asset in our community? I mean, in Janesville, Wisconsin, it was famously the site of this 100-year-old GM plant that was the centerpiece of the community that employed a ton of people. When they left during the financial crash in 2008 and the plant closed down, not only did it sort of devastate the community from a work perspective, but they also left $30 million

17:04of contamination and hazardous waste in the middle of the city that has never been cleaned up. There's forever chemicals in there. This is why developers have not been able to sell this brownfield, is because there's so much waste that GM never cleaned up. And so I think that people worry about what happens if the AI bubble pops, if maybe it doesn't pop and the data center developers just decide, never mind, we want to build elsewhere, never mind, this data center isn't good enough, we have newer, better technology, and who's going to be left holding the bag? That was the question I heard over and over again.

17:34But this is something that I do think is in people's minds. Yeah. You bring this in, and right now you're at this time of very, very high valuations. Right. And if AI demand isn't quite what you think, or even just the company that was behind this particular data center is not part of the winner's circle, that in a couple of years what you got is this giant box that's not going to continue being valuable. And so whatever the promised benefits are from it, tax revenue, et cetera, but yeah, maybe they show up for a while.

18:05But then what if in five years they're gone, but you are left with this infrastructure? It's like they can leave Janesville with no real concern. They're not there. Their people don't live there, right? But if you're in Janesville, you do live there. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's a real concern. You see things like this with Elon's giant Colossus data centers, right, that he built out in Memphis. And what makes people feel better about a new construction project in their town than calling it Colossus? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, these things. Unerring touch for the people.

18:36I mean, so usually the thing that happens is they give them very cutesy names like Project Cannoli and The Barn, and they try to make them sound as friendly as possible. But yeah, I mean, with Colossus, XAI never really took off. People are not, in fact, using Grok as much as Elon thought they were going to be using it. And in that case, he was able to get a really good deal selling the compute capacity to Anthropic, which was growing like crazy and had not built enough data centers on their side. But you could totally imagine a world, as you say, where, in fact, you know, XAI decides we are going to focus on space.

19:07We don't care about AI anymore. Maybe there's not an Anthropic to pick up the bill because Anthropic has maybe built enough of their own compute capacity. There is an open question about what happens in that world. So I read Abundance last year with Derek Thompson, who published it. And one thing I've heard been asked by a lot of people is like, what does the abundance take on a data center? And the beginning of that book has this line that, you know, the question is, what do we need more of and how do we get it? And I think the question here that has been so hard for the AI companies, for the people

19:44trying to build data centers, is actually getting people to believe they need more of them, right? When you're talking about building affordable housing, when you're talking about, you know, building an array of solar panels or wind turbines, there's a pretty legible argument for why you need that, right? People still may not like it, but we need homes because we need places for people to live. We need solar panels because we need clean, renewable energy.

20:14How much is this like a normal kind of, I don't even exactly want to call it nimbyism, but a normal kind of, I don't want the industrial infrastructure built in my backyard because like, you know, what am I going to get out of that? And how much of it is actually something that is more related to people's feelings about AI, which is, I don't want this built here because why would I want to pay the cost for a thing that I don't want there to even be more of in the first place?

20:45This, I think, was one of my big motivating questions going into this trip is, is it quote unquote normal nimbyism? Is it about AI? Is it about something else? And so I spent time both looking at polls and trying to talk to people about, would you be excited if this was a chip factory, which would use a lot more water and pollute a lot more? Would you be excited if it was a solar farm? Also, maybe acquiring agricultural land and turning it into industrial use. Would you be excited if it was a million other things? And I talked to Nick Bagley, who you've had on your show about, is this just proceduralism?

21:17And we talked about the solar farms example, where solar farms, the opposition used very similar tactics to the data center opposition. They were organizing in Facebook groups. They were packing town halls. They were talking about the local impacts and the importance of farmland and the visions for their communities. There were zoning fights, of course. But like you say, with the solar farms, you do have a very clear pro case. You have a faction. You have a group of people, a constituency, people who care about the environment, who want renewable energy, who understand that that's a thing that, yeah, maybe it sucks

21:51to have in your backyard, but you can take one for the team because this is important for our planet. You don't really have a pro faction with AI. Same with like the auto plant, right? You have one, you have maybe 7,000 workers in the old GM plant in Janesville who all have families who really care about them, who see that as a constituency. Everyone drives a car. They see their car as essential. I think the fact that it's creating these tangible outputs really, really matter. I don't think that data centers have a compelling pro constituency besides the utility companies

22:22and the AI companies, which are already incredibly, incredibly unpopular. And I went in and asked these organizers, do you guys use AI? Do you find it useful? This was one of the top questions that my friends in San Francisco wanted me to ask is, are these people like using ChatGPT and they don't even realize that the data centers are how they can use it? And what I found there was a lot of these folks did say, yeah, I've used it to draft an email or make a meme. They're not denying that AI might have any possible utility at all. But they clearly didn't see it as essential in the way that cars, energy and housing are

22:56essential. They clearly saw it as kind of like a widget, a toy. And maybe there are these risks. Maybe there's the job stuff. But fundamentally, they were like, this thing is not that useful. I don't really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations. And so I was talking to, for example, Charles Franklin, who runs Marquette Law Polls in Wisconsin, and he was explaining that usually you see 50-50 polling on issues where you have a strong anti-case and a strong pro-case. And the only reason you're kind of seeing the 70-30 bipartisan opposition to data centers, no matter whether you live near a data center or you don't, which means it's not just

23:29nimbyism, it's you don't want a data center in anyone's backyard, is because he was like, there is no strong pro-argument for it. There is not even a fight that's really going on. Nobody wants it was a phrase I heard over and over. You have a very influential definition of AI populism where you call it a worldview in which AI is viewed not only as a normal technology, but as an elite political project to be resisted. Unpack that for me. The phrase that you hear a lot from AI critics is, why is this being shoved down our throats?

24:01Or with, you know, ChatGPT, it's not that people are saying there is literally no use for ChatGPT. It's people are saying, why are you forcing me at my job to use AI to do something worse when I could do it better? And so I think that a lot of the public backlash to AI that has risen over the past six months is not explained by people thinking that the technology has no use at all. It's not explained by them being worried about specific technical properties of LLMs that might

24:32lead to rogue AI or misalignment or whatever, which are the sort of safetyist arguments. It's AI as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires' ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent. And I think that's also what I hear echoed in these data center debates. It's not just it's going to use this much water or that much water. I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers. Yeah, I consider the water.

25:02I don't want to say the water issue is fake. What I will say is there was a debate online a while back about how much water, like a chat GPT query consumed. And somebody was like, if you really care about water, are you eating beef? Yes. As someone who doesn't eat meat, I thought this was a quite good, like, you could really save a lot of water by going vegetarian. Yes. And relatively much, much more than not using chat GPT and relatively few people in that conversation were giving up meat.

25:33Or giving up YouTube videos. Or giving up YouTube videos. Like use more water than a chat GPT query. Which is to say that I think sometimes people don't like a thing and they're looking for reasons to justify that dislike. Yeah. But what's actually happening at the base is they don't like the thing. Right. And the data centers, like as you're saying, I think speak to this AI populism question like even more precisely. Because the issue with AI itself is that I think people's relationship to it is very complicated. Yeah. I have myself a very complicated relationship to AI.

26:07Like I use it a fair amount. I'm not sure I think it's a good thing for society the way it is going. I don't want my kids using it. I know they'll be using it. Like maybe it'll make things better, but I really don't know. Like I think that the costs are going to be very, very high for us relationally and economically. And, you know, and so I just I'm very conflicted. But do I want to live next to a data center? Yeah, no. Yeah, it's totally different. Like that's easier. I mean, one of the most interesting things. Somebody is just making you do that. Yes. Of like going to this back to back.

26:38I went to this Abdul-Bernie AOC rally in Lansing, Michigan. And then I went and saw the Saline activists the next day. And I was researching how the Saline Stargate project happened. And it was really interesting to see these echoes of the populist message sort of manifest in this specific project. Like when I'm at this rally, people are talking about the oligarchy. They're talking about corporate billionaires, whether it's big tech or big pharma or DT, the utility companies paying off politicians in order to, you know, screw the people over. And that's why you need the people to come together and to get money out of politics,

27:11to prevent DT from donating to these super PACs and paying off Gretchen Whitmer or whatever. And then when I learned how the Saline data center saga played out, what happened was the Saline township city council, unlike a lot of city councils, actually voted for one against rezoning their land for the data center. So this was a case where local government said, this is not a vision for our community. It's not worth it to us. And what happened, the data center developers sued Saline township, a town of like, again, a few thousand people into saying, wait, no, this is exclusionary zoning.

27:45You can't have no industrial use in your entire township. And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant AI data center developer, they just settled. They were just like, fine, give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools. And this fight is not worth it to us. But that to people felt like a profound, a profound violation of little d democracy. It felt like the dark money in politics story, which is, you know, you have some very rich companies show up with a bag of money to your politicians. They don't tell anybody else what's happening. The politicians aren't allowed to tell their citizens and involve them in the decision making

28:18process. And they themselves work out a deal, a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality into the world that these tech companies have decided for you. And so I think that the data centers in that sense are a very visceral microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel that AI is showing up in their lives. I would also maybe even take that a little bit further. I think that the way that not all of the AI companies, and I think Anthropic has largely been a good actor here, but many of them have acted, has opened up such a chasm between

28:54what they say and then how they act under pressure, that one should be incredibly, incredibly skeptical of them. And what I mean by this is that, you know, Sam Altman and all these different people, you know, in front of congressional testimony and in interviews will say, you know, it should not just be us making these decisions. There should be a real deep, small d democratic role here in how AI rolls out, in, you know, what effects it has on communities and how it is governed.

29:28And then when a community or a politician, you know, who is representing a community tries to say, well, we don't want this data center here or we want to impose these regulations. We have watched repeatedly these companies turn tremendous amounts of financial artillery against whoever is standing in their way, right? And to use this, the expertise and the money and the power they are amassing to kind of

29:58short circuit that democratic voice. Yeah. I mean, a couple of things. One is like, I think one big gap I noticed between Silicon Valley and the folks in these communities I was talking to is Silicon Valley does tend to think that money solves all problems that if you just make the check bigger, everything's going to be okay. And I think people have a sense for I'm being bribed. This corporation is not offering me a free lunch or whatever. There is going to be something that I'm losing here. And in fact, sometimes the fact that the data center deals were bigger or the amount of political spending was bigger, actually, it just makes people more suspicious.

30:28Like in the Abdul race, like his number one, like hit on Haley Stevens is how much money she is getting from APAC, from DTE, from pharma or whatever. And so one is just that I think we're in a political environment where making the numbers bigger and the amounts of money bigger makes people more suspicious, not less. Another one I'll just quickly mention is I don't even think anthropics should be left off the hook for things like labor market impacts, right? They are the ones simultaneously warning that we might see a, you know, 50% of white collar jobs lost by 2030. This is really important to us.

30:59We're freaking out about it. Dario has written in his essays. We might see an underclass of people of lower intellectual ability and they are building the agents. They are building the coding agents, the banking agents, the design agents that they know are going to displace jobs or they believe at least are going to displace jobs. And I think that people feel that hypocrisy as well, which is if you are so worried about the inequality, why are you building the agents to do it? And when I ask executives and researchers and whoever are anthropic this question, they don't really have a good answer because it is true that their business models fundamentally premise

31:33on the disruption that they say they are causing.

31:58You did a big piece for the Times on the very widespread belief in Silicon Valley that they will create this underclass. Yeah. What does the underclass mean to them? The idea of a permanent underclass caused by AI is basically a world where any job a person can do, either AI or a robot can do for them, which means that workers lose all the economic

32:29leverage they have and capital owners, people with money, can simply pay machine labor to do all the work instead of paying workers. What that means is anyone who earned their living by working is no longer able to do that. You end up with a world of runaway inequality where the rich get richer and the working class gets poor. Maybe they get some welfare checks, but fundamentally it's a loss of economic mobility in a society. And when I ask folks in Silicon Valley, do you think by default AI is going to increase or decrease inequality? I have not yet heard anyone say it will decrease inequality or keep it the same.

33:02They might say the floor will get really high. They might say AI will bring the cost of consumer goods down and so people's lives are going to get cheaper and everyone will be super healthy, so it's okay. But I have not heard a single person in the tech industry tell me that they believe that AI is going to decrease inequality. And in fact, many people are very worried that instead, most workers will lose their leverage and be on a kind of permanent welfare in the far off future. I'm pretty skeptical of this vision, although I don't rule it out, right? It might happen. Although I just don't think AI is going to be quite as revolutionary as a lot of these

33:35people think and will not diffuse into the real world as easily. But, you know, the thing you're going to need to adjust to any major technological change is time. And then also it's like the industry is like an all out war to make sure we have as little time for adjustment as possible. I mean, look at their job. And I just find it hard to like unknot that. How many enterprise salespeople are open AI and anthropic hiring in order to convince companies that they can replace their workforce or maybe not replace, but expand their workforce

34:05with agents instead of humans, right? They are having these sales conversations trying to persuade people of these questions. I don't think that a permanent underclass is the likeliest outcome economically that we're going to get. I think that AI is actually just really jagged and human jobs are super complex and super hard to automate. And most of the folks who are predicting economic apocalypse haven't actually worked enough real jobs to know how complicated and how multifaceted most jobs really are. But I definitely agree on the speed point.

34:36I think that like Alex DeMoss, the economist, has made this point very well. One thing I think a lot about are people say, well, humans can adjust. Humans can reskill. They can retrain. They can just do the new jobs that we're going to develop instead. But you look at things like software engineering where people will often say now senior software engineers are doing great. They love cloud code. Junior software engineers have been mostly replaced. And you see hiring and job postings are down in that sector. Well, do we think that a human software engineer is going to reskill or upskill themselves faster

35:08than the next model is going to get better at software engineering? That's the question that I really wonder about is if AI progress outpaces humans ability to reskill, retrain, upskill, adapt, then I'm not really sure what there is going to be left. There will be some jobs left, but it's going to be a really, really painful adjustment. I have had so many people at the top of these companies, right, the very tippy top, tell me they wish all this would slow down. I'm sure you have had them say this to you, right?

35:40But in this world where in their unguarded moments they will say they wish all this was going slower, well, one way to slow AI down is to constrict the number of data centers you can build. Yeah. And just like you've done, you know, as good reporting as anybody on just how conflicted people even working for these companies seem to be about what they are building. And yet they're in this competitive race to build it as quickly as possible. And so it makes them a pretty unconvincing pro-faction.

36:13Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's like we're building the thing we're telling you to be afraid of and we need to build it as fast as possible, even though we sort of admit that it'd be better if the whole thing was slowed down. It's very confusing. It's a weird argument. Yeah. It's so confusing. I remember when I sat down with Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate, he cited Dario's 50% white collar job loss stat probably like five times in the 30 minute conversation. It's like he was like they're saying that there's going to be recursive self-improvement and it might kill us all. Like, yeah, I get why you would not want to make this thing go faster.

36:44This is true for data centers, but it's true for any other way that you might slow AI down, which is that everyone only wants to be slowed down if they can guarantee that the other companies, that the Chinese labs are going to slow down with them. So long as that's not true, they're going to keep racing. And I think for that reason, yeah, I mean, the thing that I hear when I talk to people at the companies and data center executives about the build out is how much money do we need to give these cities to let us build a data center, tell us how to bribe them better,

37:15tell us what we can do. And so when I talk to them about the build out, I'm not hearing any sort of personal moral reckoning with slowing AI down. I'm hearing how do I make the bribes bigger? How big do they need to be? So then how do you reconcile what many of these executives, many of these AI company workers are telling you about their fears of creating an underclass, about their fears of losing control? I mean, we just saw the situation where OpenAI's model was breaking out of a sandbox in order to sort of cheat on its evaluation, right?

37:46So the AI safety people are very worried, right? The safety teams in here clearly don't have full control or even understanding of what they're building. How do you reconcile, if you reconcile, the way the AI companies talk when they are giving voice to their fears or the people at them talk when they're giving voice to their fears? And they're like pretty profound hostility to anything that would slow down how fast we are building this thing whose consequences they freely admit they cannot predict.

38:20Yeah, it's fascinating because just on a very personal level, when I talk to people at these companies, I just think like, man, if I thought this thing might have a 10% chance of killing us all or taking everybody's job, I wouldn't work on it. Yeah, I would not build that. I personally could not morally justify taking that chance. And when I talk to people who are not in the San Francisco AI world, they feel like I do. They're just like, why would you do it? And I think there are basically three rough buckets of rationales that I hear from people or that I hear between the lines from people.

38:52One is this sort of sense of techno-determinism. It's super intelligence is going to be built inevitably. There is no way it's not going to happen. If it happens, I want to be part of it. I want to make my money from it. I want to maybe make it happen in the least bad way. I think that's a super common answer. Another is this technology might kill us all, but it also might be really amazing. It might produce super abundance for everybody. We might be immortal.

39:24It might double everyone's lifespans, cure all diseases, bring the cost of every consumer good, housing, energy, whatever, to near zero. And that would be utopia. And so I think all the time to that anecdote that I think SBF said on a podcast where it's- Sam Bankman-Fried. Yes, Sam Bankman-Fried sent out a podcast where it was like, if you could flip a coin and it was 51% odds, you would double the total amount of human welfare and 49% chance everyone dies, would he flip the coin? He says yes. And again, I feel compelled to say like, have you guys here of like, you know, how'd you

39:56really know that's what's happening? Blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Put that aside. Take the hypothetical, the pure hypothetical.

40:02Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a hyperbolic example, but I think it's not actually that far off from what a lot of the people building superintelligence believe too, that they are basically willing to flip the coin. Maybe we all die, but maybe we're all immortal. And that expected value-wise cancels things out. And then the final category is just, I think, folks who are so fascinated by the technical endeavor of whether we can build this thing and how to do it, that they just aren't super worried about the consequences or what else might happen.

40:34So people have all sorts of self-justifying narratives as to why it's worth it. Some, I think, are better than others. But it makes sense to me why the public is not particularly sympathetic to any of these. I mean, that middle narrative. I heard Sam Bankman-Fried say that. I think it was on Tyler Cowen's podcast. It was like, oh, that's a psychopath. Right? To actually believe that, you would have to be a psychopath. You would have to have a very, very, very low value on, I think, human life. Yes. Right? Imagine being the person who flips that coin and it comes up wrong.

41:06Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Like, I'm a parent. Like, the idea that you would do something that's like 51-49 on, like, your kid is doubly happy or your kid is gone. Like, you would never. You don't even want to say that out loud. Of course. I think that's how almost everybody thinks about it. And again, I think 51-49 is obviously the most egregious example you could think of. And so SBF is very unsympathetic. But when I think about the super intelligence bet, a lot of people will characterize it as a 90-10 bet, as an 80-20 bet.

41:37And this question of how much is an acceptable amount of either extinction risk or total disempowerment risk, you know, I think people have very different risk appetites. And Silicon Valley is a place that has always prized their high risk appetite. I think that makes a lot more sense when you're talking about maybe yourself or your company full of people who have opted in to taking a very high risk endeavor. I think that's extremely different, obviously, when you're talking about the rest of the world. And one thing with the data center debates that I'd always hear is like, you know, I get that these people are making this crazy bet on this technology they think is going

42:10to change the world. But why do they have to do in our backyard? Why is Mark Zuckerberg not building a data center in his backyard? And so this question of, yeah, you guys are going to create like these very tangible impacts and to their view harms on specific communities that are not the communities benefiting from this technology. At least they don't see the benefits yet. They don't see the cancer cures. They don't see themselves getting these million dollar, 10 million dollar salaries that the AI researchers are getting. It feels like I think it feels to a lot of these folks like they are pawns in some tech

42:42billionaires' game and they do not like to feel that way. Why aren't they building it in their own backyards? Why don't you see a bunch of data centers in, you know, I mean, I don't northern California, I don't think I need to tell you why it's so hard to build in northern California. But I both I both think that's true that it's hard to build in northern California. But I also think there's like a truth to the other thing being said. They don't want them there. No, I mean, the land is expensive. It would be very hard, like inexpensive to build a data center and like the places where we're talking about. But it also gets at a core truth, which is people don't actually want data centers around

43:15them. It is a cost. It is a concentrated cost for a diffuse benefit, like if you believe in the benefit. Yeah. So I think that's part of it. I want to go back to the first bucket you were talking about, which is like the race dynamics. Yes. So at the most generous, the thing that I've heard repeatedly is sort of what you're describing, which is it would be better if this were going slower. But I can't control that because I, whether I'm at, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI or Google

43:46or Meta, you know, if we slow down, it just is our less ethical competitors over there who speed up. And even if you put down legislation slowing down all of America, then it's China, you know, the CCP, which is going to win the race. I guess one question is, do you buy this central metaphor of a race that has a, like a ticker tape line where at some point somebody passes it and then they have the recursive super intelligence

44:18and like the race is over? Or do you see this more as like most technologies, like a kind of like a linear set of gains? I mean, can be fast, can be slow, but that doesn't have that somebody is going to win dynamic.

44:35Yeah, I find this really confusing. One of the first things that I did when I started reporting more deeply on AI was try to figure out what AGI meant, because a lot of the way that this race has been characterized is who will build AGI first, who will build artificial general intelligence first thing. First thing I found, no one agrees on what that means. AGI means everything from AI that can build itself to AI that can do all human jobs to AI that produces whatever number of economic value.

45:06And so everyone has these different milestones for what constitutes AGI to them. What that also means is that the race has different finish lines and moving finish lines. And I think that like you see the way that these models perform differently on benchmarks. They are extremely jagged. They can be super good at math and they can be super bad at poker at the same time. They can be amazing at cracking cybersecurity problems, but not able to build anything in the physical world. And because of that, I don't think that technology is A, as general as people suggest it is.

45:39I also think that means that it is much harder to define a finish line to the race. And my sense is that the race, because you cannot adjudicate it, everyone will always feel that they are falling behind on some dimension. I mean, to then make the case that these AI companies are making is they do believe in this recursive self-improvement. They think that, you know, OpenAI, Google, DeepMind, and Anthropic are all extremely focused specifically on the question of, can we build AI that builds itself? Can we build an AI that can train the next generation model completely from scratch on its own?

46:13And in that sense, you get an exponential pace of improvement for whoever can hit that recursive self-improvement curve first. And they think that this might lead to that company pulling ahead. Right now, folks think that it's Anthropic, which has the best coding models, meaning they can code faster, meaning that their next models are even better. I can see where that argument is, but I'm not sure when we look at, you know, the latest Anthropic models versus the latest OpenAI models versus the latest, you know, Chinese open

46:48weights models that we see a company pulling ahead that decisively in that way, especially when every single company in lab is using the same recursive self-improvement strategy. And so basically, I don't know that the race has a finish line, and that's what worries me about it continuing. The reason I want to focus in on this race metaphor for a minute is I've come to think it is really one of the central dividing lines in how you think about different kinds of AI policy. Whether you think that we are in a race with China to get to the point where one side of

47:23the other is going to pull like endlessly and decisively ahead because they hit that, you know, recursive, self-improving level.

47:31Well, then that means what you do in the next one to three years is incredibly, incredibly definitionally important. But if you don't believe that, if you believe something more like, yes, this is a powerful technology, it's a powerful technology that might have a lot of downsides, might come with a lot of social instability. Its effect on a society may not be good. Then, let's run faster to the bad place is not nearly as compelling an argument.

48:01And all of a sudden, the idea that we should have policy in place that slows things down for more voice, for more consideration, it's not crazy. And I guess one place this goes is that I have begun to notice like a really interesting convergence between the SFAI safety people in a way and like the AI populace like a Bernie Sanders or in a different way in Abdul Saad who are getting to not that different places, but through very, very different mechanisms.

48:33Right. They're like the safety people who actually believe we are in a race, but they believe that winning that race might bring the end of humanity. Right. And so like they don't, they don't want to move that fast, right? If we began to slow down, we'd have more credibility for negotiating with China and like trying to come up with like international treaties and all the rest of it, you know? And then you have like the kind of more AI populace side who just like doesn't want to give all these tech billionaires all this power, who doesn't believe this technology will be good for people. And they're starting to come up with like maybe not the policies AI safety people would,

49:05but you know, data center moratoriums and things like that. And so you have this sort of slightly strange, like you would not have considered this coalition. It's super interesting. I mean, you literally have Ron DeSantis doing AI roundtables with Max Tegmark, who's been one of the leading advocates of pausing and slowing down AI, an MIT professor. And you have Bernie Sanders doing viral videos with Eliezer Yudkowsky, the guy who's telling us that AI is probably going to kill us all if we build it. I was talking-

49:36Which is both in lines. It doesn't and does kind of make sense. You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. I've been spending some time in DC this year to talk to some of these AI populace, some from the social conservative right, others from say the labor left. And this Bannon guy I was talking to told me, he's like, you know, like I wouldn't send my kids over to a play day at the Polycule, but I can do coalitions. And so I think it's been one of the most interesting political stories going on right now is a sort of strange bedfellows that have emerged. Even with the data center stuff, I was talking to an activist and they were saying these were liberal women who had gotten into politics after the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

50:09They said that data centers were the first thing that got them to talk productively with their Trump voting neighbors about politics, the first thing in like 10 years almost, which is fascinating to me. And in this sense, they felt a really strong sense almost of political agency that almost came out of this fight. Um, so I, yeah, I think one of the big questions that folks in AI safety, for example, are thinking about is, do we want to build these alliances with the rising left and right populace waves in American culture in order to slow AI down? Maybe it's okay that we have different reasons and different theories for why AI is so dangerous.

50:44For one person is big model bad. For another person, it's big billionaires bad, big tech bad. Um, and those folks are sort of linking arms in a lot of ways against, uh, the AI accelerationists and sort of the folks pushing the race faster. So I think listening to this, we've been sort of living in the data center moratorium side of the politics, but what's the other side of it? What are the problems with just saying, okay, fine, like let's not build any more data centers.

51:15One, like this is not actually the way that you would successfully slow down AI if that's what you really wanted. Um, one, if you, if one locality or one state imposes a moratorium, AI companies are very, very happy to go to other states or other countries. They're already flooding into Texas, for example, because it's had such a pro data center environment. People are looking at Louisiana, the Dakotas, Australia. Um, space, of course, is a current big interest of Elon Musk's because people think that maybe not now, but in five years, we can just put all the data centers in space and solve the

51:48political problems that way. So one is, I'm not really sure that this would stop AI progress that much. It would just shift the data centers to other places that do welcome them. Um, the second thing is, I actually do think that there are ways for these deals to be good. Not every community should want a data center. I think that many of them may discuss it and say, this isn't what we want. We don't need the tax revenue that bad. But in a lot of the cases with these sites that I visited, like, you know, in the old

52:21GM site in Janesville, the Viridian Partners, the data center developer was going to clean that brownfield up. They were the only ones willing to do so. I talked to a real estate broker who had tried to sell that site for five years and he couldn't do it because not a single other commercial buyer wanted to clean up all of this hazardous waste. Only the data centers were willing to do that. Or with Mount Pleasanton, the Foxconn site, right? They had already cleared all this land. They had built all this infrastructure. Putting a data center there was a net improvement for the community. Most, in my opinion, personally, from an economic perspective, from the perspective of there is

52:53nothing going on there anyway. Um, so I think that there are ways to do these deals right. There is enough money in this industry that a lot of communities will decide it is economically beneficial for them to bring in these jobs and bring in this investment. But I think that the way that the data center deals have been done nearly guarantee the amount of public backlash that there's been. And the thing that will probably fix it, I suspect, is probably either like a state level streamlining where someone does the research probably at the state level, maybe at the federal level to figure out what is the fair way to do these deals?

53:24How do we ensure the communities get the most transparency, the most benefit out of data center deals when they happen? So it's not case by case, and it's not so asymmetric with a town of 12,000 negotiating with an open AI or whatever. I would add two other things to that that I'd be curious to hear your take on. So one, you mentioned data centers moving towards other localities, and those localities are not randomly selected. They're localities that are going to impose fewer conditions. So maybe that is fewer environmental conditions. But, you know, in the case of maybe a UAE or some of the Gulf states that are interested

53:55here, you know, you're looking at more authoritarian countries, right? So I've heard a lot of people worry about that or, you know, Elon Musk in space.

54:02So in a sense, if you make it so the data centers cannot go into places where there is more democratic control, you might end up with less overall democratic control. The other thing, and I do think this is significant, is that there is right now more demand for compute than there is compute. You know, people talk a lot about a bubble, but we do not look to have excess AI supply at the moment. And if demand keeps rising because, you know, the coding agents get better and all the rest of the things we know that are happening, but you are constricting the supply of compute,

54:39then you end up with more inequality and who can afford it. So, you know, a Goldman Sachs, a JP Morgan, right? So, you know, a company with a lot of money to buy compute is going to have a lot of it. And then, you know, ordinary users, small businesses, et cetera. If you believe AI is important and powerful, and I believe it is important and powerful, then you have a problem where you have created much more stratification and who can afford it. How do you think about those dimensions of it? I think with where you build the data centers, a lot of folks are starting to look at building

55:12AI infrastructure as a form of geopolitical leverage, right? And so some countries, like places like Australia, Canada, countries in Europe are thinking, actually, maybe the way for us to get a slice of frontier AI, for us to negotiate with the countries where the best AI is being developed, like the U.S., for in cases like cybersecurity access, is to say, you know, we'll build your data centers here. We'll actually welcome you in. And in return, maybe you guarantee us access to the frontier models. So I think that one is that we should look at AI infrastructure as a point of leverage

55:48that both states and countries have. And as you mentioned, if local moratoriums in the U.S., if domestic moratoriums or something like that lead to giving that leverage and negotiating power to authoritarian states, that's probably something the U.S. should be really worried about. On the other hand, there are folks like Anton Light at Carnegie has done work on this, where it's, can we give our allies, can we give our democratic allies negotiating leverage through them building out compute?

56:18The second thing that you mentioned about pricing is interesting because I do think one of the big macro trends in AI right now is the closing of the frontier. It's the fact that the very best models, like Mythos from Anthropic, are not being open to everybody. That is both a safety decision, as in we don't want to give really powerful cyber weapons and bioweapons to a bunch of bad actors or just unknown actors. It is also a pricing question of the best models are really, really expensive to run.

56:48They don't have enough compute to run them. And so we're going to have to charge a lot of money or only give it to the biggest corporations. And I think that's a reason that startups are worried, that countries outside of the U.S. are worried, that normal people are worried. Maybe we get superintelligence and it can achieve all these amazing things, but I'm not going to get it. Maybe my boss is going to get the superintelligence and they're going to automate my job as a worker, as a consumer. I'm not going to be able to do the same thing. So I think it's also a really good point that if we don't continue the compute buildout,

57:22we do see a world where it is the folks with existing capital and access, probably big corporations in the U.S. and the U.S.