There’s a lot you can say about AI, much of it involving justified horror. And we don’t just mean that when the New York Times emails “Many students can no longer write without A.I., educators say” we respond that they certainly can’t write with it, any more than they can do push-ups by sending a robot to the gym. Also stories like “ICE plans to buy robot ‘dogs’ for some immigration enforcement operations” or “China is training up thousands of humanoid robots”. But we also want to point out that, even as the need for vast amounts of power for their processing facilities has helped back the tech bros away from trendy climate alarmism, there’s a massive public backlash in the US that may actually inhibit construction of some of those data centres. Whereas in the rest of the world, people may hate it but their governments essentially don’t care what they think. So there’s a lot you can say about America’s democracy, much of it involving justified horror. But there’s still a strong residue of actual meaningful citizen engagement and power that’s easier to sneer at than replicate.
To try to cover the entire debate over data centres would result in a blog post even longer than our typical and arguably self-indulgent length. Heatmap, grappling with the issue that the more governments invest in cheap, reliable alternative energy the more expensive and manky the system becomes, wonders if they could be hit with a “large load tariff” to help pay for the rest of the grid. Schools try to ban AI use by students. People worry that Skynet may be achieving self-awareness, 30 years late by Hollywood standards but incredibly fast by anyone’s now that it’s upon us. They ask if it will cause a short-term stock market bubble. They praise Communist China for being so good at it unlike stinking free markets and stinking Donald Trump. (Yes, the Guardian.) But whatever the answer may be to any of these things, what we want to stress here is that given massive public unease, it’s striking how much of the even partly effective opposition is concentrated in the United States, also home to the most astounding and dynamic high-tech firms the world has ever seen.
David Gelles of the New York Times “Climate Forward” newsletter, which and who furnishes much grist for our mill, wrote a thoughtful piece about seeing an old coal power plant being converted to natural gas for “a giant A.I. data center”, and also being able to see “a nuclear power plant that was selling electricity to Meta for its A.I. efforts” while nearby “a former steel plant was being converted into another hyperscale data center.”
Then, he commented:
“What I found was a region at a crossroads. On the one hand, outraged residents were part of a swelling resistance to the mass build-out of A.I. infrastructure around the country. But I also heard from business executives and labor leaders who were eager for the investment and development. It was a case study in the complex trade-offs that communities consider when they debate whether or not to house these facilities in their backyards. Making these decisions all the more tricky is the speed at which they’re happening.”
Quite. Indeed part of the terror of AI is how fast it’s happening. It only took humanity 42 years to get from the comically frail and unstable contraption in which the Wright Brothers made a “historic” 120-foot flight to the Enola Gay “superfortress” dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima from 31,000 feet. Which was nothing to the subsequent and ever-accelerating pace of technology.
So Americans are worried, like people everywhere. The difference is that they’re able to push back whereas, for instance, we hear that “Government of Canada launches Canada’s Responsible Data Centre Development Principles” it is a certainty that, in addition to be being fatuous, richly rewarding to those on the gravy train and ineffective in every way, it will totally bypass citizens’ concerns and be immune to citizen action.
We also note wearily that “Prime Minister Carney launches Digital Transformation Canada to deliver better, faster, more reliable government services to Canadians” which bloviation includes that:
“Earlier this year, the government launched AI for All, Canada’s national AI strategy, to harness the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve services, boost productivity, and strengthen Canada’s economy. The strategy commits the federal government to lead by example in the responsible adoption of AI and to use government procurement as a strategic anchor customer for Canadian AI companies, helping them scale, strengthening domestic capacity, and reinforcing Canada’s digital sovereignty.”
Most of which, again, is a lot of long words describing things that are not happening and won’t. Why we need “Responsible Data Centre Development Principles” when we already have “AI for All” is hard to explain and we don’t really want to hear them try. But you can be dang sure that “Canada’s digital sovereignty” will be another way for government to dictate to citizens, not the other way around. In America it’s different.
As another “Climate Forward” writer, David Wallace-Wells, just argued, under the headline “The data center backlash is a demand for democracy”:
“Every time you think data center resistance might be cresting, the numbers get bigger. You can make sense of this pattern any number of ways. But to me, it looks, above all, like the arrival of a genuinely novel mass politics, so unfamiliar to Americans in the 21st century that we hardly know what to make of it.”
Initially, he says, he mistook it for another ineffectual NIMBY movement, and “Kill one data center project, I figured, and another would pop up.” But it’s not what he thinks has happened, and:
“six months later, I’m feeling a lot less patronizing about those fighting to keep a machine future out of their hometowns. What I feel instead is more like awe. There simply hasn’t been something like the data center backlash in American politics for a very long time, uniting three-quarters of the country across all those divisions we tell ourselves are unbridgeable – partisanship, age, income and education and the yawning one between rural and urban Americans. In lately rallying a number of high-profile political leaders with their fingers in the wind, it’s even managed to unite a chunk of the elites with the populist rabble.”
Not something an observer would be likely to say about any other country on Earth, not even any other democracy, let alone China.
Whether in fact anyone can do anything is far from clear, not least because AI seems to convey massive military advantages on whichever nation gets there first, from drones to cyberattacks to Terminators and their headless but gun-toting robot dogs. Which also raises the disquieting notion that if AI is militarily unbeatable and we lose control of it, there will be no John Connor to save us. But whatever you think of AI, from the classroom to the battlefield to the Promethean notion that if only we could get some interesting inventions at last we could begin to live, surely we should admire a political system that gives effective voice to citizens concerned about it… and wonder about ones that don’t.
