Essay by Eric Worrall
But history has a hard lesson for those who ban or restrict economically important technologies.
The Guardian view on AI politics: US datacentre protests are a warning to big tech
Mon 13 Apr 2026 02.42 AEST
In both Republican and Democratic states, scepticism and hostility towards an unregulated construction boom is growing
When blue-collar Trump voters and Maga-friendly midwest states join the same cause as Bernie Sanders and liberal California teachers, something novel is afoot. Last month it was the turn of the Republican party in Texas to expressforthright opposition to the construction of datacentres for artificial intelligence, pending adequate environmental safeguards for local communities. Across the United States, similar campaigns are being waged, as voters from across the political spectrum rail against the outsize influence and power of big tech.
For the White House, which has made the rapid rollout of datacentres a priority in its AI action plan, the scale of the protests is an unwelcome surprise. ……
Democrats have been slow to spot the political potential of an issue that pits the interests of the world’s most powerful corporations against those of concerned local communities. But having in some cases aggressively competed to attract big-tech-related investment, senior figures such as Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, are now stressing the need to avoid an unregulated free-for-all.
…These are surely early skirmishes in a wider battle, as the politics of AI play out. A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that 56% of experts on AI think it will have a positive impact on the US over the next 20 years. Only 17% of all Americans thought the same.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/12/the-guardian-view-on-ai-politics-us-datacentre-protests-are-a-warning-to-big-tech
…
There is an obvious opportunity for politicians opposed to President Trump’s AI push, but the choice of whether to exploit concerns about AI carries some risk. AI companies are offering serious funding to politicians who support their businesses, and I have a funny suspicion politicians opposed to AI might find themselves disappearing off web search rankings maintained by businesses whose profitability depends on AI.
AI becomes contentious issue in midterms over donations
PUBLISHED WED, APR 15 20265:30 AM EDT
Emily Wilkins@EMRWILKINS
- AI PAC Leading the Future raked in another $15 million in the first three months of the year, according to the group.
- The PAC recently endorsed five House Democrats for reelection.
- A coalition of anti-Big Tech groups is sending a letter exclusively obtained by CNBC to lawmakers asking them to denounce the PAC.
Funding from AI groups is becoming a flashpoint in the 2026 midterm elections, as a major political action committee that launched in 2025 with support from AI companies announced its latest fundraising haul.
Super PAC Leading the Future will announce Wednesday it has raised $15 million in the first quarter of 2026 across all of its entities, bringing the group’s total haul for the 2026 election season to $140 million. The group’s backers include venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and AI software company Perplexity.
The group has backed candidates of both parties in the midterms. It also recently endorsed five House Democrats: Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) and Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.).
But a coalition of groups led by The Tech Oversight Project, an advocacy group that seeks to break up big tech companies, is pressuring those same Democrats to denounce the group that’s supporting them.
…
Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/ai-2026-elections-midterms-campaign-donations.html
Should the USA restrict AI anyway?
I know a lot of WUWT readers have an unfavourable view of AI. But history has a hard lesson for those who reject technological advances.
The Ottoman caliphate from the 16th to 18th centuries was a leading global superpower of its day. The Ottomans controlled much of Southern Europe, Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Only desperate Christian defensive actions such as the Battle of Vienna in 1683 and legendary borderlands leaders like Vlad the Impaler prevented the Ottomans from overrunning all of Europe.
But right at the height of their power, the Ottomans made a critical mistake which cost them everything. After witnessing the chaos of the religious reformation in Europe, caused by Guttenberg’s invention of the Printing Press in the mid 1400s, the Ottomans decided to halt the flow of dangerous new ideas into the caliphate by restricting mechanised printing.
“We over-regulated a technology, which was the printing press,” said Al Olama [UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence]. “It was adopted everywhere on Earth. The Middle East banned it for 200 years. “The calligraphers came to the sultan and said: ‘We’re going to lose our jobs, do something to protect us’—so job loss protection, very similar to AI,” the UAE minister explained. “The religious scholars said people are going to print fake versions of the Quran and corrupt society—misinformation, second reason.” Lastly Al Olama said it was the fear of the unknown that led to this fateful decision. “The top advisors of the sultan said: ‘We actually do not know what this technology is going to do, let us ban it, see what happens to other societies and then reconsider,’” he explained. – AEI
This restriction on technology had a catastrophic impact on the Ottoman economy and their status as a global superpower. While other nations raced ahead, embracing new industry and military capabilities, the Ottoman Empire abandoned progress. Within a few short centuries they fell from being a world class power, to becoming the plaything of other great powers, finally suffering the humiliation of national dismemberment as the new global leaders carved up and claimed former Ottoman territories with the signing of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres.
The reasons the Ottomans used to justify banning the printing press seem oddly familiar :- “We’re going to lose our jobs”, “misinformation”, “let’s ban it, see what happens to other countries and then reconsider”.
The concerns identified by the Ottomans were legitimate, but the Ottomans response to those concerns led to disaster. In the West the problems identified by the Ottomans were faced headon and solved. New laws on copyright made plagiarism manageable. Libel laws, and the rise of authoritative bodies such as the Royal Society, and widely published standard reference works such as the King James Bible, addressed the problem of misinformation, at least for a time. And all those scribes who lost their jobs in the West discovered their talents were still useful, after printers realised they still sometimes needed elegant hand drawn images and calligraphy.
Now the world faces those same old world problems in a new form. The old solutions we developed during the age of the printing press have failed. So we also face a choice – whether to deal with these reincarnated old world problems head-on, as our ancestors did, or whether to hide our heads in the sand like the Ottomans did.
I understand people who are concerned about AI messing up the kids, and AI automating away everyone’s job, because as a father and as a software developer I also share those concerns. My kid watches too much online AI slop, helping a child navigate these new pitfalls is a real challenge. As for my work, automating my profession of software development is a major goal of AI companies.
But the one thing which is worse than learning how to adapt to and deal with these challenges, learning how to keep our kids safe and how to continue to be economically valuable in the new world order, is to be like the Ottoman Empire, to try to stop the clock. Because while great powers and empires can sometimes briefly stop the clock within their borders, the protection offered by stopping the clock is always incomplete and temporary. The barbarians at the gate who have embraced the new ways rapidly grow in strength, until the gates can no longer hold. Then the once great power crumbles and falls before new capabilities they are helpless to defeat.
The TDS is strong in some of these people….
For sure – but exploiting people’s fears with damaging policy ideas like Net Zero in my opinion has been part of the Democrat playbook for a long time. I don’t see any reason that will change in the AI age.
There is perhaps a simple explanation. A combination of:
1. TDS;
2. disintegration of the support for Global Warming;
3. the obvious and impending overthrow of the Labour government in Britain at the next UK election;
May simply have induced insanity among Groaniad writers? After all, they are seeing at first hand the collapse of everything they held sacred and true.
I know someone who thinks that way, and unusually he’s someone of the left / green persuasion who is happy to talk to people with wildly different views.
They see right wing individualism, the kind of individualism embodied by President Trump, as immensely damaging to the planet and to people’s mental wellbeing.
But thanks to President Trump and MAGA, they are seeing what they believed was certain victory snatched from their grasp.
Global warming is just one of a number of fronts they are fighting to reshape society into their vision of a gentle place where everyone gets along and are perpetually kind to each other – kind of a Disney princess utopian worldview of how society should operate.
AI and social media are a threat to this vision because sometimes people create unkind videos and memes. And also AI uses crazy amounts of energy, which contradicts their utopian vision of everyone running their villages with a handful of community solar panels in the town square.
I think that Democrats will solidify around AI luddite positions, despite the money on offer from AI companies, the opportunity is too great to miss. And hatred for AI, for a wildcard which threatens to derail their historically inevitable march to permanent victory over the forces of individualism, I mean why wouldn’t they try to smother it with regulations?
I agree. There’s a lot of Disney princess utopianism among the members of the radical left. One such was John Reed (Ten Days That Shook The World). He became a propagandist for Lenin and the rest of his murderous thugs during and after the Russian Revolution. He ignored the landslide of murders and executions by Lenin and Trotsky’s gangs. He spread his propaganda to a New York Times which was all too willing to accept it.
Even much later, in the 1960s people of the far left were willing to ignore the mass murders by starvation of Mao, of Che Guevara and of Pol Pot. You can still see today children wearing Guevara T-Shirts.
So, the utopianism you outline has been around the far Left for many decades. It’s interesting that the supposedly well educated seem most vulnerable to this tripe.
Do you believe that american politicians still believe in individuals?
Only a few and they are sidelined.
The system is totally corrupt and set up to feed the corporate monster, not protect individuals. Have you been asleep for 40 years?
You live in a fantasy.
Trump does NOT care about individuals but about power. And power works through powerful elites, clans. And they NEVER let an individual steer the ship.
The americans live in the pretense of a Strong Leader and that is the portrayed image that sells. But you are being misled. The snake salesman becomes the snake.The ones who actually tried to do something were taken out.
Even Eisenhower waited until the very end to warn about the dangers. JFK obviously spoke out too soon, as did his brother Robert.
It brings the assassination attempts on Trump in an interesting light. It clearly had an influence on him. And it’s not pretty. And we saw the people in his 2nd admin. It told a story.
But apparently i suffer from TDS and that ends all conversations and arguments.
Talk about labels!
Funny how the left, who’s greatest fear is big business, wants to create a government that has more power than any business could ever have.
Would I love to see a world where everyone is kind and cooperates freely with everyone else?
Heck yea.
The problem is that simply isn’t how human nature works. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have shaped life to be selfish and competitive, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that.
“an unregulated construction boom”
Huh? AI datacenters are not required to follow local construction regulations?
They’re so big with such huge need of energy and water, etc. it’s hard to believe any location has any relevant construction regulations. I suspect many communities are just saying, “sure, go build it and spend your billions in our community”. Worry about the consequences later.
Are they that much bigger than a plant for building say trucks?
Might not be a larger building but I suspect they need far more energy and water.
They need a new cause to engage the people since all causes have a life cycle. The CO2 issue has been through several. That is the reason they have to keep uping the fear factor
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/up-and-down-with-ecologythe-issue-attention-cycle
I think that artificial intelligence is going to do to white collar workers what automation and robotics did to blue collar workers. When “learn to code” is no longer a viable option, then what? Maybe “The End Of Work” was written thirty years too early.
There are still ways to add value. Vibe coding only works for coders – you have to be highly skilled to spot the mistakes and figure out how to fix them. Office automation requires skilled and experienced people to make sure it works.
Juniors are suffering, because in the AI Age a lot of junior work can be done by AI. But new skills are becoming important, and the smart kids are already making good choices. Their less clever friends will follow their footsteps.
Eventually AI will end the age of work – but there is still a long way to go, a lot of theoretical breakthroughs required to reach that point.
There’s a host of job types which AI cannot do. This includes most of the skilled trades (plumbing, carpentry, electrical contracting, auto mechanics, skilled welding and steam-fitting). It also includes a lot of highly skilled labour such as surgery. AI cannot make decisions, so any profession requiring decision-making skills may not have much use for AI.
It’s not clear to me that AI can ever do these tasks.
Have you seen the Chinese AI robot electricians doing industrial inspections – on the news today
And that would be a very good thing. We need evidence daily of the human “touch” in our lives.
AI by itself can’t. AI combined with advanced robotics probably can.
Note, as of this morning, the kind of advanced robotics I’m thinking of hasn’t been built. To the extent that it has been produced, it is still to expensive.
Juniors are suffering
This is true – but the companies that are too shortsighted to hire and train them will suffer more in the long term, when the seniors retire and there’s nobody to replace them.
Humans have long been excellent at finding new needs that only they can fill. The entrepreneurial spirit may be about ready for a massive new wave. Smart people understand the value of work and will make sure thay have their fill. I’m hoping excellence in craftsmanship is on the near horizon. As an artist I have found myself instinctively tending towards art that requires eight or more hours for something the size of a post card that in the past would have taken me about an hour.
That said, the example of the lesson learned by the Ottoman Turks has moved me firmly into the camp supportive of AI. Especially as no one is forcing me to use it because I think the better it gets the more we stand to lose if we use it for creativity, given the human tendency to laziness.
In one story I’ve read, automation was ubiquitous and most everything was cheap.
In this world, there were expensive restaurants where the servers were humans.
What did automation do for workers? It allowed them to cut the work week down from 100 hours a week to 40 while increasing their standard of living.
If AI has a similar impact on office workers, it will end up improving the standard of living for everyone.
I don’t know what would be worse. Regulated, or unregulated AI. On one hand anything the government regulates inherently turns to crap and is often used to control the people. On the flip side the power of AI used for nefarious purposes is a real challenge to contain.
Unregulated AI is worse , of course.
Just like everything else with potential, some potential is negative and eventually results in cancerous growth.
And AI has the biggest downside potential for humankind besides nuclear bombs.(your country currently fights a war because of that to “regulate” things 6000 miles away)
It is also wrong to claim that everything the government regulates turns into crap.
You need some regulation/ rules to even have a common ground / culture etc to have a functional society to begin with
and even the constitution + amendments etc are part of a regulatory systems.
+ the government actually uses “deregulations” to control you and me.
Either by going criminal and ignoring regulations as the NSA and CiA are doing with mass spying or drug trafficking,
or by using private proxies to spy on us like Palantir that was created by the CiA
or Facebook that popped up just after DARPA shut down lifelog.
No one would claim that regulating traffic is a bad thing, as it won’t work otherwise.
But overregulate it with traffic lights and signs and you will get the same mess as with no regulations at all.
The Banking crisis 2008 was result of crazy deregulations(and people said it from the get-go in 1999 when Glass-Steagel was repealed),
and then regulations were then necessary to save the day by socializing the losses of the banks.
It is always about balance but sadly there has been some stereotypical polarized social engineering in the fake left- right paradigm going on,
where the left is being told that corporate power is the ultimate evil while state tyranny is a great thing as long as it is sold as social
while the right will accept any tyranny and censorship by corporations as long as its sold as free market(which does not exist).
And it has reached so bizarre levels that the left will go in full self destruct mode
and avoid common sense as soon as something is being labelled white/patriarch and follow
new ” values ” presented to them by the corporations they pretend to hate,
while the right will reject everything as soon as it is being labeled regulatory /communist
while they are perfectly fine when their country is permanently ” regulating ”
other countries with wars/ interventions / sanctions etc.
Bingo!!
But you will get downvotes here for telling the truth and not supporting the ‘right’ side.
Of course the “right side” is anything the socialists support.
There is zero chance they can be regulated because they offer such competitive advantage. Even if you outlawed them here on Earth, Elon or someone like him would take it into space and you have no law you can use there.
It’s the same situation as all major technical breakthroughs you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
According to the socialists, if only we had an all powerful government that was in charge of everything, we could finally make people safe.
Can you think of any technology that can’t be used to hurt people?
The tech bros might do something sneaky? Say it ain’t so! 😉
Bradley’s Bromide applies here:
“If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee — that will do them in.“
Look up “AI Agents” 🙂
The one thing I don’t like in the digital platform world, is the creation of personalised avatars. Two people search for the same thing and get different responses that are “aligned” with the avatar version. The aim..to keep you online for longer with each click.
At least with a reference book, both read the same account or definition forever. Of course new editions change, but digital can be different even in your own avatar 6 months and there is no trace – you wouldn’t realise unless looked a dsy later.
What are these AI data centers to be doing?
I organised an appointment with my plumber last Wednesday. The appointment web page asked me to describe my problem – I needed a new mixer tap in the kitchen, and we had water pressure problems in the bathroom. Then the web page asked me two relevant questions – “Have you already purchased the mixer tap you want fitted?” and “Is the water pressure problem only in the bathroom, or is water pressure a problem for all your taps?”
It wasn’t a human who asked those questions, it was an AI large language model my plumber had integrated into his website.
So a big part of AI, part of the reason it is so valuable, is using AI to streamline communication and commerce, to improve economic efficiency. I got an instant response, and the plumber got the information he needed in seconds, because a 24×7 AI was on hand to ask the kinds of questions which once would have required an office admin.
Sometimes a standardized question can be good enough, but all too often all the choices offered by digital assistants do not apply to my needs. And choosing “other” often leads into a vague Nowhere,
The better question is what won’t they be doing.
The Western world can do anything they like with AI activism and it will have the same effect as climate activism … zero in the grand scheme of things, except for dragging Western economies further behind. China will be the winner … no attempt to reduce CO2 and in fact massive increases and Chicom supported AI overwhelming the rest of the world in civil and military applications.
Japan was poised to become a major economic power during the Japanese Economic Miracle, which occurred from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, characterized by rapid industrial growth and significant advancements in technology and exports. That all ended in 1973.
Agree China has some big unresolved banking and finance problems, lots of bad debts, which are going to drag them down for at least the next decade. They’re making lots of wrong moves in resolving this crisis, instead of letting bankrupt companies fail, well connected companies with lots of employees are getting big government handouts, which is piling on government debt, on top of their other problems.
Thanks to the one child policy, they have a big surplus of males who have no chance to ever find a wife and start a family. As such, they have no motivation to save for the future.
They also have a rapidly aging population and in another decade or so, a significant fraction of the total population will be needed just to take care of th elderly.
I suspect part of the reason China is investing so heavily in robots is they hope the robots will be ready to alleviate the cost of caring for old people.
My early experience with AI, when I asked about myself, came up with fictional personas. The only thing it got right was the spelling of my name.
I’m amused by AI images and videos. Apparently, many students use AI for reports, etc., and professors use AI to check if students use AI.
We’ve moved from the information age to the bullshit age.
It is NOT an advance, AI is not intelligence. Asimov has warned us, we ignore him at our peril. Exploring the laws of robotics to their logical conclusions has revealed the dangers.
We need to start with a ban on all use of AI in schools and universities.
We will not be able to trust any unsupervised written material from any student in any subject as being work they have done, knowledge they have personally used and understanding they actually possess.
Just like in the good old days, each student will have to be examined verbally – a teacher or professor or expert asking questions and receiving answers from each candidate who is empty handed and not wired up to the www.
Or, back to handwriting inside a guarded room with supervisors scanning each candidate for hidden devices and patrolling the aisles between seated candidates who are writing, not typing, answers to test questions.
Read education being given by real experts in their field educating intelligent and capable scholars in mathematics and history and philosophy and literature and the sciences and human and animal medicine and law and commerce.
ReadReal education …Exactly, and once they have a solid formation they can be educated solidly regarding AI, the pros and cons, so that from the beginning they have some idea of the impact they will bear from its use. using AI seems to me like using drugs — an easy and harmful addiction that if misused can lead to a fruitless life.
The keystone of the current AI boom was a demonstration of extraordinary image recognition skill in a competition in 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet
There is a big list of things AI does not do well. But that list is shrinking every day.
Not sure about the history. The high tide of the Islamic conquests was much earlier, the battle of Tours 732. The reversal was well underway by the fall of Grenada in 1492, which was the completion of the Reconquista and the end of Islamic rule in any of the Spanish peninsula. Another really decisive event was the sea battle of Lepanto.1571. The key factor was weaponry, mostly from the Venetian armories, and s Spanish primitive early version of a ship of the line whose broadsides made havoc among the Turkish galleys.
Was the decline caused by the decision to ban printing presses? Don’t know, an interesting theory. But the siege of Vienna was a very close thing, so as late as the 1680s the Turks were still able to mount major and threatening land offensives. If it was due to banning printing, it took rather a long time for the effects to become apparent.
Perhaps the dead hand of clerical political power, with a ban as part of its effect, is a more convincing total explanation?
As Terry Pratchett once said, in the bath tub of history the truth is harder to find than the soap, and twice as slippery.
You could be right. But some Muslims like Al Olama who I quoted cite the printing press as decisive. Of course you could argue the societal sclerosis which led to the banning of the printing press was the real factor.
You also have to take into consideration the influence of persian and indian scolars and scientists on the european renaissance. While science was reserved to the few on the west, in west Asia science ran parallel w religion and books were copied on a big scale, not only the Koran. And in the west only the clerics were taught latin and permission had to be granted for an individual to write and publish any book. Ie, there was a stranglehold on knowledge.
For the larger, non-specialized, use of AI, to me the big unanswered question now is the economic one. AI companies are not profitable, not even close. There is HUGE investment going on without a clear future revenue stream to support it. How this plays out could be:
There are specialized areas. One we seldom hear about is military applications where AI is being built into weapons systems from large scale to what soldiers have on there persons. This includes strategic planning uses. In this case, the benefits can justify far more expensive AI infrastructure than people chatting or writing papers.
Perhaps the best know specialized area of AI use is computer programming and debugging. This is a field changing so fast that last week’s capability may no longer be relevant. No one knows what sort of changes to kinds of jobs this will entail. Finding the security bugs in software before shipping can justify enormous expense on AI usage, far exceeding what a company could justify to write some software to automate a task.
An interesting economic study from a major bank concluded that so far, there is no discernible economy wide uptick in productivity. And so far, it’s hard to discern a downward effect on employment from AI. There have been layoffs which blame them on AI, but there is also opinion that many of these are a way to get rid of dead wood or general down-sizing and AI is a handy excuse.
My point is that there are huge unknowns. I think most people have a gut feel that “something should be done to regulate this beast” and yet when it comes to specifics, history tells us that our chances of being really “smart” about things are not very good. It may turn out that like some other inventions, it can be argued that mankind would be better off if AI was never invented. But it has been invented and restrictions may only lead to tipping the use cases to the bad ones.
A lot of them, possibly all of the current crop will go bust. And we shouldn’t lift a finger to help them, because picking winners with something as new as AI is a surefire way to burn taxpayer money for no benefit. But out of the ashes will emerge real value. Ai is genuine, even if some of the mushrooms which have sprung up on this fertile new field are toxic toadstools.
That may be, but it doesnt solve the issue of energy regulation visavis data centres and the public.
Those decision are made NOW, not in 10 years time..
I count this as an issue on a par with any other environmental nuisance caused by a new factory or industry in the area. And now the problem has become a political football it will be dealt with the same way – by say installing modular nuclear reactors, or paying for extra electricity infrastructure, so the locals aren’t inconvenienced.