Essay by Eric Worrall
Data centers driving up energy costs and fear of job losses have become major public concerns.
The American rebellion against AI is gaining steam
Amrith Ramkumar, Katherine Blunt, Lindsay Ellis
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Delivering a commencement address at the University of Arizona, Schmidt told students the “technological transformation” wrought by artificial intelligence will be “larger, faster and more consequential than what came before.” Like some other graduation speakers mentioning AI, Schmidt was met with a chorus of boos.
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Consumers resent energy-price jumps exacerbated by the spread of data centers. Workers fear widespread job losses. Parents worry about AI undermining education and harming children’s mental health. In recent months, the wave of anger has brought protests, swayed election results and spurred isolated acts of violence.
In April, a 20-year-old Texas man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman’s home and made threats at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, according to a federal complaint filed against him. A few days earlier, someone fired 13 shots at the front door of an Indianapolis councilman who had recently approved a data center.
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After bubbling up in a handful of races last year, it has exploded onto the ballot across the country. Voters in Festus, Mo., ousted four city council members a week after they approved a $6 billion data center. Dozens of communities in states from Maine to Arizona are trying to ban new data centers. Some 360,000 Americans are in Facebook groups opposed to the facilities, roughly quadruple the number from December, figures from organizations fighting the AI build-out show.
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Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-american-rebellion-against-ai-is-gaining-steam/ar-AA23w1HH?ocid=finance-verthp-feeds
Globalists and Democrats have been quick to jump on these public concerns.
The point is these are legitimate concerns – AI is and will continue to cause job losses. Data centers are driving up power prices. But only one of these problems is fixable.
The data center electricity price rises are a symptom of a broken energy market, not a problem caused by data centers. Any rise in energy intensive economic activity, including a rise in factory jobs, would have caused similar upward pressure on energy prices. The problem is the market is not responding to the price signal. Higher power prices should be a signal to increase supply, but something is preventing market participants from responding adequately to changes in demand.
The source of market friction is likely red tape. For example, Data Centers could be built with co-located modular nuclear power plants, so they don’t ruin anyone’s power bill. Such an arrangement would bring down prices and improve local grid reliability, by allowing the data center to support the local grid with their in-house nuclear reactor during data center quiet periods. But imagine trying to push that solution through today’s planning approval processes.
The problem which can’t be fixed is job losses. Job losses are sadly inevitable – restricting or banning data centers in the USA won’t stop this, because China and Asia will keep pushing forward regardless of what the USA does. China with its surplus of electricity generation capacity already has a significant advantage in the AI race.
Much of the USA’s economic and military advantage is because of the USA’s enormous global trade network. Trying to stop data centers in the USA because of their impact on jobs will destroy the USA’s global competitive advantage. If the USA turns its back on data centers and AI, economic rivals which embrace AI will be in a position to destroy the USA’s competitive advantage and usurp the trade networks which propelled the USA to become the world’s dominant superpower.
Retraining might help mitigate the impact of job losses – and I’m not talking about trite non-solutions like President Biden’s advice to “learn to code”. There are plenty of jobs AI can’t do, and won’t be able to do well for the foreseeable future. Any job which involves complex and unpredictable environments, such as trade jobs like gas fitters, plumbers and electricians, will resist AI encroachment for a very long time. There will be more robotic tools for such jobs, but such jobs will still need humans in the loop to analyse the problems and figure out the solutions, and make sure the robots don’t do anything stupid.
Of course if you can “learn to code”, the jobs of people who serve the AI – data scientists, top tier programmers and expert maintenance engineers – will have real staying power.
My point is the problem is real, but banning or restricting data centers is not a viable solution. We can’t turn the clock back on today’s technological advances, any more than textile workers in the 1800s could stop machine driven mass production of woven cloth. All that can be done, and should be done, is to act early to cushion the blow, to help people distressed about job insecurity to find new jobs which the AIs can’t steal, and to figure out how to fix the regulatory roadblocks which are causing electricity price misery for anyone who lives next door to new data centers.
