The growing backlash against AI

[Bernard]

From TPM.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/the-weekender/saved-pete-hegseth-gives-the-pope-leeway-to-do-his-thing

The Backlash Against AI Is Breaking Containment

“It’s our home, and once we give it up, we won’t get it back,” a south Florida resident said at a recent town hall meeting opposing the construction of a proposed data center.

The resident was talking specifically about the proposed Okee-One data center in Okeechobee, which is slated to be built near waterways connected to the Everglades and other environmentally sensitive sites. But the comment could be a slogan for the broader, accelerating anti-AI movement. A growing number of Americans are refusing to invite a technology that could be irreversibly destructive into our communities and government.

Brian Merchant, an indispensable voice on all things AI, has chronicled the mounting backlash against AI in his Blood in the Machine newsletter. In just the past weeks, Merchant notes, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco mansion was hit by a molotov cocktail and gunfire in two separate instances; a councilman in Indianapolis said someone fired bullets at his home and left a note reading “No Data Centers”; Maine became the first state to ban the construction of new data centers and Monterey Park, California became the first California city to do the same.

“If you take at face value what the AI executives themselves have been saying for the last decade, that an AI powerful enough to make humans go extinct is nascent, then acting with force to stop it would be a rational action,” Merchant explains.

For months, the humming opposition to the technology has grown louder, cutting across partisan, regional and professional lines. Locals have staged protests against data centers from the Southwest to Northeast, in rural and urban areas alike. Journalists at ProPublica walked off the job in a one-day strike, partly because they want a say in how the company adopts AI. People are pissed about AI contributing to their soaring energy costs, taking their jobs, harming the environment, spreading misinformation, increasing surveillance, making us all dumber — you name it. A once abstract debate about how the technology could impact our lives has become very tangible, showing up in people’s literal backyards, and they’re not happy about it.

Those responsible for ushering in our new AI era don’t seem to grasp this, though. That was evidenced in a much-derided X thread recently put out by Palantir, the intelligence and defense software firm that has multibillion-dollar contracts with the U.S. Army, DHS, ICE, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies. The thread summarizes CEO Alex Karp’s book “The Technological Republic,” which calls for resisting “a vacant and hollow pluralism” and encourages the development of AI weapons, among other points. Critics disparaged his worldview, in which a small group of elites wield great military and economic power with little accountability, as “technofascism.”

For most of us, this isn’t a vision of the future that appeals.

— Allegra Kirkland