Although the data-center backlash may reflect a specific attempt to defy A.I.\u2019s encroachment, the wellspring of \u201cA.I. populism\u201d\u2014an umbrella term coined by the writer Jasmine Sun\u2014seems properly understood as an expression of more general political resentment. Most of us have become accustomed to the idea that government either cannot or will not just do things. Zilch, it seems, can be done about climate change, war, the housing crisis, inflation, or inadequate medical coverage and child care. The basic political legitimacy of our republic, the abundance movement claims, depends on its tangible achievements. New York\u2019s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, probably does not believe that a few city-owned supermarkets will definitively ease the affordability burden, but they might nevertheless resonate as proof that government can deliver.<\/p>\n
Absent such progress, we will continue to take for granted the inexorable erosion of our physical and our social infrastructure. This sense of stagnation was bad enough when it seemed like a universal affliction; the A.I. build-out, privately underwritten by at least a trillion dollars, has rendered the situation intolerable. The speed with which data centers have proliferated across the country makes it obvious that not all of us reside in the same inertial void. In recent decades, our largest and wealthiest companies have directed their free cash flow into unproductive stock buybacks; today, they compete to spend down their balance sheets on chips, buildings, and energy. These are capital investments on a scale that our society has not seen since the construction of the railroads.<\/p>\n
The money is only part of it, though. The overnight transformation of the national landscape is a feat of human will and collective action. A.I. has yet to cure cancer, but it has already established that a different world is possible. These companies move even faster than their Valley predecessors did, but in place of breaking things they build them. If California\u2019s plagued high-speed-rail project were necessary to A.I. infrastructure, it would have been finished yesterday. Certain people and organizations can, it turns out, just do things.<\/p>\n
Why, then, can\u2019t these same people just do the things that prevent extinction? Unfortunately, they often sigh, they are trapped by commercial and geopolitical realities. In an essay published earlier this month, Amodei signalled his immediate willingness to slow everything down, or \u201cpace the frontier,\u201d but his company\u2019s self-sacrifice would be for naught without the compliance of his domestic rivals, not to mention that of their Chinese competitors. It is a prisoner\u2019s dilemma, and it cannot be solved by unilateral action. Amodei would prefer sensible regulation, but in the meantime he has proposed that his peer companies voluntarily adopt a common framework for transparency and accountability\u2014a course, he notes, that would probably require that the federal government waive potential antitrust action. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have made ambiguous noises in support, but Mark Zuckerberg remains unaligned, as do Trump pals such as David Sacks, the Administration\u2019s former A.I. czar, and Jensen Huang, the C.E.O. of Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world. The discord is maddening. When it comes to the difficult challenges that must be overcome on the level of bits or atoms, all of these people freely just do things. But, when it comes to basic interpersonal communication, they apparently cannot get their act together to make a joint commitment in favor of cautionary measures.<\/p>\n
Such measures would at least buy the industry time to address the problem of alignment\u2014to figure out how, or whether, an artificial superintelligence might be kept on our team. The current state of affairs is hardly encouraging. How can we trust these humans to co\u00f6rdinate successfully with an advanced being if they can\u2019t even manage it with one another?\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Although the data-center backlash may reflect a specific attempt to defy A.I.\u2019s encroachment, the wellspring of \u201cA.I. populism\u201d\u2014an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,4943,85,46,1619,4813,125,97089],"class_list":["post-621894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-comment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-magazine","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","tag-technology","tag-the-lede"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}