Sign up to see the future, today<\/p>\n
Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech<\/p>\n
The public outrage over the tech industry\u2019s obsession with AI is starting to boil over<\/a> \u2014 and the pitchforks are coming out.<\/p>\n Most recently, a man allegedly lobbed a Molotov cocktail<\/a>\u00a0at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman\u2019s house. Days earlier, a councilman in Indianapolis said that somebody had fired a dozen bullets at his house<\/a>, with a handwritten note reading \u201cNo Data Centers\u201d left on his doorstep.<\/p>\n A similar story is playing out across swathes of rural America, with small towns continuing a years-long effort<\/a> to keep environmentally damaging<\/a> data centers that put a huge strain on water availability<\/a> and the power grid<\/a> out of their communities.<\/p>\n Earlier this week, voters in a small town in Missouri led a revolt, firing half of their city council<\/a> over a recently-approved $6 billion data center deal.<\/p>\n In short, public backlash over AI has long broken the confines of snarky online commentary. Residents are starting to stand up to what tech leaders continue to claim is a technological revolution, while workers are actively rebelling<\/a> after being forced train their AI replacements.<\/p>\n The public tone is notably starting to shift, as journalist Brian Merchant noted in a recent blog post<\/a>, with some politicians even publicly throwing their weight behind moratoriums on data center development.<\/p>\n Whether the public will eventually reap the benefits of the industry\u2019s enormous investments remains as dubious as ever. As Axios points out<\/a>, the industry is struggling to agree on a cohesive narrative, with OpenAI arguing in a controversial industrial policy paper<\/a> published earlier this month that we could soon live in a society where the tax burden shifts from human labor to capital, while workers benefit from a four-day workweek.<\/p>\n Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, on the other hand, continues to emphasize<\/a> that AI poses a massive risk to society and needs to be controlled at all costs.<\/p>\n The widening schism between optimism and disillusionment is forcing AI companies into damage control mode.<\/p>\n Their attempts to regain control over the narrative are hard to overlook. Just days before the New Yorker published<\/a> an unflattering expos\u00e9 about Altman, which painted the billionaire as a liar and skilled manipulator<\/a>, OpenAI announced<\/a> it had bought the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN), a business and tech podcast company that\u2019s been referred to as \u201cSportsCenter for Silicon Valley<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n