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- The AI backlash is growing in the West, but ranked only 29th of 39 US election issues — there is far more politics to come as the technology spreads.
- Fights over data centres — from nearly $100bn in scuppered US projects to opposition in the Utah desert — show how jobs, environment and existential fears converge.
- An incremental strategy works best: spread benefits, regulate hard where needed, measure impacts, and use AI to make the state itself better.
Advances in artificial intelligence have long terrified techies. Lately, voters are feeling the angst too. The AI backlash is climbing the political agenda in the West, and it is only just getting started — because the technology itself is only just getting started.
US data-centre projects scuppered by protests
Of US voters who tell pollsters they want AI banned from most industries
Where Americans rank AI among election issues — for now
The fiercest fights so far have been in America, where protests against data centres have scuppered nearly $100bn-worth of projects, warring AI megadonors have just dumped tens of millions into a Manhattan congressional race, and around 40% of voters tell pollsters that they want AI banned from most industries. Spats are breaking out elsewhere too: after chipmaking profits soared recently, workers at Samsung in South Korea threatened a strike to secure special payouts.
Even so, the politics remains nascent. Britain’s flimsy prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has barely said a word about AI. Even Americans still rank it 29th out of 39 election issues. That is bound to change.
Why data centres became the flashpoint
Battles over data centres offer a hint of the struggles to come. The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition.
Data centres can be ugly, it is true. But the opposition reflects the technology’s reputation. AI bosses have spent years warning of a looming job-pocalypse and the danger that an AI-engineered super-virus will make humans extinct. Opponents of data centres variously believe they are shielding the environment, protecting jobs and saving the species — and they are not entirely wrong.
The high cost of getting AI policy wrong
Yet this backlash is itself dangerous. AI promises to change the world for the better, much as electricity or the steam engine did. Not long ago, the era-defining problem for the rich world was stagnant economic growth and the populism it unleashed. Now it has a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.
All this could be lost if countries starve the technology of computing power or regulate it into uselessness. Look at mRNA vaccines research, which has been held back after a backlash during the covid-19 pandemic.
Scenarios in which some countries give in to popular rage but others forge ahead are also worrying. If America succumbs, it could cede the global AI frontier, and the attendant cyber and military capabilities, to authoritarian China. Europe and Canada are more risk-averse than America. If they choked off AI while the rest of the world kept pushing forward, their losses could be unrecoverable. More than two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, few countries have managed to catch up with the first movers.
Grand plans will not help — incrementalism will
So the stakes are high. Can governments do anything about it? Grand proclamations about the shape of a “social contract” for a post-AI world are good fodder for blog posts but offer little help today. Besides, the unknowns are still large enough to make the exercise almost futile.
Better to be incremental. While China’s economy was growing by 10% a year in the 1980s — faster than all but the most extreme forecasts for AI-driven growth — the mantra of its leader Deng Xiaoping was “crossing the river by feeling the stones”: pushing forward iteratively, planning for problems but staying flexible. Deftly handling the AI age will take a similar spirit.
Four ways to handle the AI backlash
To that end, here are four pointers for politicians and AI companies looking for policies.
- 1Spread the benefits as widely as possible. Blockers need to be shown that their local area will benefit if they get out of the way. Wisely, data-centre firms are beginning to offer funding to nearby towns. Gradually, this approach needs to be broadened to society at large, with mechanisms showing people that they have an economic stake in AI’s progress, and will be helped to adapt to disruption through policies such as wage insurance. Only a shared sense of prosperity can temper the toxic who-wins/who-loses politics that emerged in the era of globalisation.
- 2Regulate hard when interventions are needed. The hair-raising prospect of AI-enabled cyber-attacks or bioterrorism is still not taken as seriously as it ought to be. Tackling those issues and others is essential in itself, but it would also weaken arguments to ban or hobble AI indiscriminately. Ideally, these efforts would involve international co-operation.
- 3Measure everything. The common view that AI is already leading to lay-offs and raising electricity bills is probably wrong. But without better statistics it is hard to be sure. Data centres must contend with viral worries over water usage, a confected issue. Modern ones drink up no more than other industries, and much less in total than America’s golf courses. Facts won’t cure misinformation, but their absence worsens it. Britain’s AI Security Institute and new AI Economics Institute may offer models for other countries to follow.
- 4Use AI to make the state better. It is not just the private sector that could use AI to lift productivity. Filing taxes should be a breeze; state-run health-care systems should link up data seamlessly and schools should experiment with AI-powered learning. AI may also make it easier for citizens to monitor what politicians are up to.
People are less likely to oppose a technology if it is behind their grandmother’s cancer treatment or helping their child’s education. And they are more likely to trust that the state can oversee it if they believe that government works.
Machine politics
Voters are right to take a close interest in how AI could change their lives. The future will be messy, odd and unpredictable. Persuading them that their interests are being served by disruption has become as important as making AI models better. Failure will bring out more pitchforks — and destroy vast opportunities for humanity. ■
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