Connexion
Highly ideological liberal elites are conspiring to take over the AI safety field.
What would it take for a European country to sabotage its own energy security, pouring cement down its gas wells and sealing them off for good?
Not much, it turns out. The Dutch government is doing exactly that, permanently burying reserves worth €200 billion (that’s around €150,000 per Dutch citizen) because locals complained about tremors so faint that most people never felt them.
Britain has banned new drilling in the North Sea, one of the richest oil reserves on earth. The EU has spent five years and counting forbidding oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, even as it declared its intention to wean itself off Russian energy. Stories like these are routine now. They are the fruit of a political crusade against fossil fuels that the progressive left has waged for decades.
The United States has held up better. Every time progressives have moved to kill a pipeline or a drilling project, Republicans have been there to block them. Part of the reason is that Republicans, far more than their European counterparts, understood what these anti-fossil fuel policies were really about.
In the 1990s, as the Democratic left grew more absorbed in environmentalism, the oil industry drifted toward the Republican Party for protection. The drift became a realignment in 2000, when voters narrowly sent two former oil executives, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, to the White House. Progressives now had every reason to make the industry a public villain, and they went about it with enthusiasm.
So began the golden age of the climate narrative. In 2006, Al Gore, the man Bush had beaten, released An Inconvenient Truth, and it became a global sensation. I was a 15-year-old liberal at the time and found it persuasive. A year earlier, my secondary-school geography class had sat through a solemn screening of The Day After Tomorrow, a climate-apocalypse film our teacher plainly regarded as required viewing. The fate of the planet, we understood, depended on our paying attention. All of this while two Republican oilmen sat in the White House, and while the oil, gas, and coal industries kept writing checks mostly to Republicans. I am still no admirer of Bush, but it is hard to believe that was a coincidence.
Something similar is happening to Big Tech. When President Donald Trump said recently that data centers could be “bigger than oil,” he probably meant the economic upside. But the resemblance runs deeper than that. Today’s fevered warnings of a tech-driven apocalypse sound a great deal like the case made against oil in the mid-2000s, and they are driven by the same partisan logic.
Four years ago, Silicon Valley was a progressive stronghold, the censorship arm of the global elite. Every major social media platform had banned Trump outright.
Now the same industry is the left’s favorite villain. The platforms have not only restored Trump and his allies; they have made their peace with his administration. Elon Musk’s right-wing radicalism seems to deepen by the week. Palantir grips the far left’s imagination as an accomplice in ICE deportations. Data centers are cast as environmental plagues.
And as with oil companies, Democrats are keen to demonize tech as an existential threat to humanity. The progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants to completely ban the development of AI superintelligence—taking it as given that such a technology is even possible to develop, which remains a topic of debate. One would think the doyen of “abundance liberalism,” Ezra Klein, might disagree with socialist Sanders, but no—in a recent New York Times article, he suggests banning AIs from coding, a step which would be even more radical than what Sanders has proposed.
More serious, because it is already playing out, is Anthropic’s insistence that all AI companies open up their technology to third-party evaluators. Sounds like a good idea—except the CEO of their handpicked AI safety outfit, METR, has expressed the belief that “effective altruism” means destroying the concept of national borders. As my institute, the Foundation for Freedom Online, has been laying out in a series of recent reports, these “neutral third-party evaluators” have much in common with the “disinformation” and “brand safety” experts who seek to insert themselves (sometimes via government mandates) as intermediaries between social media algorithms and the public. It is now on AI safetyists to prove that their project isn’t just a similar ideological power-grab over the technology of the future.
The right still has real complaints about the tech giants. The headline reinstatements aside, biased content moderation remains an unsolved problem. But taken as a whole, the picture is hard to describe as anything but a full reversal.
Given how quickly it happened, it is no wonder the narrative has lagged behind, but the story now filling the vacuum is a poor one. The public is being sold an account of the technology industry that blends legitimate worry with exaggeration and, in its wilder versions, plain paranoia.
In this account, Elon Musk is poisoning democracy. He fed USAID to the woodchipper, which is true. My institute’s founder, Mike Benz, lent a hand, and the agency had it coming. Politicians in Europe and Britain accuse Musk of stoking “extremism” in their countries. The rest of the industry, we are told, has thrown in with the Trump administration, which is using Palantir to steal Americans’ data, deport innocent immigrants, and bomb Palestinians. Its moguls intend to reduce the rest of us to digital serfs, stripped of our jobs and of control over our data, our likenesses, and our identities. The data centers powering all of this will finish off the environment, unless superintelligent machines finish off humanity first.
Democrats, career bureaucrats, and foreign governments have an even stronger motive to go after tech than they had to go after oil. The oil industry merely funded Republicans. Big Tech undermined the legacy press and thus also the control by liberal elites of public information. Across the West, the power of liberal officials and functionaries depended in large part on this control. When Musk bought Twitter (now X) and restored free speech, he became the face of a perceived threat to their continued rule.
Among European governments, this political calculation is compounded by a wish not merely to rein in American tech firms, but to replace them with an indigenous “Eurostack” subsidized by the taxpayer, data centers included. “Digital sovereignty” has become a fashionable slogan in a Canada that seeks to get out from under American economic dominance. The panic isn’t actually about the dangers of out-of-control AI or the harms, real or imagined, associated with data centers. It is a fight to defend the power of Western governing elites. Conservatives, who instinctively distrust those same elites, should be made aware of this fight so that they can better understand the political stakes of the intensifying debate about Big Tech.
Of course, not every critic of Big Tech is a political shill. When the podcaster Theo Von argues that data centers belong to a Silicon Valley scheme to achieve immortality, corner the necessary technology, and consign everyone else to permanent serfdom, he means it, even if the theory is a bit mad. Teenage climate activists who vandalize historic paintings because they expect the world to end within their lifetimes are usually sincere too. They need not grasp the elite politics that shaped their beliefs. The line running from Al Gore and The Day After Tomorrow through the permanent “climate emergency” back to American party politics in the 2000s may never occur to them. A belief can be sincerely held and still be the downstream product of an elite campaign against an industry seen as a political threat.
Republicans eventually learned to tell a good story about energy. “Net Zero” is now a reliable target for right-wing populists, who tie it to stagnation, soaring power bills, and the petty indignities of regulated life, from paper straws to feeble air conditioning. In the United States, green policy came to be associated with the hollowing out of the Rust Belt and the loss of good jobs in mining and oil. Both stories were substantially true, and the parties of the right profited from telling them.
Technology is a harder case. The industry does not employ a comparably broad domestic workforce, and its reliance on H-1B labor remains a stain on its record. Tying Silicon Valley’s prosperity to the prosperity of the average American is more difficult than tying energy production to jobs and cheap power. But conservatives can still explain the fight over political control.
The story should begin with the industry’s pre-election gamble in 2024. Starting with Musk’s X, technology companies began refusing demands from governments and activist groups to censor their political opponents at scale. Data centers had existed for years by then. The nationwide panic over them had not. The timing deserves more attention than it gets.
Many conservatives are understandably exasperated by what they see as conspiracy theories circulating among their fellow travelers in the podcast world, such as those regarding data centers. But the public should not be scolded for staying alert to elite coordination. It should be pointed toward the kinds of coordination that can be proved.
Is there a concerted effort by the permanent bureaucracy in the United States and by foreign governments to weaken, capture, or replace American technology platforms, and with them Americans’ ability to speak freely online? There is. Is a similar cohort of highly ideological elites now assembling to take over the AI safety field? It certainly seems so. That is its own kind of elite coordination, and a story which many readers of this magazine will find familiar.
The post For Progressives, Big Tech is Becoming the New Big Oil appeared first on The American Conservative.
Opposition to data centers and Flock cameras advance the left’s agenda without scoring concrete wins for the right.
It’s rare to find agreement in American politics, but elements of the right and left seem to have found common ground on opposing tech. Both sides of the aisle are raging against data centers, Flock cameras, and the industry’s inadequate attention to child safety measures.
But this bipartisan push may not be all that great for the right. Many of these measures will deprive deep-red counties of revenue, hinder law enforcement, and empower liberal bureaucrats to censor the internet. Bipartisan support doesn’t always mean something is a great idea. Just look at the Iran War and the broad support for amnesty in the early 2010s. Anti-tech populism could do more harm to the right’s interests than people imagine.
Data centers are a major midterm issue. Both Republicans and Democrats are calling for moratoriums, with a few states passing restrictions on future construction. The sites are criticized for a variety of reasons. They can lower property values, cause noise pollution, and raise utility costs. They’re specifically attacked by the left for posing a threat to the environment. A number of Republicans, such as Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, feel attacking data centers provides a good way to build credentials with a national conservative audience. In spite of the suspicion with data centers, they can support another conservative goal: lowering property taxes. A number of counties profiting off data centers are slashing these despised taxes. DeSantis and other Republicans love to assail these obligations, but one way to reduce them is revenue from the data centers they want to ban.
Data center outrage is now joined by growing concerns over Flock cameras. These AI-powered license-plate readers are intended to help law enforcement solve crimes and not monitor petty traffic offenses. Police departments around the country have plenty of data to show how Flock has helped them nab criminals. But people fear that they could be abused by police and violate people’s privacy. It doesn’t help that Flock’s online backers are extremely sensitive about criticism. I was recently accused by people affiliated with Flock of being a possible foreign agent over a post merely saying why people would be worried about them.
You’ll find equal numbers of right-wingers and leftists deriding Flock cameras. Both see it as a case of encroaching Big Brother. But leftists have other reasons besides fears of authoritarian abuse and privacy concerns. They don’t like the cameras because they will help law enforcement, particularly ICE. Much of the hysteria over Flock centers on how they’ve been used to catch illegal aliens. The left doesn’t want police, whether local or federal, to have these tools. Unsurprisingly, the people responsible for the rash of Flock vandalism appear to be leftists, with a number filming themselves destroying the cameras in anti-police shirts.
What’s interesting is that the lawmakers most eager to ban them come from the far-right of the Republican Party. Some of the most conservative Republicans in Congress want them banned. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) warns that the cameras violate our constitutional rights, a view echoed by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), and Thomas Massie (R-TN).
This push against Flock comes at a time when much of the right wants the state to arrest more illegal immigrants and native-born criminals. Flock could help with that goal, but that doesn’t appear to be a popular talking point on the right. Instead, it appears to be more popular to help the left’s goal of hindering immigration operations. Liberals are quite open about why they don’t like Flock. At the top of its list of problems with the cameras, the ACLU states: “ICE and CBP have repeatedly used Flock to go after immigrants without warrants.” Santa Cruz, California, and other cities around the country have cancelled their Flock contracts over worries the data will be used by immigration enforcement.
Conservatives can, of course, have different reasons for Flock suspicions. But eliminating license-plate readers may just end up making it harder for law enforcement to locate criminals and illegal aliens. Burchett and other conservative Republicans want more deportations. Their Flock bans would likely make that goal harder to achieve while doing little to minimize the surveillance state. We’d still have an abundance of traffic cameras and other invasive tech in our public spaces.
Congress is united in attempts to make the internet safer for kids. But this is another effort that would enable the left to achieve its policy goals at the right’s expense. The KIDS Act passed the House a few weeks ago with a solid majority. Nearly 270 lawmakers voted for it, while only 117 voted against. While the bill received majority support from both parties, more Republicans voted for it than Democrats did. Just 32 Republicans cast a vote against it.
The bill would impose age verification across much of the internet, push for more safety features and parental controls, and restrict AI bot interaction with children. Conservatives support the bill in part because it aims to restrict access to pornography, a long-time goal for the right. But the bill also offers a way for liberal bureaucrats to impose censorship.
The age-verification requirements would undermine online anonymity. Anonymity has proven a boon for right-wing speech online, as I document in my new book, Whitepill. Anons helped Trump win two elections and made the right embrace ideas once restricted to the fringe. Free speech on the internet is a gift for conservatives, but this bill may intimidate anons into abandoning the new public forum. Many would not trust giving their full names and home addresses to strangers at tech companies just to have the right to post. This is a clear invasion of privacy, one that could be argued is worse than license-plate readers. Yet that’s what the KIDS Act.
The bill also allows the government to censor speech. It demands tech platforms suppress content related to alcohol, gambling, drug use, and other vices that might be aimed at kids. It’s not hard to see this as opening a backdoor for liberal bureaucrats to demand censorship of “hate speech” that minors may interact with. If that’s deemed harmful to children, tech companies may decide to censor it just to avoid the hassle of dealing with government monitors. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, “When platforms are required to create and enforce content moderation policies that regulators can sue them over, they will often err on the side of deleting speech.”
Much of the public is leery of Big Tech. Conservatives have long held to this sentiment due to the industry’s insidious censorship practices. While it may be smart for politicians looking to be re-elected to appeal to this sentiment, it doesn’t do our side any favors when the measures passed hurt the right.
There isn’t much to gain from banning data centers except depriving many deep-red counties of desperately needed revenue and stymieing further technological advancement. Getting rid of Flock cameras may seem like a big win for privacy rights, but it would hinder our ability to deport illegal immigrants and arrest dangerous criminals. It’s a good idea to make the internet a safer place for kids, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of free speech.
The left has nothing to worry about with these measures. They’ll achieve their goals without any downsides. But it’s a completely different story for conservatives. They’ll end up hurting their own interests with little in return.
There are undoubtedly anti-tech sentiments on both sides of the aisle. But the current focus of anti-tech populism redirects these sentiments toward left-wing ends.
Just because something seems popular doesn’t make it right.
The post Bipartisan Anti-Tech Populism May Just Help the Left appeared first on The American Conservative.
People don’t like being told their concerns are unreasonable by the gang threatening to destroy their livelihoods.
Freddie DeBoer in a Monday Substack post noticed a tic among advocates for more aggressive home-building policies (“YIMBYs,” for “Yes in My Back Yard,” in contrast to “NIMBYs,” for “Not in My Back Yard”). When confronted with opposition, these YIMBYs dismiss the possibility that the other side may have good-faith reasons of its own, instead resorting to ridicule and abuse.
DeBoer points out that this is not really how democratic politics works: You have to get people on board with what you want to do by the usual methods of persuasion and incentive-creation. Telling your fellow citizens that their concerns about the environment or their neighborhood’s character are stupid and wrong doesn’t move your ball down the field at all.
You’d think everyone would have learned this lesson after the last presidential election, when the Democratic strategy was to tell voters their unhappy feelings about the cost of living were baseless and that, in fact, the economy was roaring along.
That tack, as we found out, was not particularly effective.
But I very much fear the titans of industry and their abettors in high office are making the same mistake. Businessmen and politicos are bewailing growing bipartisan opposition to the construction of the data centers needed to generate dumb pictures of cats and wildly inaccurate search engine results. A lot of this stuff overlaps with YIMBY housing arguments, since much of the opposition is coming from the same place—people getting touchy when you try to monkey with where they live.
I confess this isn’t much of a surprise. The entire pitch for AI has been wildly shortsighted. If you believe the fellows at the top of the industry, their technology will either cause a labor apocalypse, particularly for white-collar workers—that is, for the set with some money and some political clout to defend its interests—or it will take over the world and kill everybody.
Yet the AI maximalists seem to think that, if they gesture vaguely toward the Maoist menace (to which, it should be noted, many of these same CEOs are itching to sell their products) and throw in a few ominous warnings about the stock market crash that will surely happen if we don’t do everything they want, this adds up to a compelling argument for turning the wheel toward the future and slamming the accelerator. Ah, but the good news: To arrive at these utopian vistas, you only have to put up with an eyesore that makes annoying noises, raises your utility bills, and provides few, if any, permanent new jobs in your community.
Now, I am just a journalist, callow and unlearned in the dark arts of the press agent, but I feel pretty comfortable in the assessment that this strategy is not very clever. Calling people stupid or stooges for the Red Chinese when they fail to grasp its charms is even worse. On the merits, data center boosters may be right—concerns about water usage may be overstated, there may be good national strategic reasons for pursuing dominance in the industry, and, in some cases, data-center development may even lower utility costs—but being right does not actually get things done. While crushing one’s opponents by main force is tempting, the use of money, coercion, lawyers, and backroom tactics also does not tend in the long term to get things done. Persuading people gets things done. It’s not difficult to imagine AI development going the way of nuclear power: set back for a generation because of a catastrophic failure to make the case to the public.
My own attitude, officially, is bemusement. While I do think AI will make the masses lazier and more ignorant—a process that was already well under way, thanks to a host of other material and cultural causes—I doubt it will cause a white-collar extinction event. (If AI gets really good at pushing paper, why do we think we are getting rid of the paper-pushers instead of increasing the amount and complexity of the paper to be pushed, necessitating human oversight of the automated processes? Has anyone ever noticed how bureaucracies actually work?) I also entertain suspicions that AI will not wipe out the human race, which, for all its evils and follies, has managed to keep a handle on far more directly menacing items, like thermonuclear weapons and medical research facilities—sometimes barely managed, but managed just the same.
Yet, despite my reservations about the parousia of the silicon god, I think it would be a bad thing if one of the liveliest sectors of American technical and economic development were to be crushed out of hand because its overseers couldn’t read a room.
People don’t like being told their feelings are wrong and baseless. The AI boosters might take note. They are notionally capitalists, after all; if the market doesn’t want what they’re selling, maybe they should try a little harder.
The post Some Obvious Points About AI appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 