The Ezra Klein Show: The A.I. Revolt Is Here

0:00AWS AI is how the world's leading organizations are transforming their industries, not in theory, but in production, at scale, right now, like turning race-day data into real-time insights for Formula One fans, reinventing the journey for every United traveler, and personalizing every trip with booking.com. However big the question for your business or industry, AWS AI is how. So we are taking this week off along with our producers to get ready for our finale extrav against our last ever episode of HardFork, which will be next week, and when you see the choreography, you'll understand why we need it a week to prepare.

1:01Exactly. There's Pyro, there's Corio, it's going to be a big production. There's Oreos. But until then, we have a very special treat to share with you. You may remember past HardFork guest, Jasmine's son. She recently appeared on the Ezra Klein show to talk about her reporting on data centers. Yeah, she took this really fascinating reporting trip through the Midwest this summer, interviewing people on all sides of the debate throughout Wisconsin and Michigan. She wrote a piece called No Data Centers in My Backyard, Money, Power, and Populism in the AI build-out on her sub-stack. Really great, really worth a read, and after you read it, you should listen to this conversation with Ezra. Yeah. Then we'll be back next week, one more time, and among other things, we'll tell you what we're doing next. We'll be back in a week to say goodbye and bring you our very special finale episode. But in the meantime, enjoy Jasmine and Ezra talking about data centers.

2:14What is big, ugly, and has united Republicans and Democrats at a time when it has felt like nothing else could. AI data centers. Last August, a heat-bap news poll found that about four and ten voters would oppose a data center being built where they live. By May of this year, opposition grew to seven in ten. Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, or Republican, of course, has proposed a new citizens' bill of rights for AI. The incentives of big tech are not the same as what's in the interest of the people and the public. Senator Bernie Sanders called for a national data center moratorium. This moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing and make sure that the benefits of these technologies work for all of us, not just the wealthiest people on earth.

3:21There are over a hundred local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. And here in New York, Governor Kathy Hoekall, not usually thought of as a hardcore populist, just imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction. At least, hyper scale AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power. Truly threatening to outpace our grid's capacity and they drive up costs for local rate fairs. And I refuse to let those costs be passed on to New Yorkers who already paid too much for the utility bills. So I wanted to get into the fight over data centers. How much of this is really about water, electricity, or aesthetics? And how much is about AI itself and the companies that are behind it? My guess today is Jasmine's son. Jasmine has been doing excellent coverage of both the culture inside the AI companies, unusual culture, and the anger that is building against them in the rest of the country. I highly recommend following her sub-stack, but right now she just finished her reporting trip in the Midwest.

4:23Talking to the people organizing against these data centers. And I wanted to hear what she learned. A W S A I is how the world's leading organizations are transforming their industries. Not in theory, but in production, at scale, right now. Like turning race day data into real-time insights for Formula One fans, reinventing the journey for every united traveler. And personalizing every trip with booking.com. However big the question for your business or industry, A W S A I is how? Recently we asked about how you share your New York Times account. And you had a lot to say about New York Times games. I need my own New York Times login because my sister is so much worse at the crossword than I am. And I discovered that he's already finished connections that day. And I'm like, Jonah, it was my day. It doesn't let us play the same game since each other.

5:25I play the StoGoo. I do the crossword. I do the spelling bee. I do the wordle. Please help. My kids want to be able to play wordle, but with the wordlebot. We would love to be able to have our own puzzles. I love New York Times games. I want to be able to play my own games. I'm so excited to be here. So you just got back from a reporting trip in Wisconsin, Michigan, coming to fight over data centers. Let's just start with what you see when you're near a data center. What does it look like? I think one of the most important things about rural Wisconsin and rural Michigan is how beautiful it is. I felt like I was in Eden. I felt like I was in paradise. It's incredibly lush, incredibly green.

6:26And as you get closer to a data center, you start to see more power lines. You start to see more towers. And eventually you just see what looks like an extremely large flat warehouse. But you just see this sort of like vertent landscape give way to what is a windowless industrial park. Data centers are very ugly. I think I didn't appreciate this until I started standing in front of them, getting near them, listening to them. People will time how long it takes to drive past a data center on the highway, going 70 miles per hour in Port Washington. I think it's like a minute and 42 seconds. The size of these things is a long on the highway. It is a long, long ride. Like these hyper-scale data centers are huge. They are massive. And so I think that the aesthetic questions right around is this what I want my state, my community to look like. These are really salient people. You mentioned hearing them. Yes. What do they sound like?

7:26Oh my gosh. I mean, they sound like humming, buzzing, worrying. Everyone's well, you'll hear a rattling. Residents who live next door to some of them say they're producing noise. That's not only annoying, but debilitating like this right here. But again, they're windowless. There are not that many workers inside. So they're very mechanical sounds. They are inhuman as a lot of folks would say. So you spent a lot of time with people organizing against data centers. Who were they? You had state home moms. You had retired executives. You had farmers who didn't like the impacts on their land. You had activists, professional activists with environmental groups in the state. It was an interesting mix of people, but a lot of women relatively more left leaning. They're definitely some right leaning folks as well. So one question I've heard people ask is how much is this different than other kinds.

8:29Industrial installations. I mean, there are a lot of things that are built all over the country. You wouldn't necessarily want to be right next to. Are data centers unusual in this? Or are they from fracking to industrial agriculture? Or does the latest version of it? It's a good question. It's when I had and thought a lot about before I went. And I've talked to city officials who are confused by this question of we had a terrible problem. We had a chip fab here. We had an auto plant here. We had a fulfillment center here. And nobody cared as much. Why are data centers so much more unpopular than say solar farms, which also faced local opposition in places like Michigan. And so I think while the quality of life concerns around this thing is loud and annoying and ugly and consumes resources are very similar to other industrial projects. There must be some reason that opposition is so much more severe and widespread, even beyond the communities where the data centers are literally being built.

9:30And I think that question has a lot to do with the AI, with the AI industry, and sort of the way that people feel about these companies and these projects. When I read your reporting on this, when I've talked to people involved in this, it always feels to me there are sort of three layers of concerns that are converging into what we call the data center backlash. There's process. Then there's direct impacts, you know, the environment, water, electricity, and then there's AI itself. And maybe let's go through them sort of one by one. One thing that I have been hearing a lot of, and I've seen in your reporting as well, is the anger over how these processes are going. And in particular, the use of NDAs, which is not that common, right? I've covered a lot of what does it take to build a housing development? And you don't tend to hear a lot of the city councilmen got put under an NDA. So what is happening with these NDAs? Yeah, I mean, this is also something that really surprised me. And I think the NDAs that is not disclosure agreements.

10:32Right, the non disclosure agreements. This has really inflamed the amount of local opposition that you see. And so basically what would happen oftentimes is there would be some sense starting in city council. That may be a big development project was going to show up. But because of the NDAs, the council members would not be able to disclose that necessarily it was a data center. Necessarily who the customers were going to be a company like open AI or a company like a throttaker, whoever. Or even the size of the project, like how much electricity is this actually going to consume. But whispers would start to get around. I was talking to a VP of a construction union. And he was saying, you know, there's an old Irish saying the only way to keep a secret between three people is to kill two of them, which I thought was hilarious. And so he's saying when these developers show up, they talk to the general contractor, the general contractor talks to all their subcontractors, the subcontractors talk to all their workers. Yes, maybe everyone is signing NDAs at every part of that process, but whispers get around. And as soon as whispers get around, you start to get social media posts, you start to get rumors.

11:33And the city council, because they are beholden to these NDAs, they lose the ability to get ahead of the social media narrative. That was something I repeatedly heard from these local government officials was we could not get ahead of social media, because we had signed an NDA and rumors started getting around. Why do the companies want these NDAs signed? I mean, I think they didn't think about it. They didn't realize there would be a backlash. They just thought it would be easier in case they changed their mind. These companies signed lots of NDAs with their own workers, with anyone who works with them. I don't think there's a good reason Microsoft has actually decided to stop using NDAs because of the level of backlash. I've heard from people managing compute at some of the other AI labs that they are thinking of making the same decision. One thing that surprised me is all of the pro data center pro build people who I spoke to, whether workers or AI developers, they all regret the NDAs. They all think that they made the situation much worse. What is the impact of a new data center on what are you sig what are availability in the town? They do require some of it, obviously, primarily for cooling the data centers,

12:37because these chips and servers run really hot and they need AC. The thing that's gone a bit wrong in the water debate, I think, is that today's new data centers are almost all closed loop systems, closed loop in the same way that air conditioning is closed loop, which means they're recycling the water within the system, and they use a fraction of the water that golf courses use. In fact, in places like Jamesville Wisconsin, we would often see a literal golf course right next to the data center site. They do some and it has sort of become a very sticky icon of these things resource consumption. A lot of folks I talked to and was constantly Michigan, they would say things like, you know, they're building right by the great lakes. Why would they do that if they weren't trying to drain the lakes? Why would they do that if they didn't need all this fresh water? So your view is at this point, the technology has changed, such that water is not as big of a deal, as maybe it actually was a couple of years ago. I think the next thing people have heard a lot about is energy usage. Yes. So walk me through that. The electricity consumption issue is real.

13:38So data centers do, in fact, use an incredible amount of electricity. These chips and these servers that are processing gigantic mathematical calculations to make AI work, require tons of energy, all these chips and clusters are talking to each other. You need the interconnections to be really fast in order to get like a chat to be to answer really quickly with low latency. You need these super fast connections, all of us powered by electricity. So we are talking about a really, really significant amount of new electricity that is going to require new generators, new power plants. It's probably going to be natural gas in the near future. Once the data center is fully operational, there is not a ton of air and water pollution assuming that everything's working correctly. They are relatively clean facilities, but you know, like a lot of folks are concerned about the electricity use. They're saying, yeah, maybe the data center doesn't use that much water. Maybe the data center doesn't pollute that much, but what about all of these new power plants that they're going to build in order to power it? When the tech companies come into these towns and begin talking to the city council members when they begin talking to the community,

14:41what are they sort of promising on the one hand? This is why this will be good for you. And what are they asking for on the other? Yeah, I mean, so these things do provide an incredible amount of tax revenue. And so in-mountain pleasant that on the old Foxconn site, which ended up being bought out by Microsoft, they saw, oh, there's all this infrastructure already here. Why don't we build a hyper-skill data center on this unused, industrially-zoned land? Microsoft is on track to pay $19.6 million in property taxes in 2026. This is expected to continue for many years. Again, this is a small village of 28,000 people. And so there are really meaningful property tax benefits. And I do think it, I find it frustrating personally when anti-data center organizers say that the job creation is a myth, because I think that 500, you know, maybe six figured jobs for folks who go through apprenticeships that maybe don't need college degrees that last two to six years. That's enough time to build a family. That's enough time to buy home. I think it's super meaningful. And when I talk to technicians, when I talk to workers, clearly it was extremely meaningful work.

15:46I think one of the things that was the most surprising to me when I talk to data center activists was that they responded to so many of the pro arguments with, I don't believe them. So like this company says that they are going to treat the water with chemicals in it so that it doesn't flow into the lakes. People would say, I don't believe them. I don't think they can do it. People would say the companies would say, we are going to cover the cost of our own electricity grid build out. We are going to ensure that rates do not go up for all Michiganders. A lot of folks would say, I don't believe them. DTE has raised our electricity rates basically every year since 2022. Why would this be the year that they decide not to do it? I do not believe them. They are going to create 500 jobs. And some of these will stick around after the data center is built. People just said, I don't believe them. It was really clear to me that data centers are showing up in an environment of extremely low trust in both governments and in corporations to the extent where the pro arguments almost do not land.

16:51Because people just aren't interested in anything and outside tech companies are going to tell them they say they have big PR teams. They can say whatever they want. One thing that became really obvious to me when I talked about people of the AI companies and local officials is that two years ago no one thought the data center backlash was going to be like this. And so these companies were in fact looking for things like does this state have a sales tax exemption as Wisconsin does to ensure that they don't have to pay sales taxes on their very expensive chips on their very expensive GPUs. They were often looking to build in places that might even offer local subsidies to the companies for building in that area. I think that a lot of the balance of power has shifted as local opposition has ramped up. Now it's the case that I'm hearing from some local officials. If we did this again today, we wouldn't have to offer any subsidies because in fact now there are so much local opposition that the developers are really looking. Where is there going to be a local community and a government that is friendly to our project. How can we have a Christmas tree ornaments worth of community benefits agreements.

17:58And so just the nature of these deals and how much they are skewed towards communities versus the AI developers has really changed. One of the things that came up a lot in your reporting and that I thought was interesting was the fear that this is a bubble for sure. And what's going to happen is your community will agree to something. And then in the middle, the bubble is going to pop and you're going to end up with a half inch data center or one that is not being kept up correctly or something where the promise benefits don't emerge. I mean, you were in Wisconsin, which had a very, very bad experience with Foxconn, which seems to be structuring the way people are thinking about at least some of this. So talk to me a bit about that set of concerns. Absolutely. Yeah, I think in terms of what people in these communities with these data centers feel when they see the projects come in with their gigantic like two billion dollars of investment, like these gigantic numbers that are being dangled. It feels like a bubble to them. One, they're seeing news articles saying maybe a a eyes of bubble. We don't know it's a bubble, but it could be two. You do have experiences like Foxconn where you have an big test.

19:06And you have a big tech company show up in a very small community in this case, Mount Puzzle was cons in a city of like 28,000 people. It's not very big. Get you know hundreds of millions of dollars and infrastructure investment and tax subsidy from the from the town promise 13,000 high paying manufacturing jobs and then pull out because the contract wasn't set up correctly. They didn't actually want to build a bunch of flat screen TVs in Wisconsin. And the you know the town is left on the hook having invested all of this money and the grid and in roads. They got I think a thousand jobs in the end, Foxconn is still paying back all of this debt that has been accumulated. And so experiences like that have really, really sour people on the question of when an outside big tech company comes in and you know promises these gigantic numbers and all of these jobs and all this tax revenue. And it's for this technology that like you can't a lot of people they don't see they don't feel they don't find personally extremely useful not at the levels of these valuations. They have a lot of questions about if the bubble pops are we going to be the ones left with the stranded asset in our community.

20:06I mean in Jansville was cons in it was famously the site of this 100 year old GM plant that was the centerpiece of the community that employed a ton of people when they left during the financial crash in 2008 and the plant closed down. And so I think that's not only did it sort of devastate the community from a work perspective. But they also left 30 million dollars of contamination and hazardous waste in the middle of the city that has never been cleaned up. There's forever chemicals in there. This is why developers have not been able to sell this brownfield is because there's so much waste that GM never cleaned up. And so I think that's why people worry about what happens if the AI bubble pops if maybe it doesn't pop and the data center developers just decide never mind we want to build elsewhere never mind the status center isn't good enough we have newer better technology. And who's going to be left holding the bag that was the question I heard over and over again. But this is something that I do think is in people's minds. You bring this in and right now you're at this time very, very high valuations. And if AI demand isn't quite what you think or even just the company that was behind this particular data center is not part of the winter circle.

21:13They're in a couple years, but you got this is like giant box. Yeah, that's not going to continue being valuable. And so whatever the promise benefits are from it, you know tax revenue, etc. Yeah, maybe they show for a while. Yeah. But then what if in five years they're gone, but you are left with his infrastructure. It's like they can leave Jane's Hill right with no real concern. They're not there. They're people don't live there. Right. But if you're in Jane's Hill, you do live there. Yes. Yeah. I mean, you see these things like this with Elon's giant colossus data centers that he built out in Memphis. And what makes people feel better about a new construction project in their town, the calling it colossus. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, these things and I'm airing touch for the people. I mean, usually the thing that happens is they give them very cute sea names like Project Canoli and the barn and they try to make them sound as friendly as possible. But yeah, I mean with colossus XII never really took off. People are not in fact using Grog as much as Elon thought they were going to be using it.

22:13And in that case, he was able to get a really good deal selling the compute capacity to inthropic, which was growing like crazy and had not built enough data centers on their side. But you could totally imagine a world as you say where in fact, you know, XII decides we are going to focus on space. We don't care about AI anymore. Maybe there's none in the topic to pick up the bill because and the topic has maybe bill enough of their own compute capacity. There is an open question about what happens in that world. So, er, abundance last year with a director of the Center of Public State. And one thing I've heard been asked by a lot of people is like, what does the abundance take on a center? And the beginning of that book has this line that, you know, the question is, what do we need more of and how do we get it? And I think the question here that has been so hard for the AI companies for the people trying to build data centers is actually getting people to believe they need more of them.

23:13Right. When you're talking about building affordable housing, when you're talking about, you know, building an array of solar panels or wind turbines, there's a pretty legible argument for why you need that. People still may not like it, but we need homes because we need places for people to live. We need solar panels because we need clean renewable energy. How much is this like a normal kind of, I don't even exactly want to call it an imbiasm, but, but a normal kind of, I don't want the industrial infrastructure built in my backyard because like, you know, what am I going to get out of that? And how much of it is actually something that is more related to people's feelings about AI, which is I don't want this build here because why would I want to pay the cost for a thing that I don't want there to even be more of in the first place? This saving was one of my big motivating questions going into this trip is is it quote unquote normal nimbus is it about AI is it about something else. And so I spent time both looking at polls and trying to talk to people about, would you be excited if this was a chip factory, which would use a lot more water and pollute a lot more.

24:25Would you be excited if it was a solar farm also maybe acquiring agricultural land and turning it into industrial use. Would you be excited for a million other things and I talked to Nick Bagley, who you've had on your show about is this just proceduralism and we talked about the solar farms example where solar farms. The opposition use very similar tactics to the data center opposition they were organizing in Facebook groups, they were packing town hall halls, they were talking about the local impacts and the importance of farmland and the visions for their communities, there were zoning fights, of course. But like you say with the solar farms, you do have a very clear pro case, you have a faction, you have a group of people, a constituency, people who care about the environment who want renewable energy, who understand that that's a thing that yeah, maybe it sucks to have in your backyard, but you can take one for the team because this is important for our planet. You don't really have a pro faction with AI same with like the auto plant right you have one you have maybe 7,000 workers in the old GM plant in Jamesville who all have families who really care about them who see that as a constituency everyone drives a car they see their cars essential I think the fact that it's creating these tangible outputs really, really matter.

25:35I don't think that data centers have a compelling pro constituency besides the utility companies and the AI companies which are already incredibly incredibly unpopular and I went in and asked these organizers. Do you guys use it I do find it useful this was one of the top questions that my friends and San Francisco wanted me to ask is are these people like using chat to be tea and they don't even realize that the data centers are how they can use it. And what I found there was a lot of these folks did say yeah I've used it to draft an email or make a meme they're not denying that I might have any possible utility at all. But they clearly didn't see it as essential in the way that cars energy and housing are essential they clearly saw as kind of like a widget a toy and maybe there are these risks maybe there's a job stuff but fundamentally they were like this thing is not that useful I don't really see my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations. And so I was talking to for example Charles Franklin who runs market law polls in Wisconsin and he was explaining that usually you see 50 50 polling on issues where you have a strong anti case and a strong pro case and the only reason you're kind of seeing this 70 30 bipartisan opposition to data centers no matter whether you live near data center or you don't which means it's not just nimbus and it's you don't want a data center and anyone's backyard is because he was like there is no strong pro argument for it.

26:57There is not even a fight that's really going on nobody wants it was a phrase I heard over and over you've a very influential definition of a populace and we're called a world view in which a eyes viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted. I'm packed that for me. The phrase that you hear a lot from AI critics is why is it being shoved down our throats or with you know chat you be T it's not that people are saying there is literally no use for chat you be T is people are saying why are you forcing me at my job to use AI to do something worse when I could do it better. And so I think that a lot of the public backlash to AI that has risen over the past six months is not explained by people thinking that the technology has no use at all it's not explained by them being worried about specific technical properties of elements that might lead to rogue AI or misalignment or whatever which are the sort of safety as arguments it's AI as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires ability to impose their vision of the world.

28:07On to everybody else without their consent and I think that's also what I hear echoed in these data center debates it's not just it's going to use this much water that much water I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use people would be just as angry about the data centers. Yeah, I consider the water I don't want to say the water issue is fake what I will say is like there was a debate yeah online while back about how much water like a chat you be D query. Yeah, consumed and somebody is like if you really care about what are you are you eating beef yes, somebody doesn't eat meat I thought this was a quite good like you could really save a lot of water by going vegetarian yes and relatively much much more than not using chat GPT and relatively few people in that conversation were giving up meat or giving a YouTube video or giving videos like use more water than a chat GPT query. Which is to say that I think sometimes people don't like a thing is looking for reasons to justify that dislike yeah.

29:07But what's actually happening the base is they don't like the thing right and the data centers like as you're saying I think speak to this AI populism question like even more precisely because the issue with the AI itself is it I think people's relationship to it is very complicated right I have myself very complicated relationship to AI like I'm not going to talk about this. I think it's a good thing for society the way it is going I don't want my kids using it I know they'll be using it. Like maybe it'll make things better but I really don't know like I think that the cost are going to be very very high for us relationally and economically and you know. And so I just I'm very conflicted but do I want to live next to a data center yeah no yeah it's totally different like that's easier I mean one of the most interesting things is just making things easy. Somebody is just making you do that yes of like going to this back to back I went to this Abdul Bernie a OC rally in Lansing Michigan and then I went and saw the saline activists the next day and I was researching how the saline stargate project happened.

30:07And it was really interesting to see these echoes of the populist message sort of manifest in the specific project like when I'm at this rally people are talking about the oligarchy they're talking about corporate billionaires whether it's big chat or big pharma or DT the utility companies paying off politicians in order to get the money. And then I was thinking about the politicians in order to you know screw the people over and that's why you need the people to come together and to get money out of politics to prevent DT from donating to these super PACs and paying off direction with more whatever. And then when I learned how the saline data center saga played out what happened was the saline township city council unlike a lot of city councils actually voted for one against rezoning their land for the data center. So this was the case when local government said this is not a vision for our community it's not worth it to us and what happened the data center developers sued saline township and town of like again a few thousand people into saying wait no this is exclusionary zoning you can't have no industrial use in your entire town.

31:09And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant AI data center developer they just settled they were just like fine give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools and this fight is not worth it to us but that to people felt like a profound a profound violation of little democracy it felt like the dark money and politics story which is you know you have some very rich companies show up with the bag of money to your politician they don't tell anybody else what's happening the politicians are into loud a towel their citizens and involved with the people. And then they're going to be the ones and involve them in the decision making process and they themselves work out a deal a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side that will then transform the image of your community your lived reality into the world that these tech companies have decided for you. And so I think that the data centers in that sense are a very visceral microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel the AI sharing up in their lives. And also maybe you can take that a little bit further I think that the way that not all of the companies and I think anthropic is largely been a good actor here but many of them have acted has opened up such a chasm between what they say and then how they act under pressure.

32:21That one should be incredibly incredibly skeptical them and what I mean by this is that you know sound moltman and all the different people you know in front of congressional testimony and interviews will say you know it should not just be us making these decisions there should be a real deep small d democratic role here in how I rolls out in you know what effects it has on communities and how it is governed. And then when a community or a politician you know who is representing a community tries to say well we don't want this down to center here or we want to impose these regulations we have watched repeatedly these companies turn tremendous amounts of financial artillery. Yes, again to ever is standing in their way right and to use this the expertise and the money and the power they are amassing to kind of short circuit that democratic voice.

33:22Yeah, I mean a couple things one is like I think one big gap I noticed between Silicon Valley and the folks in these communities I was talking to is Silicon Valley does tend to think that money solves all problems that if you just make the check bigger everything is going to be okay. And I think people have a sense for I'm being bribed this corporation is not offering me a free lunch or whatever there is going to be something that I'm losing here and in fact sometimes the fact that the data center deals were bigger or the amount of political spending was bigger actually just makes people more suspicious like in the Abdul race like his number one like hit on Haley Stevens is how much money she is getting from a pack from DTE from far more whatever. And so one is just that I think we're in a political environment where making the numbers bigger on the amounts money bigger makes people more suspicious not less. Another one I'll just quickly mention is I don't even think and thought that should be left off the hook for things like the labor market impacts right they are the ones simultaneously warning that we might see a you know 50% of white color jobs lost by 2030 this is really important to us we're freaking out about it.

34:22Dario has written in his essays we might see an underclass of people of lower intellectual ability and they are building the agents they are building the coding agents the banking agents the design agents that they know are going to displace jobs or they believe at least are going to displace jobs and I think that people feel that hypocrisy as well which is if you are so worried about the inequality why are you building the agents to do it and when I ask executives and researchers and whoever and then drop it this question they don't really have a good answer because I'm not sure if I'm going to do it. I don't think I'm going to have a good answer because it is true that their business models fundamentally premise on the disruption that they say they are causing. AWS AI is how the world's leading organizations are transforming their industries not in theory but in production at scale right now like turning race day data into real time insights for formula one fans reinventing the journey for every united traveler and personalizing every trip with booking dot com however big the question for your business or industry AWS AI is how.

35:47The New York Times app unlocked everyone knows the times is behind a paywall only subscribers have access to all the reporting but what if you could explore the times for a month for free without putting in a credit card now you can when you download the New York Times app for the first time your first month in the app is free a month to go behind the paywall to see what time subscribers get every single day all the investigations the reviews. The recipes the deeply reported fact based journalism if you don't already subscribe to the New York Times download the times app today and get free access for 30 days. You did a big piece for the times on the very widespread belief in Silicon Valley they will create this underclass yeah what is the underclass mean to them. The idea of a permanent underclass cause Bay I is basically a world where any job a person can do either AI or robot can do for them which means that workers lose all the economic leverage they have and capital owners people with money can simply pay machine labor to do all the work instead of paying workers what that means is anyone who earn their living by working is no longer able to do that you end up with a world of runaway inequality where the rich get richer and the working class.

37:12But fundamentally it's a loss of economic mobility in a society and when I ask folks in Silicon Valley do you think by default AI is going to increase or decrease inequality I have not yet heard anyone say it will decrease inequality or keep it the same they might say the floor will get really high they might say AI will bring the cost of consumer goods down and so people's lives are going to get cheaper and you know everyone will be super healthy so it's okay but I have not heard a single person in the tech industry tell me that they believe that AI is a real thing. AI is going to decrease inequality and in fact many people are very worried that instead most workers will lose their leverage and be on a kind of permanent welfare in the far off future. I'm pretty skeptical of this vision although I don't rule it out right it might happen although I just don't think AI is going to be quite as revolutionary as a lot of these people think us and will not defuse into the real world as easily. You know the thing you're going to need to adjust to any major technological changes time. And then also it's like the I just reason like an all out war to make sure we have a little time for adjustment is possible and I just find it hard to like unknop that how many enterprise sales people are open AI and a drop a hiring in order to convince companies that they can replace their workforce or maybe not replace but expand their workforce with agents instead of humans right they are having these sales conversation.

38:35Trying to persuade people of these questions I don't think that a permanent underclass is the likeliest outcome economically that we're going to get I think that AI is actually just really jagged and human jobs are super complex and super hard to automate and most of folks who are predicting economic apocalypse haven't actually worked enough real jobs to know how complicated and how multifaceted most jobs really are. But I definitely agree on the speed point I think that like Alexi and I say economists has made this point very well one thing I think a lot about are people say well humans can adjust humans can reskill they can retrain they can just do the new jobs that we're going to develop and said but you look at things like software engineering where people will often say now senior software engineers are doing great they love cloud code junior software engineers have been mostly replaced and you see hiring and job postings are down in that sector well do we think that a human. The human software engineer is going to reskill or upskill themselves faster than the next model is going to get better software engineering that's the question that I really wonder about is if AI progress outpaces human's ability to be skill retrain up skill adapt then I'm not really sure what there is going to be left there will be some jobs left but it's going to be a really really painful adjustment I have had so many people at the top of these companies for the very tippy top.

39:59Tell me they wish all this would slow down yeah I'm sure you have had them say you right but in this world where. In their unguarded moments they will say they wish all this was going slower well one way to slow AI down is to construct the number of data centers you can build yeah. Just like you've done you know as good reporting is anybody on just how conflicted people even working for these companies seem to be about what they are building and that the yet they're in this competitive race to build it as quickly as possible. And so it makes them a pretty unconvincing. Profaction absolutely yeah we're building the thing we're telling you to be afraid of and we need to build it as fast as possible even though we sort of admit that we better the whole thing was slow down. It's a really confusing it's a weird argument yeah it's so confusing. I remember when I sat down with Abdul also yeah the Michigan Senate candidate he cited Darius 50% why color draw lots up probably like five times in the 30 minute conversation it's like he was like they're saying that there's going to be a recursive self improvement and it might kill us all like yeah I get why you would not want to make this single faster.

41:11This is true for data centers is true for any other reason way that you might slow AI down which is that everyone only wants to be slow down if they can guarantee that the other companies that the Chinese labs are going to slow down with them so long as that's not true they're going to keep racing and I think for that reason yeah I mean the thing that I hear when I talk to people at the companies data center executives about the build out is how much money do we need to give these cities to let us build a data center tell us how to bribe them better. Tell us what we can do and so when I talk to them about the build I'm not hearing any sort of personal moral reckoning with slowing AI down I'm hearing how do I make the vibes bigger how big do they need to be so then how do you reconcile what many of these executives many of these I company workers are telling you about their fears of creating an underclass about their fears of losing control I mean we just saw the situation where open a eyes model was breaking out of a sandbox and or I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. So I'm going to be able to do that in order to cheat on its evaluation right so the AI safety people are very worried right the safety teams in here clue we don't have full control or even understanding of what they're building.

42:20How do you reconcile if you reconcile the way the AI companies talk when they are giving voice to their fears or the people at them talk when they're giving voice to their fears and they're pretty profound hostility to anything that would slow down how fast we are building this up. So fast we are building this thing whose consequences they freely admit they cannot predict. Yeah it's fascinating because just on a very personal level when I talk to people at these companies I just think like man if I thought this thing might have a 10% chance of killing a soul or taking everybody's job I wouldn't work on it. I would not feel that. I personally could not morally justify taking that chance and when I talk to people who are not in the San Francisco and AI world they feel like I do. They're just like why would you do it and I think they're basically three rough buckets of rationales that I hear from people or that I hear between the lines from people. One is this sort of sense of techno determinism.

43:23It's super intelligence is going to be built inevitably there is no way it's not going to happen. If it happens I want to be part of it I want to make my money from it I want to maybe make it happen in the least bad way. That's a super common answer. Another is this technology might kill us all but it also might be really amazing it might produce super abundance for everybody we might be immortal. It might double everyone's life spans cure all diseases bring the cost of every consumer good housing energy whatever to near zero and that would be utopia. I think all the time to that anecdote that I think SPF set on a podcast where it's Sam Beckman freed. Yes, I'm Benjamin Friedson on a podcast where it was like if you could flip a coin and it was 51% odds you would double the total amount of like human welfare and 49% chance everyone dies would you flip the coin he says yes. And again I feel compelled to say like I've got to hear of like you know how do you really know that's what's happening blah blah blah whatever put that aside take the hypothetical pure hypothetical.

44:28Yeah, yeah, I think this is a hyperbolic example but I think it's not actually that far off from what a lot of the people building super intelligence believe to that they are basically willing to flip the coin maybe we all die but maybe we're all immortal and that expected value wise cancels things out. And then the final category is just I think folks who are so fascinated by the technical endeavor of whether we can build the thing and how to do it that they just aren't super worried about the consequences or what else might happen. So people have all sorts of self-justifying narratives as to why it's worth it some I think are better than others. But it makes sense to me why the public is not particularly sympathetic to any of these I mean that middle narrative what I heard Sam Beckman for you to that I think it was on Tyler cowens podcast. Oh that's like that's a psychopath right to actually believe that you would have to be a psychopath you have to have a very very very low value on I think human life.

45:29Yes, imagine being the person who flips that coin and it comes up wrong. Yeah, like I'm a parent. Like the idea that you would do something that's like 51 49 I'm like your kid is you know doubly happy or your kid is gone like yeah you would never you you don't even want to say that out loud. Of course I think that's how almost everybody thinks about it and again I think 51 49 is obviously the most egregious example you could think of and so S.V.F. is very unsympathetic. But when I think about the super intelligence bet a lot of people will characterize it as a 90 10 bet as an 80 20 bet and this question of how much is an acceptable amount of either extinction risk or total disempowerment risk. You know I think people have very different risk appetites and Silicon Valley is a play set as always. Priced their high risk appetite. I think that makes a lot more sense when you're talking about maybe yourself or your company full of people who have opted in to taking a very high risk endeavor. I think that's extremely different obviously when you're talking about the rest of the world and one thing with the data center debates that I'd always hear is like you know I got that these people are making this crazy bet on this technology they think is going to change the world.

46:37But why do they have to do in our backyard? Why is Mark Zuckerberg not building a data center in his backyard? And so this question of yeah you guys are going to create like these very tangible impacts and to their real harms on specific communities that are not the communities benefiting from this technology at least they don't see the benefits yet they don't see the cancer cures they don't see themselves getting these million dollar 10 million dollar salaries that they are researchers are getting it feels like I think it feels to a lot of these folks like they are ponds in some tech billionaires this game and they do not like to feel that way. Why aren't they building it in their own backyard? Why don't you see a bunch of data centers and you know I mean I don't know the California. I don't think I need to tell you why it's so hard to build a Northern California. But I both think that's true that it's hard to build a Northern California but I also think there's like a truth to the other thing being said they don't want them there. No, the land is expensive it would be very hard like inexpensive to build a data center like the places where we're talking about. But it also gets it a core truth which is people don't actually want data centers around them it is a cost it is a concentrated cost for a diffuse benefit.

47:45Like if you believe in the benefit. Yeah, so I think that's part of it. I want to go back to the first bucket you're talking about which is like the race dynamics. Yes. So at the most generous the thing that I've heard repeatedly is sort of what you're describing which is it would be better if this were going slower. But I can't control that because I whether I'm at you know I'm thropic or open AI or Google or meta you know if we slow down it just is our less ethical competitors over there who speed up. And even if you put down legislation slowing down all of America then it's China right you know the CCP which is going to win the race. I guess one question is do you buy this central metaphor of a race that has a like a ticker tape line where at some point somebody passes it and then they have the recursive super intelligence and like the races over or do you see this more as like most technologies like a kind of like a linear set of gains.

48:54I mean can be fast can be slow but it doesn't have that somebody is going to win dynamic. Yeah, I find this really confusing one of the first things that I did when I started reporting more deeply on AI was try to figure out what a G.I. meant because a lot of the way that this race has been characterized is who will build a G.I. First who build artificial general general intelligence first thing first thing I found no one agrees on what that means. A G.I. means everything from technical AI that can build itself to AI that can do all human jobs to AI that produces whatever number of economic value. And so everyone has these different milestones for what constitutes a G.I. to them. What that also means is that the race has different finish lines and moving finish lines and I think that like you see the way that these models perform differently on benchmarks they are extremely jagged they can be super good at math and they can be super bad at poker at the same time. They can be amazing at cracking cyber security problems but not able to build anything in the physical world and because of that I don't think the technology is as general as people suggested is I also think that means that it is much harder to define a finish line to the race in my sense is that the race because you cannot adjudicate it everyone will always feel that they are falling behind on some dimension.

50:20I mean to then make the case for that these AI companies are making is they do believe in this recursive self improvement they think that you know open AI Google deep mind and then drop it girl extremely focused specifically on the question of can we build AI that built itself can we build an AI that can train the next generation model completely from scratch on its own. And in that sense you get an exponential pace of improvement for whoever can hit that recursive self improvement curve first and they think that this might lead to that company pulling ahead right now folks think that it's a topic which has the best coding models meaning they can code faster meaning that their next models are even better. I can see where that argument is but I'm not sure when we look at you know the latest and the topic models versus the latest opening models versus the latest you know Chinese open weights models that we see a company pulling ahead that decisively in that way especially when every single company in lab is using the same recursive self improvement strategy and so basically I don't know that the race has a finish line and that's what works.

51:30So it's really hard to raise me about it continuing. The reason I want to focus on this race metaphor for a minute is I've come to think it is really one of the central dividing lines and how you think about different kinds of AI policy. Whether you think that we are in a race with China to get to the point where one side of the other is going to pull like endlessly and decisively ahead because they hit that you know recursive self improving level. Well, then that means what you do in the next one to three years is incredibly incredibly definitely important. But if you don't believe that if you believe something more like yes, this is a powerful technology it's a powerful technology that might have a lot of downsides might come with a lot of social instability. It's a fact on a society may not be good. Then let's run faster to the bad place is not nearly as compelling an argument and all of a sudden the idea that we should have policy in place it slows things down for more voice for more consideration.

52:36It's not crazy. And I guess one places goes is that I have begun to notice like a really interesting convergence between the SF AI safety people in a way and like the AI populace like Bernie Sanders or any different way and I'll say it. Who are getting to not that different places but through very very different mechanisms right there like the I safety people who actually believe we are in a race but they believe that winning that race might bring the end of humanity. And so like they don't they don't want to move that fast right if we began to slow down we'd have more credibility for negotiating with China and like trying to come up with like international treaties and all the rest of it. And then you have like the kind of more AI populace side who just like doesn't want to give all these tech billionaires all this power who doesn't believe this technology will be good for people and they're starting to come up with like maybe not the policies the I safety people would. But you know data center moratoriums and things like that. And so you have this sort of slightly strange.

53:37Like you would not have considered this coalition. It's super interesting I mean you literally have Ron DeSantis doing AI round tables with Max Teigmark who's been one of the leading advocates of pausing and slowing down AI and MIT professor and you have Bernie Sanders doing viral videos with L.A. And so I think that's why I think it's really important to do the guy who's telling us that AI is probably going to kill us all if we build it. I was talking just both in line to dozen and does kind of makes it you know I mean. Totally I've been spending some time in DC this year to talk to some of these AI populace some from the social conservative right others from say the labor left. And this band and guy I was talking to told me he's like you know like I wouldn't send my kids over to a play day at the polycule but I can do coalescence. And one of the most interesting political stories going on right now is a sort of strange bad fellow is that of a merge I mean even with the data center stuff I was talking to an activist and they were saying these were liberal women who had gotten into politics after the 2016 election Donald Trump. They said that data centers were the first thing that got them to talk productively with their Trump voting neighbors about politics the first thing in like 10 years almost which is fascinating to me and in this sense they felt a really strong sense almost of political agency that almost came out of this fight.

54:51So I yeah I think one of the big questions that folks in AI safety for example are thinking about is do we want to build these alliances with the rising left and right populace waves in American culture in order to slow AI down maybe it's okay that we have different reasons in different theories for why I assume dangerous for one person is big model bad for another person it's big billionaires bad big tech bad. And those folks are sort of linking arms in a lot of ways against the AI accelerationists and sort of the folks pushing the race faster. So I think this and this we've been sort of living in the data center moratorium side of the politics. But what's the other side of it what are the problems with just saying okay fine like let's not build any more data centers. One like this is not actually the way that you would successfully slow down AI if that's what you really wanted one if you if one locality or one state imposes moratorium.

55:54A companies are very very happy to go to other states or other countries they're already flooding into Texas for example because it's had such a pro dot center environment people are looking at Louisiana the decodas Australia space of course is a current big interest of Elon Musk's because people think that maybe not now but in five years we can just put all the data centers in space and solve the political problems that way so one is I'm not really sure that this would stop AI progress that much it would just shift the data centers to other places that do welcome them. The second thing is I actually do think that there are ways for these deals to be good not every community should want to data center I think that many of them may discuss it and say this isn't what we want we don't need the tax revenue that was bad. But in a lot of the cases with these sites that I visited like you know in the old GM site in Jamesville the brilliant partners the data center developer was going to clean that brown field up they were the only ones willing to do so I talked to a real estate broker who had tried to sell the site five years and he couldn't do it because not a single other commercial buyer wanted to clean up all of this hazardous waste only the data centers were willing to do that or with Mount Pleasanton the Foxconn site right they had already cleared all this land they had built all this infrastructure.

57:08Putting a data center there was a net improvement for the community most in my opinion personally from an economic perspective from the perspective of there is nothing going on there anyway. So I think that there are ways to do these deals right there is enough money in this industry that a lot of communities will decide is economically beneficial for them to bring in these jobs and bring in this investment. But I think that the way that the data center deals have been done nearly guarantee the amount of public backlash that there's been and the thing that will probably fix it I suspect is probably either like a state level streamlining where someone does the research probably at the state level maybe at the federal level to figure out what is the fair way to do these deals how do we ensure the communities get the most transparency the most benefit out of data center deals when they happen so it's not case by case and it's not so asymmetric with the town of 12,000 negotiating with an open AI or whatever. I would add two other things to that that would be curious to hear you take on so one you mentioned data centers moving towards other localities and those are call these are not randomly selected.

58:09The localities that are going to impose fewer conditions so maybe that is fewer environmental conditions but you know in the case of maybe a UAE or some of the Gulf states that are interested here you know you're looking at more authoritarian countries right so I've heard a lot of people worry about that or you know Elon Musk in space. So in a sense if you make it to the data centers can not go into places where there is more democratic control they might you might end up with less overall democratic control. The other thing and I do think this is significant is that there's right now more demand for compute than there is compute. Yes. You know people talk a lot about a bubble but we do not look to have excess AI supply at the moment. And if demand keeps rising because you know the coding agents get better and all the rest of the things we know that are happening but you are constricting the supply of compute. Then you end up with more inequality and who can afford it so you know a Goldman Sachs a JP Morgan right so you know a company with a lot of money to buy compute is going to have a lot of it.

59:15And then you know ordinary users small businesses etc if you believe AI is important and powerful and I believe it is important and powerful. Then you have a problem where you have created much more stratification and who can afford it how do you think about those dimensions of it. I think with where you build the data centers a lot of folks are starting to look at building AI infrastructure as a form of geopolitical leverage right and so some countries like places like Australia Canada. Countries in Europe are thinking actually maybe the way for us to get a slice of frontier AI for us to negotiate with the countries where the best AI is being developed like the US for in cases like cyber security access is to say. You know will build your data centers here will actually welcome you in and in return maybe you guarantee us access to the frontier models so I think that one is that we should look at AI infrastructure as a point of leverage. That both states and countries have and as you mentioned if local moratoriums in the US if domestic moratoriums or something like that lead to giving that leverage and negotiating power to authoritarian states that's probably something the US should be really worried about on the other hand there are folks like Anton liked Carnegie is on work on this where it's can we give our allies can we give her a democratic allies negotiating leverage through them building out compute.

1:00:43The second thing that you mentioned about pricing is interesting because I do think one of the big macro trends in AI right now is the closing of the frontier it's the fact that the very best models like mythos from anthropic are not being open to everybody that is both a safety decision as in we don't want to give really powerful cyber weapons and bio weapons to a bunch of bad actors or just unknown actors it is also a pricing question of the best models are really really expensive. They don't have enough compute to run them and so we're going to have to charge a lot of money or only give it to the biggest corporations and I think that's a reason that startups are worried that countries outside of the US are worried that normal people are worried maybe we get super intelligence and it can achieve all these amazing things but I'm not going to get maybe my boss is going to get the super intelligence and they're going to automate my job as a worker as a consumer I'm not going to be able to do this.

1:01:43So I think it's also a really good point that if we don't continue the compute build out we do see a world where it is the folks with existing capital and access probably big corporations in the US and the US government that are going to have access to frontier AI and all the benefits that it confers. AWS AI is how the world's leading organizations are transforming their industries not in theory but in production at scale right now like turning race day data into real time insights for formula one fans reinventing the journey for every united traveler and personalize.

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1:03:43Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games at ny times dot com slash join games. You're in China for a trip reporting an AI was there much political AI backlash and ferment there from what you could see. I was super interested in this question on this trip because I was finishing my times piece on the permanent underclass while in China and so I was basically asking everyone I met there whether it was engineers at the labs or just my family members were sort of normal middle class people in Shanghai are people worried about AI and jobs are people worried about AI and social instability. I think the answer is not as much I caveat this of course with the fact that the information environment in China is obviously suppressed you can't dissent in public on social media nearly as much as you can in the US you don't have good polling so it's kind of hard to understand the actual level of social discontent there is in China. But I would say that for the most part people were not as terrified of AI as they are in the US there's a few explanations for this some people say that China is more techno optimistic than the US is.

1:04:49I don't love this explanation mostly because the thing that I heard was not exactly optimism is not exactly yeah we're going to get the cancer cures in the super abundance it was something a lot closer to technology is a force that cannot be stopped actually in some ways reminded me more of some of these Silicon Valley beliefs that the future is predetermined that when the state decides that something like AI is a national priority that is going to march forward and as an individual there's not much you can do to resist especially in a one party state in a authoritarian society there is no way to get the culture of resistance really and so rather than thinking about how do I prevent AI in my workplace or in the world that's not really a thing that a lot of people in China think about it's how can I use AI to make sure I don't fall behind in an environment that already has crazy levels of white color competition and white color unemployment if you're if you're not upskilling yourself with you know open claw or whatever there's a million people online behind you we're going to get on the bus at the same time I think that the Chinese state takes a pretty different approach to the US. When it comes to AI regulation and also to technology regulation in general and so China has past laws sort of banning a lot of kinds of companion chatbots because they're worried about relationships they're worried about fertility rates they're worried about addiction China has past made court rulings that say that AI replace this workers job AI can do this workers job is not a good enough reason to lay off a worker you have regulations that require all AI generated in the world.

1:06:18Images to be labeled and you'll see the made with AI sort of language on all the AI made ads in China and so there's also a sense that some people some Chinese have that their government is more likely to look out for sort of this social downsides and labor downsides relative to the US government which has thus far been pretty less a fair especially at the national level right and that gives some people a bit of solace as well. There's been some reporting that China and Russia are pushing sort of anti data center means and social media bots. It's hard for me to tell what scale that is but it has been very much picked up on but like people like Kevin Leary the for the Shark Tank guy who's big data center project is faced a lot of backlash. Do you buy the sort of growing view among like at least some tech elite that the data center backlash is like a Chinese side up. I think this is ridiculous to be honest I mean so I read the opening airport that was saying like this is all a CCP plot and like it pays in the accounts and the tweets that are doing the side up these tweets have like no likes on them they have two views per tweet so I'm not doubting that like I'm sure some clever CCP propaganda person has attempted.

1:07:33To inflame the anti data center sentiment I've not seen evidence that any of this is working I think it feels very organic I think I also tend to be personally a little suspicious when you just castle your political opponents is being misinformed I think there's a way in which people use foreign influence to avoid. Thinking about the fact that there are people that they live with in society who do not agree with their vision of the world and when I talk to these data center activists for example they are actually much less tick tock adult and misinformed then I think people like to caricature a lot of them understand sort of the basic facts of what's the difference between an AI data center and the old kind of data center how much what's the difference between a closed loop system and an open loop system mostly see porn not just misinformed they have just personally decided I'm not that interested in having a data center might be. I think that the community even pays in property taxes. So you talk to people in the AI companies and sort of talk to them about this backlash I know they're very worried about this right I talked to them about this. What are they learning from it?

1:08:35I do think that this year in 2026 I've AI executives AI researchers have started to take the public backlash a lot more seriously than they have in the past. I've heard executives ask can we do better marketing I don't understand why it is that way mo's are so unpopular I've heard executives ask what do you think are the deals that we should be making do you think we should just be mailing checks to every house that lives near a data center project will that fix things. Like tell us how to make a better deal do we need to cut people's electricity prices in half with that work. Unfortunately the word bribe gets used a lot more than I'm personally comfortable with I think that when you are framing the thing you're doing even jokingly as bribing communities into putting a data center there I don't think you're starting off on the right foot. I think that people can feel when they are being bribed I've heard these people say these companies are bribing us. So there's a little bit of examination the thing that I don't think is being examined as much as I want it to be though is.

1:09:40Are we building a technology are we building a product that is helping people the version of this I've heard is. We have a marketing problem maybe we should stop saying allowed so often yes that our technology might take everybody's job and has a 10% chance of upending or destroying humanity all together. What is not been clear to me even as a begin to like maybe move away from that sitting a little bit is whether or not they no longer believe that again I am my personal view is like I don't think it's going to take everybody's job. But to the extent they do or at least they take that very very seriously it's like I keep hearing them say we have a marketing problem and I keep saying when I talk to them about this that if you believe the things you have been saying and in fact the things you have told me personally you don't have a marketing problem. Yeah you have a problematic technology like you have a product problem yes because people are not going to want that future.

1:10:43Yeah I mean I think I would make some distinctions between of course different companies different executives right like one thing that's like very interesting to me thinking about the comms and Silicon Valley is that for a very long time. These companies were only marketing to potential recruits and potential investors basically they were trying to win the vibes on a. Twitter in San Francisco and I kind of feel like they never realize everyone else could hear them right and so now they're trying to take it back but like my sense is that Sam Altman for a long time part of the reason he was talking about like shifting the balance of power from labor to capital and like Rogay I'm whatever was also because he was winning points among people who he wanted to work out and I and he had a communicate that he was as a GI pod as them he was as worried about the same safety things as them and now that his interest is more in political goodwill and IP. And I'm not sure to what extent every AI industry actor has always believed the things that they've warned about.

1:11:44I think people can believe things they don't feel of that makes sense and I think a lot of people in the industry are in a culture and inside arguments where this set of outcomes feels very real right. Or looks very real and so I think they believe it I think when they make these arguments I don't think they're just doing it for you know publicity points in fact I think it's the opposite I think when they're now trying to move away from some of these arguments I think it's actually much more of like a cynical marketing ploy yeah. But I think they often believe these things without actually like in their bones feeling it which is sort of why they act relatively heedlessly yeah or at least like on the set of things they believe. Like this speculative notional set of these about what might happen is way less close to their core yeah then their belief that if they don't build this data center or get this next model out like their competitors or China or somebody yeah is I can get in front of them and they're much more motivated by by the push forward.

1:12:47Yeah. I mean I think the technological determinism is just such a big part of it. I think that if I'm trying to think about how my friends in the AI industry would react to this conversation that's the thing that they would say that we are not focusing on enough is they are so sure. That there is no way that a G I or super intelligence or whatever it is does not get built and it is only a question of who builds it. I think that fundamentals sort of underlying belief is what justifies everything else is we have to be the ones to do it us pulling back us stopping is not going to prevent any of the bad stuff right. I agree with that and I think that's why the China card in this has been such like a destructive part of the argument. I'm not even sure it's totally untrue like I am completely willing to believe that China and America are on a race for a economically and geopolitically important technology even if you don't buy like recursive super intelligence. But the way that has been used to not say well we should enter into international negotiations or something but instead just like we cannot so down whatsoever no matter what else we worry about or believe I think has been.

1:13:49It is acted as a kind of blackmail and the thing is that it's not bought by enough people outside of the industry but I think the phase of the politics around now in is out of their control and it is just not going to be the case that they have control over the AI narrative like next year that they had two years ago. And yeah I don't really think they know what to do in that space and so now it's like either going to have to start benefiting. Yeah people right you some of these like if people begin seeing like drug curious come out right all these things we've actually been promised right you could say like we're meeting to see the beginning of like mathematical conjectures like that's been pretty cool. But we're not really seeing the gains and if you start getting the losses before the gains right you start getting the job loss for instance before the promised you know super abundance. Politically it's not going to be an equilibrium you can protect. That's one of the things I'm worried about is I do think that we are pretty likely to see we are seeing a lot of the social instability before we get the cancer curers right and so or even with the math stuff it's like I think that one thing I notice more and more now is this.

1:15:02Deep cultural and values gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of America the rest of the world I'm not saying the Silicon Valley is wrong that it's cool to like disprove the Jacobian conjecture right like it is cool but like when you ask a lot of people in the tech industry. What their utopia looks like they'll say things like we have you be I so no one has to work anymore we're all immortal and we've discovered all of math and physics. And if you do the pulling on you be I in a mortality neither especially popular with the American public I think that we pulled a mortality is funny I mean it's been told you can look it up if you ask people what like they want AI to do for them it's not necessarily having you know parents towel in your pocket it's not disproving math right like they want things to be cheaper they want to be healthier they want to not do crappy works they have more time for the stuff they like but I think it is genuinely true. That the stuff that is really cool and also that it's oftentimes technically easier to solve like math is not what most people want from this technology and I think it's also true that it's just literally technically harder to cure cancer than it is it turns out to prove math theorems and the other thing that I hear from the public when I talk about the cancer curators is yeah but are they going to just use it for themselves is Peter teal or whoever just going to buy you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to do that.

1:16:24I'm just going to buy himself a mortality am I going to be able to afford a mortality my view for very long time has been that a lot of people in these companies over rate how much of the bottleneck in scientific and human progress is raw intelligence. Yes. Yeah. And just I mean this is a point of abundance is just the point of covering anything anywhere the world is full of friction. And you know you want to do drug discovery and I think we should actually do a lot to make drug discovery easier make drug testing easier right like I've said this many times before I would like to see us prepare like drug development for a world where AI is spitting out way more promising molecular candidates. But that's still a world where you need it up monkeys to test things on right humans to test it's on rats to test things on right you still need to do all the safety data and just the amount of the world that is slow down by we don't have any good ideas like we are out of ideas versus. It is hard to organize things amidst humans you know amidst you know with raw materials like in bureaucracies in organizations you get that like.

1:17:34It helps us is important but it is not everything and I think anybody who's like been in organizations like knows it's actually less than you think it is yeah again I think of a you know a lot of these people have been AI researchers for their entire careers maybe before that they were physics PhDs or they were doing quant trading which are all these kinds of jobs that are fairly their icy jobs are individual contributors where you're not necessarily working in big teams there's not a lot of politicking and relational work. Where all of the relevant context lives inside a single code base and so for AI to sort of understand what's going on a kind of explore all this context that's already been written down I'm not saying there's no tacit knowledge but a lot more of the context is made explicit and these are also places where simply applying more thinking and more intelligence just as an individual like as a person a remote worker in a closet or whatever might actually find the more efficient algorithm right like you don't actually need to politic your way to a better algorithm you don't need to. You don't need to do stuff in the physical world to get that and so I think a lot of.

1:18:37People at these companies don't really realize how hard that is I mean it's funny cuz people say things like yeah there's like electricity cost and energy cost to AI but like AI will maybe solve the climate and I ask how and to be clear I think there are a lot of ways that AI can improve you know climate science research help you building efficiency. But like at the same time you ask people and it's just like oh I don't know it's just going to do it right or it's like oh how how is AI going to improve robotics like I don't know AI will figure it out you kind of do have this I find it lazy actually like I one of the things that annoys me about this particular approaches it's not that I don't think that AI can contribute to all of these problems I think it definitely can but what I often hear is a kind of laziness about how it's going to do that and it feels like a Deus Ex Machina of it's super smart it'll just figure it out. I used to say that this is back when you know so come back is more optimistic place and it has been in recent years but the difference between the culture of DC where I live for a long time and so come back with it in so come back people's world view is formed by seeing impossible problems prove possible to solve.

1:19:47And in DC people's world view is formed by seeing possible problems prove impossible to solve and I think that is now going to collapse for the AI industry into one world view because you know these are people who like give them their do they've invented artificial intelligence like they actually did it you know this is amazing like I cannot believe how good some of these systems are I'm like shocked to be living through this they were able to do that that seemed impossible prove possible and now they're going to now I'm going to do it. So I'm not really sure if the other finding it's like impossible to data center yeah. And like that's what doing other kinds of things in the world teaches you yes that there are a lot of problems that are not possible solve not because like you cannot come up with the idea for them. you are dealing with the messy realities of societies, of politics, of values, of logistics. And it all demand a kind of, it all impose a kind of realism, I think,

1:20:50on the issues that it does not always have. Yeah, I was trying to think about what the difference was between how I would describe Silicon Valley and San Francisco culture a year ago, let's say early 2025 versus now. And I think the number one thing that says Silicon Valley has really woken up to politics. You know, in January 2025, Silicon Valley was feeling very triumphant about doge, about Elon Musk, about David Sachs and Jerome and the White House. It kind of felt like they were all in control. And actually, if you just build these genius technologies and you get super rich and you have good ideas, you'll just get the political power to enact your vision. And a year and a half later, a lot of those folks are out of the White House. They failed at reducing the national debt in achieving all these other goals that they thought they could just AI their way into solving. Anthropic, for example, has had a lot of problems and its dealings with the Trump administration, fundamentally very political and very relational problems. Dario's problem in dealing with the White House was not, I think, that he didn't have good arguments

1:21:51or that he's not very smart or not saying logical things. I think that anyone from Anthropic will admit that these are largely relational problems. And so there's a way where I think democracy and politics is a lot more powerful than these very rich and very smart tech people realize. And there's some optimism to that, I think, in looking at it and saying it's actually really hard to buy an election. It's actually really hard to buy out the whole White House at once. But it's an interesting moment, I think, for the tech industry to be realizing how important politics really is and how difficult it is. I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are three books that you'd recommend to the audience? So I think the first one is really relevant to this conversation, which is Benjamin Lava-Tuz the maniac, which includes a sort of lightly fictionalized biography of John Von Neumann, the story of AlphaGo. I think it's very much a sort of halfway novel, halfway non-fiction book about how intelligence is incredibly awe-inspiring and something worth respecting

1:22:54and at the same time can lead people to some very dark realities. My second book is The Technology Trap from Karl Benedict Ray, which I think is very much about how people's attitudes towards technology and automation depend on, to what extent the benefits, the economic growth is shared, to what extent they feel like they're getting a piece of the pie. It goes through a lot of history much more than just the industrial revolution. And so that's shaped a lot of my thinking on some of the economic questions and the populist questions. And then finally, pre-aperkers that are of gathering because I do think that the relational stuff is going to become a lot more important to it always was. And I do think that book has helped me become a better host. She would be so happy to hear that people should go check out our conversation with the pre-aparker. Jasmine Sun, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. This is fun.