Reported by The Guardian
Election results appear to have turbo-charged an already growing social, political and financial market rethink about AI
‘AI clog’: UK battles onslaught of chatbot-generated complaints
Editorial: the AI backlash – Silicon Valley’s political power is cracking
More from the original report
Last week’s midterms may not have cowed Donald Trump, but they should be a wake-up call for the grinning tech broligarchs who lined up at his inauguration two chaotic years ago.
Clearly, the cost of living squeeze unleashed by Trump’s war in Iran was a big driver of the Democrat wave. But AI was also on the ballot – in many places, literally.
Dozens of measures calling for limits on datacentre expansion were passed. And elsewhere, reining in the unchecked expansion of the power-hungry mega-sheds was a rallying cry.
At a campaign event, the Texas senator-elect James Talarico recalled meeting a mother who told him the lights from the neighbouring datacentre were so bright, her son thought it was daytime in the middle of the night.
Whether the tech sell-off resumes this week remains to be seen; but the anti-AI sentiment evident in last week’s results appears to have punctured at least one narrative that was sustaining the market boom.
Every bubble needs a story, and for AI, one chapter involves carpeting the US in debt-funded datacentres, which will become necessary – and viable – as demand for the technology increases.
That looks a lot less feasible after last week. It turns out, chucking up hundreds of these humming warehouses, while simultaneously warning workers they may be superseded by an army of superhuman bots, is not great PR.
The public were meant to set aside their qualms, for the greater good that AI would bring the economy. But the positive benefits many people may derive from interacting with chatbots – the shopfront of AI for most of us – coexist with very obvious downsides.
Just to name a few: the sea of online slop; those pervert glasses ; and tech firms’ insistence on shoehorning the technology unbidden into every app, platform and device – the latest example of what tech writer Cory Doctorow calls…