Siliconsciousness: The Unabomber, Replacement Theory and the Crazy Evolving Politics of AI

Welcome to Silicon Consciousness.

“The DSR network podcast focusing on the artificial intelligence revolution,”

politics and policy. [MUSIC] Hello and welcome to Silicon Consciousness. I'm David Raskoff. This week as every week, we're going to talk about some of what's going on in AI

and related technological developments and policy developments. And this week, we're extremely fortunate to have with us Molly Taft. Molly is a senior writer for Wired, covering climate change, energy, and the environment. Previously, they were a reporter and editor at Drilled and Investigative Climate,

Multimedia Reporting Project.

And I want to begin with what I was just saying off camera to Molly, which is the article that got me into this. How data centers broke American politics, which was August 4th and Wired, is great. It is a great lively, well-written article.

And I want to congratulate you on. Thank you. And one thing that struck me is you come at this from the background of a climate writer. And I thought what was interesting to me was that there are a lot of similarities between these various movements and being a climate writer enabled you to see into

how the right-wing backlash against data centers generally, AI, more broadly, that they're all related. It's kind of a backlash against technology. But I would go further. I would say there's something you to find here between the right and the left,

which is it's kind of a backlash about how control has people feel control has shifted out of their lives for technological development, for control of the environment, for jobs and stuff. And they look at globalization or they look at environmental degradation. They look at AI.

They say that the people who have power now are sucking it away from us. And so there is this kind of movement on the right and the left to say, we have to reclaim power for ourselves. And I don't know, that was just kind of one of the reactions I had to it before I get into this specific sense of what your thoughts were on.

“Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail right on the head.”

For some context, I've been a climate reporter for like 10 years now on and off. And you know, the piece you're talking about centers on Joe Allen,

who rose to national prominence as Steve Bannon's tech editor, basically.

He's a really interesting guy who kind of has a background as a musical rigor and got interested in tech sort of on his own. And you know, had been writing a lot of kind of like far left and far right anti-globalist ideas when Steve invited him to be on the show, when Bannon invited him to be on the show. And you know, I think that one thing that struck me is, first of all,

a lot of people don't know that Bannon is like a longtime tech critic. Like he, you know, there's a lot of critiques of the AI and tech worlds that like have been like rooted in right-wing populism for a very long time. But like one thing that actually got me, Joe is not like a natural fit for the data center conversation in some ways because he talks a lot more about like AI safety and the technology.

But one thing that got me personally interested in this didn't actually make it into the piece is hearing him talk about like the globalist tech elites. It was very similar to how the right, you know, talked about global climate elites, you know, like the idea of Davos, the idea of the world economic forum, being these sort of controlling forces.

“And that really interested me because, you know, you have to take a pause sometimes.”

And you think I've heard this rhetoric before applied to other scenarios. And I'm also hearing it increasingly from folks who might not realize that they are saying something similar. To like something that could fit on, you know, ban and show. And things that I think are very real for a lot of Americans right now. This idea that like there are a couple of people in very high positions of power in the tech world

who are making a lot of choices for the rest of us that will decide like what humanity's future looks like and what our economic future looks like and what our kids' futures are going to look like. So yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. It was, I do think, you know, other than the fact that a lot of us who started reporting on data centers.

concerns about the environment because that's where a lot of this resistance started.

But I do think like we sit in this interesting nexus of like, you know, hearing about efforts to solve big problems or make technological changes that have been met with different types of resistance. You know, I'm also thinking about the flash that pushed back to renewable energy is like

“very related here. So yes, I think like a lot of us in the climate space are like very well”

positions to kind of write and report on what's going on right now to be honest. Yeah, and to, you know, for I'm a very progressive person. There are a lot of people who are listening to the podcast. So I think full more into that category and they're like, well, you know, what is this nut job have to do with me and how does this, you know, and you know, this guy lived in his van and worked for Steve Bannon and you know, his is sort of self-educated

which there's nothing wrong with being self-educated, but alarm bells go off when it has to be with high big complicated science and so forth. But it relates to other things. I mean, you had an article also this month, I think it wired. AI could help fossil fuel companies create more emissions. And, you know, that's kind of the left side of this, right, which is, for a long time, the big fossil fuel companies have been seen as people who sort of co-opted power

co-opted the government had their people in the government and were driving the destruction of the

“environment of the planet because of their own profit motives. And, and, you know, I think one of the”

reasons that the data center story has gotten the right and the left together is because you have

this kind of coincidence of these two power centers at a third, if you want, with, you know,

oligarchs generally and you're like, my goodness, but, but, but, but, you know, if you're on the left or you're on the right, you, there's something ahead of it. Yeah, and I think it is driving like a real, like marked, marked realignment of how we think about, like, what a left issue is or what a right issue is, you know, I think that one of the things that I really wanted to convey in the piece and one of the reasons I kind of like wrote it in first person was like, a lot of this is really

weird and uncomfortable for those of us who have been reporting on traditional politics as usual, you know, it's, it's, it's strange to have these ideas represented to us. And I think a lot of people, you know, one interesting thing about the data center backlash is that a lot of people on the ground are reporting like, yeah, I work with my neighbor on this issue and he voted for Trump twice, and, but we both don't want this. And they are sort of rediscovering what it looks like to be

in political solidarity with someone who you, you may not have anything else in common with.

“And I think, you know, my big question that like, I don't know the answer to is like, how, you know,”

if those coalitions will hold past this issue or if AI itself is driving such a market change in everyday people's lives and in American society and the economy that like those coalitions will indeed hold because it is, it is a sea change. And I think that that's kind of, that's one of the things that keeps me coming back to this data centers issue because I think it is so it pulls in so many different aspects of what's going on right now in the conversation, right?

Well, I think, you know, the other thing and the reason you're article is such a good article is it's not, you know, DC's centric or New York's centric or Silicon Valley's centric, it's sort of out there in, uh, in the field centric and you're talking to regular people who are affected by this. And, uh, aside, they come from really different backgrounds, but, um, the level of alarm across the country. I mean, who would have thought a year ago that AI data centers would be a national

political issue affecting every political campaign in an election? Well, say a couple of us who are writing about this kind of saw the writing on the wall like I have been boring the pants off of my friends talking about data centers for like a good year. So, but it's because it brought in a lot of things that I think a lot of us were used to reporting on. And, you know, like, I've, in retrospect, it's like it's fascinating that, you know, we're also

at this time when I think a lot of the tech companies are playing with playbooks that, that they wrote

in 2012, right, or 2010 when they first started building data centers in areas like Loudon County,

in Virginia, out in Silicon Valley. And, and then it's, you know, think back to 2012, 2010. Google is great. Google's a good company. They're trying to do good. There's all these sort of like exciting innovative products. We were sort of at the, the nascent stage of social media before a lot of things got monetized, right? It's still felt fun to be on the internet, still felt fun to be engaging with tech, you know, fast forward 15 years were in such a different place politically culturally

people are so like, you know, they, they see these companies as driving everything bad that's happened

“in the past, you know, decade, decade and change. So, when you combine that with a physical”

structure that doesn't provide a lot of long-term jobs that does use like a pretty substantial amount of resources that raises concerns about water right when we are at like the breaking point around water as a resource, like the Colorado River is going through a crisis right now. A lot of us East Coasters don't realize like how bad the water situation is out west. You know, we're having all these conversations about renew, resources we thought were previously, you know, like,

untouchable. And then you bring in stuff like, you know, that use chemicals and data centers and we're worried about the water and, you know, the, the forever chemical crisis has unfolded

in front of our eyes over the past 20 years, you know, people mock up, people are really concerned

with like what's in the environment, what, what are we actually eating drinking breathing all the time. And so to me, it was kind of a no-brainer that, you know, of course tech companies if they come in and they use NDAs to build these things that have maybe some, you know, tax space, but you don't see tax space every day. You see something going up that you don't know what it is. It's not going to provide a job. It's going to take all the electricity and water. And it's also like causing

traffic ants in your neighborhood like there's not, you know, like the, the pitch that they made

“to a lot of communities was I think really out of date. So like, but, you know, it is remarkable”

how fast it's moved. And I think that that is something that I, I don't think a lot of us saw coming. Even when we were kind of covering this, this. Well, yeah, and I think one of the things you mentioned in the article, which, you know, has been, you know, we've been doing this podcast for three years or four years now, but I've been involved in these issues for a long, long time, and it's just been a hobby horse, which is that nobody in DC understands it. You wrote those,

almost those words of a beta in the article. And so it does cause a problem, because it allows them to be taken advantage of by people coming in and saying, here's some campaign money and here's a think tank that we just set up across the street and they've got some data look at that. And therefore, let's proceed with this. And, you know, it leads to Trump going, "Well, this is

good for the local economy." And the reality is, it's not good for the local economy. It doesn't

create jobs, but, you know, there's a step further, which is if you create these big high prescalers and if you enable these companies to go where they want to go with this. And if it has the effects that people think that it's going to have on killing jobs, killing the labor. I'm quite apart from the environmental things. What it's going to do is exacerbate inequality. And it's going to give more and more power to fewer and fewer people, particularly to the

tech-brows who are in charge of this kind of thing. And that may be good for the politicians who take their campaign contributions. But for everybody else, it's bad. And I just think there is this pervasive sense in the community of fear about this because, and this is another sort of, you know, unexpected, I don't know, in quotes, development, which is that the people who are the face of the AI community are horrible. And, you know, you've got, you know, and they're like,

some of them are not the most likable, absolutely. Oh, yeah, they're the ones who are against women having the right to vote or the ones who, you know, who don't think we should have democracy anymore. And we should leave it to the machines or the ones who say, you know, we're all going to move to another planet. Or, well, it gets into, you know, one of the things that this guy that you think you make the center of the article talks about, which I'm tempted to sort of use in the title

of this podcast, because I thought it was so like jolting and interesting was how he has somehow morphed the replacement theory argument to AI. Right, you know, so we're used to it with immigration. Now, the all the brown people are going to come and then we're going to all be all us white question men. Anyway, we're going to all be supplanted from our rightful control of this society. That's replacement theory A. But replacement theory B is the machines are coming. They're going

“to replace us. And, you know, I think that's what gets to this thing that I started out with,”

which is people feel like every single day in hundreds of ways they're losing power. And that this guy and the other people who are out there, whether it's Steve Bannon or people, don't well, there's Steve Bannon or whether it's Bernie Sanders, what they're saying is you're losing power to these people. And we've got a fight back. And I think, I don't know, to me, that resonated because as as as as vial as replacement theory is understanding what it speaks to in the psyche of

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Yeah, I think there's so much to say on that. I think, first of all, it's also important to note

that Steve Benin and Bernie Sanders have been on the same side of a lot of the AI safety conversations that I've gone on in the past year or plus. They've signed on to similar pledges. They've made similar asks pointed out they've had within the same day, have spoken to the same experts. I think one thing that's interesting about looking at politics through exclusively DC Lens and especially with the Democratic Party, they tend to see whoever is

“allied with Trump as an opponent is to remember that tech and the White House and tech in the”

right are like a pretty recent political alliance. And a lot of what I heard reporting this article

is that a lot of the populist space on the right have deep memories for things like

during the pandemic when Facebook censored a lot of accounts that were posting about the vaccines and the COVID conspiracy theories, there was a large scale what the right sees as unjust censorship from tech companies. There's still a lot of anger there. There is a lot of concern over, you know, how this will impact children and that threads into stuff like anti LGBTQ stuff that that kids can access online, you know, censorship laws online are like a big portion for them.

So, you know, their like tech is not automatically aligned with the right right now just because they are aligned with who's in the White House at the moment, right? Like it is a coming split that I

think is going to be really significant. And you know, that draws up like what you brought up with

the great replacement theory, that draws up a lot of like, you know, for me, I'm like a non-binary gay person, right? And so reporting this, you know, one of Jo Allen's like blurb that the person who blurred his book is this woman Jennifer Bellack, who is kind of on the moha side of railing against big pharma because they introduce drugs to the LGBTQ LGBTQ community, right? And that transgenderism is an expression of modernity and an expression of big pharma and chemicals in our water.

“So, it all kind of gets slot together. And I think that, you know, if anyone comes away with like”

one thing from my piece, I hope it's the impression that like things that you think are politically aligned with one way of thinking or the other are absolutely going to get shaken up in the coming years. And I think like understanding what the roots of some of these conversations are is going to be really important for the future of conversations around tech, around power, around oligarchs, around how we handle society in, you know, this brave new world. And yeah, I think it's going to be

really interesting to watch. It's going to be super interesting to watch. And I don't know if you're writing a book about it, but please, I don't mean to curse you. As somebody is, I like written templates. Yeah. And it's a nightmare. But, but, but, but somebody is out there email the show notes.

“I love, I obviously love this stuff. I think it's fascinating. Wow, but I also think, you know,”

the people who go out into the grassroots drive down the streets, listen to what people are saying, understand that this is breaking down the traditional divisions that the DC centric world is talking about politics and a better future. You got to see it, you know, and you're seeing it. And it comes out in this article and think one of the things that I thought was kind of great and weird. And that part of the article, I like because they were a great weird, is this kind of

revisionism on the unit bomber? You know, where you've got people on the right and the left going, well, you know, maybe you had a point. And I was like, whoa, are we really there but talking about that? Yeah, I love this part because, you know, again, this gets to like one of one of the

energy in predominantly rural but some urban communities, right? Like, there are some projects

that people really don't want. Like, one of the first big, and it's not just one class of people,

right? Like famously, one of the Kennedys was actually a huge driver in making sure that like Massachusetts first huge offshore wind project didn't happen because he and a bunch of like other rich people could see the wind turbines from their house and they didn't want to see that, right? They thought it was ugly and they didn't want it. So helped seed a lot of narratives around

“like turbines harming whales and turbines harming the environment, you know? So I think that, but there”

is something in that that I have noticed in that pushback in especially in Make America healthy again, like the Maha movement and in this pushback to data centers, this sense that we've gone too far, that we are separating ourselves from what connects us to the Earth, what connects us to nature, and that is somehow what's responsible for a lot of, you know, what's going on right now that

people don't like, and that's like basically, you know, but for manifesto, right? And, you know,

I find also culturally, there has been, I think since he wrote his manifesto, this tension around him, right? Like, as I, you know, as Joe Allen writes in his book and I point out that my article, like, tech thinkers kind of were like, yeah, he had a point that like, there are trade-offs with technological advancements, and for, you know, the tech thinkers, those trade-offs were worth it, right? But, like, even acknowledging that they exist is a really interesting facet of this kind of

were, were tangled in this cultural conversation with the unibommer where it is like, he may have,

“you know, landed on something, but he obviously took it, like, to the far, far end, but I think,”

you know, the question is like, okay, so what's the appropriate response? Like, how do you

moderate technology? How do you, who decides what, you know, how much is too much? Who decides that we've gone too far? And what, what are the markers look like? You know, um, and like, again, we're going to start seeing a lot of, you know, as the technology grows and leaves and bounds, you know, like, uh, brain chips, like, some people really love the meta-classes. They love the idea of having wearable interfaces or interfaces in your body. For some other people, that is like a

nathema to what the human experience is like. And so I think that these conversations are going to keep evolving and that tension, yeah, the unibommer stuff is just absolutely fascinating. And, um, you know, I, I can't get over how much unibommer stuff I have seen just on social media, like, as a joke, but, you know, also kind of like, well, you had a point. It's like, oh my god.

“Well, I think, I think part, an aspect of what's happening right now is the velocity with which it's”

happening. And we don't have the mechanisms, you know, it took 250 years from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution for the Industrial Revolution to reach the whole planet. In the course of that time, you were able to have Adam Smith and then you were able to have Karl Marx and you were able to have battles over this thing in various countries around the world. And we were able to, you know, unions were able to write, you know, that a lot of responses happen, right? But this is all happening

in a few years instead of 250. We don't have philosophers writing big books about this. There's some of the ones that have been out there have been compromised by the whole experience. And on top of that, our political systems are just not able to respond quickly enough. And, you know, I think the tech community has decided to take a little bit like the, um, I don't know, the Trump approach for renovating Washington, which is I'm going to tear down the buildings

and by the time the court gets to this thing, I'm going to be done, right? And so the, it doesn't matter where the court comes at. And I think the tech community is like, well, we're going to build all these data center. We're going to do the hyper scaling. We're going to be on our way to quantum computing. We're going to be on our way to the next phases of this thing. And you're going to come up and, you know, there's going to be a court like today, the day we're recording this,

there's this settlement with Meta and 22 states about, um, whether how to regularly kid. But, but they're like, you know, this is a cost to doing business. We're going to charge at the court's lag behind. And I, and I think that's part of the problem because it makes a lot of people who don't have any kind of philosophical frame for this, because that hasn't developed. And they don't have political mechanisms for dealing with it, simply to feel disempower,

simply to say, what the fuck? You know, all this stuff is happening in my life. And I can't, I, I, I just feel more and more alienated from the power structure of the place I would.

while we don't, yeah, like we are, we don't have a philosophical framework to process this.

There's this kind of debate that's cropped up in the, the weeks since I wrote my piece about what the data center back, which is all about, right? And there are a lot of pundits who are saying that it's, it's a response to AI. And, you know, a lot of politicians are starting to respond, you know, Ken Paxton, um, who's running for Senate, obviously released a platform earlier this week against data centers where he proposes to reign them in. And then also hold them legally liable

if they develop any chat box that would harm children, which is like another example of what we're about to see, which is politicians pulling in their own pet issues with technology into the data

“center conversation. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. But, you know, I think that”

there, there has been some polling to suggest that, you know, people who live near data centers

are really concerned about the environmental impacts, which I absolutely think is totally something that's going on. You know, folks I talked to in my article, like they are much more interested in passing ordinances than in talking about like power robots are going to replace us, right? But, at the same time, culturally data centers are becoming the signifier of what you said of like life moving too fast, right? And I'm thinking very weirdly, you know, I'm a millennial

and there is a trend on TikTok right now of, um, you know, nostalgia for like my high school years when kids only had a digital camera and not a lot of people had cell phones. And there are a lot of comments on these videos from Gen Z and younger talking about how much better of it we had

“that back then, um, which, you know, nostalgia is a human thing, like I think every generation”

does this, but it is so pronounced like the way even I had high school experience versus

what the high school experience is now. And I remember seeing this one comment that it's like, I wish I could have grown up like this and now all we have is like data centers sucking all the water, right? And so it, I think people are using some of this conversation as a stand-in for like what you're talking about, much broader conversation about how we're headed somewhere else quickly and it's being driven by people in Silicon Valley who have a very distinct attitude to tech and

progress that a lot of us don't share or don't have the same basis. And you know, so I think you're totally right that like in normal, in normal circumstances, we would slow down and maybe have a different philosophical conversation or political conversation about what this all means, but we just don't have the, it feels like we don't have the time or we don't have the resources. Well, we also, we don't have a space right now where you can have a rational debate. And so a lot of the discussion is, um,

you know, I have friends on the free Zaldeta Centers, free Zaldeta AI, shout it down, let's, and it's like, well, okay, that's kind of in the zip code and defund the place. That's not going to happen. You know, you want to slow it down. Yes, let's find some mechanisms for doing it. Let's find some mechanisms for rationality dealing with it. But I think all of this, you know, and I think, you know, I watch sort of traditional politicians, including damn, I was in the

Clinton administration, damn politicians going, uh, well, we need to, you know, talk to the Republicans and, you know, it's all about power sharing, not realizing that for most people in this country, millennials, uh, Gen Z's, Alpha's, whatever's coming up, uh, who, by the way, after 2020, it will make up the majority of the electorate, right? Um, for them, that this is not the issue. The issue is they've lost control. They do not feel in control. They do not feel that the power

establishment negotiating among themselves about their power sharing has anything to do with their lives. And what the real thing in their lives is, and this, you know, sort of brings it full circle to where we started is re-empowerment. And, you know, the weather, it's, you know, whether it's the DSA or Mombani is saying, I'm going to fill a pod hole or I'm going to give you a grocery or whether it's somebody, um, you know, on the, on the far right saying, you know, you know, it's the

eastern establishment. We have to burn them all down. It's, the, all of it gets to the point that we feel at a control. It's happening too fast. The systems that are in place are not controlling it. And that we want somebody's going to help us be re-empower, to have some say over the outcome. If you're enjoying this episode and want to get even more out of the DSR network,

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DSR network.substack.com/awgist26. That's DSR network.substack.com/awgist26. Yeah, yeah, I think that that's really on, on point. Yeah, and you know, that also threads in and

“again, like one, you know, one aspect of the data center resistance that I think is so important”

is, you know, the NDA is involved in constructing law of these facilities. Like that is far and away, just the secrecy aspect. Like people feel like they are not being informed of what's going on in their communities. Even if it's going to be like, let's say, best case scenario, like, a data center comes in and is going to have a huge tax base component. They're going to only recycle water. They're going to pay for their own clean electricity, right? And somehow they're

magically going to create jobs. If people feel like they were not informed of the decision, which

a lot of data centers, you know, until extremely recently, it was like very much business as usual to have an NDA process for citing these things, especially because the structure of the way these deals are done is like a lot of times it'll be, you know, like a, a landowner passes off to a contractor who then passes off to the actual builder who then is like, you know, competing with a couple different tenants at one time. Like Google might not know they're coming in until much later.

But people really feel like they do not have control over what is happening to a parcel of land down the road or to, you know, in, in their backyard, like near a school. And they're, and they're obviously worried about the environmental impacts. But like the secrecy aspect of this is like so important. And, and it is about the control you just mentioned absolutely. Right. And, and the secrecy leads inevitably to conspiracy theories and, you know, and it's sort of, you know,

the kind of storm of bullshit that surrounds all of these things where people can't sort of make sense of it. And it resonated to me when I read the article because you go through loud and county Virginia, which is data center corridor, I live in Potomac, Maryland, the Potomac rivers. I can look at my, it's about 100 yards in that direction. And that's on the other side of it. When you go directly across the river and you talk about going past one of these places

and the home that's coming out that you can hear across the street. It was crazy, actually. And, and it has also like that, that facility has been the subject of many local news reports, you know, like, this is not, I'm not under thing new information. But I, and they don't, I don't think they run, it's back up generator. So I don't think they run them that. But I was like, this is what, like, I really had to check myself for a moment. And even, even the noise aside,

“it, it is remarkable. I've, have you been out there? Have you been out there?”

I can't wait. I can't avoid it. Yeah. But if you go to Dallas airport, you go just past Dallas airport here. It's, at first, you know, if you look at it with my old boomer eyes, you think, look at all these warehouses. But it, because they look like just big giant warehouses. And then you notice,

there's a million ventilation fans on the roof and there's air conditioning and all this stuff.

And, and you realize you're in something completely different. Totally. And I, I recognize, you know, like, a melodramatic person, I'm a journalist. Like, these are buildings filled with servers. Like, you know, I think a lot of AI companies are trying to change tech and figuring out ways to build, now in places where there will not be as much local opposition where they're more out of the way. That's a little bit more challenging, because there's not the infrastructure set up. But, you know,

what, they're, they're quickly learning lessons from a lot of this backlash. But I have to say, like, a lot of the, like, the environmental movement against data centers began in Latin County. Like, they have been really sounding this alarm for, you know, since for a while, since before

“chat GPT honestly, because there were just so many. And, and I will say, like, I was surprised”

at how visceral a reaction I had to them. And, and I don't know if I, I've been asking myself, like, if I didn't know they were data centers, would I have reacted the same? What I have just been, like, wow, a lot of warehouses around here. But, yeah, it was pretty remarkable. And, and, like, you know, there are, I think what gets lost in a lot of the kind of debate over, like, what's a real concern about data centers. There's been a lot of streaming drawing about water.

And, you know, like, is that the real problem? But, you know, like, I do think, like, people, people are really pissed off for, like, in many cases. Like, if I lived across from that thing, and it was making that noise, I would also hate it. Like, yeah, absolutely. And, if I heard that they can sound like that, and they were coming to my neighborhood, I wouldn't want them either.

Well, yeah, but also, if you know that they're associated with a technological transformation

that's going to remake the world, and you don't know how, and it may lead to a singularity, or it may lead to you not having a job, or it may control you. And, in other words, all AI, all the AI myths jumbled up. And all of a sudden, they're the symbol of it. Then you're going to project all those fears onto it at the same time, and the strategy of the tech companies to do NDAs and keep it all under wraps, and so forth. All of a sudden, blows up

in their faces. And I guess as a point, I mean, I'd love to go on and on with the conversation.

“But as a point to wrap it up, I think one of the things that I got from the article, and I get from”

this conversation is a message that needs to land in Silicon Valley in a way that it has not yet.

And that is, the political landscape has changed. AI is a permanent grassroots level issue, whether it's about privacy, or it's about jobs, or whether it's about security, or autonomous weapons, platforms, or it's about data centers. And everybody, right in left, is concerned, and you can't just have a private meeting at the White House and resolve the issue. It is just too pervasive, too national, too multilayered, to go that way. And so I think it's sort of where we're

seeing is a sea change, much as you did in the middle of the 19th century, as you go from an agrarian society to an industrial society. You're seeing a sea change where the things that people

care about in the structure of their society are changing. Yeah, totally. And I'm going to call it now,

I'll be on this podcast calling it now. The next, actually it's already happening, but like, flock cameras are a great example of how this moves being done. I have a piece coming up today about where I spoke with Dan Osborn, who's running as an independent person in Nebraska, and I asked him, like, you know, people are debating over whether or not people opposed to data centers are connecting them to AI, and he was like, "No, of course, they are." He's like,

"I get standing ovations every time." Like, when I talk about flock, like, I got standing ovation, the other day. Like, people hate some, some of the stuff that's happening. And they say, somehow, you know, somebody's got to do an analysis of it. Somehow, AI, you know, and the people responsible for it, made major technological innovations that could have brought enormous amount of good, solved research problems, ended diseases, made the world a better place, and for greed

or stupidity, they dropped the ball. And all of a sudden, people hate AI, and it's like, "That's a big deal." And by the way, it's not true everywhere in the world.

“No, and I also think, like, people's politics are not coherent. You know, I think there's a lot”

of sort of laughing on places like X, where someone uses chatGPT to make an anti-data center protest poster, right? But like, that can be totally congruous with someone's belief system. They can recognize people aren't stupid. They can recognize, like, I like this tool. I don't think we need more surveillance, and I don't think we need to build this thing out in my backyard to do even more. You know, like, I don't understand the buy-in for me for more things.

They, you know, like, I think people are, people's politics are not as predictable as people like to think. Because they're, they're not. And, but the other point is, I'm a foreign policy national security guy, by my training career. In China, they don't have these views. And other parts of the world, they don't have these views. And some parts of the world, they don't expect privacy. And other parts of the world, they're embracing and applying AI much more rapidly than we are.

That has a consequence economically, socially, politically. And this is another part of the discussion that we're not thinking about, which is the geopolitical consequence of the fact that there is this massive backlash here, because somehow we've gotten the worst of the worst, you know, and now Peter Teele and, and Alex Karker, sitting there whispering in the air of the president, and then standing up on chairs and ranting about the anti-Christ or whatever that is their

“answer, the ranting back, and you go, oh, Jesus, what is going on in this country?”

Yeah, it's exciting time to be alive, so. And really is, and really is, and your article brought it to life. I am so glad you could join us. I hope you can join us again. Yeah, of course. Follow what Molly is doing at wired, and I know I will, and we'll be back each and every week here

host of that podcast, David Teele, because we do one on AI climate energy. And I think it's another

“place you should don't visit, so. But David's podcast, yeah. Yeah, you know, David. So yeah, that's so.”

Anyway, that's all part of our, what we're doing here. Anyway, thank, thank, thanks a lot, Molly.

Thanks everybody for listening, and we'll be more with you soon. Bye.

“This was Silcoxistus, a production of the DSR Network.”

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