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The public outrage over the tech industry’s obsession with AI isstarting to boil over— and the pitchforks are coming out.
Most recently, a man allegedlylobbed a Molotov cocktailat OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house. Days earlier, a councilman in Indianapolis said that somebodyhad fired a dozen bullets at his house, with a handwritten note reading “No Data Centers” left on his doorstep.
A similar story is playing out across swathes of rural America, with small townscontinuing a years-long effortto keepenvironmentally damagingdata centers that put a huge strain onwater availabilityand thepower gridout of their communities.
Earlier this week, voters in a small town in Missouri led a revolt,firing half of their city councilover a recently-approved $6 billion data center deal.
In short, public backlash over AI has long broken the confines of snarky online commentary. Residents are starting to stand up to what tech leaders continue to claim is a technological revolution, while workers areactively rebellingafter being forced train their AI replacements.
The public tone is notably starting to shift, as journalist Brian Merchant noted in arecent blog post, with some politicians even publicly throwing their weight behind moratoriums on data center development.
Whether the public will eventually reap the benefits of the industry’s enormous investments remains as dubious as ever. AsAxiospoints out, the industry is struggling to agree on a cohesive narrative, with OpenAIarguing in a controversial industrial policy paperpublished earlier this month that we could soon live in a society where the tax burden shifts from human labor to capital, while workers benefit from a four-day workweek.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, on the other hand,continues to emphasizethat AI poses a massive risk to society and needs to be controlled at all costs.
The widening schism between optimism and disillusionment is forcing AI companies into damage control mode.
Source: Drudge Report
