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Democracy blindsides Silicon Valley’s power players looking to transform the world with AI

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The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like. The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”.

When Reich asked whether this state would be a democracy, he got a cool no. “Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back,” he was told. “To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.”

The technos were onto something. Silicon Valley’s power players have just been blindsided by democracy, which has slammed into their program to transform the world with artificial intelligence. A cabal that never doubted the greatness of their ambitions unexpectedly finds their project in the hot seat, forcing them into the unusual position of having to persuade the great unwashed of the merits of their endeavor. So far, the public is not buying. And for all their blindingly high IQs and their massively endowed wallets, Silicon Valley’s greats don’t quite know what to do.

Everyday Americans are up in arms against the AI datacenters sprouting across their communities. Villages, counties, cities and states are imposing moratoria and bans on further development. While the backlash has largely focused on stopping the proliferation of sprawling sites packed with energy-guzzling computer servers, the revolt is not merely nimby opposition to local development.

Public opinion has also turned decidedly sour on the AI project that has called these datacenters into being. Some 73% of Americans think the costs of datacenters outweigh the benefits, according to a survey by the Marquette University Law School. The same survey found that 70% of Americans think that AI is bad for society.

Americans were not always this down on the tech. In 2021, only 37% declared themselves more concerned than excited about the technology, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center. But the share has climbed to 52%. Even 55% of young adults – usually the most excited cohort – have soured on it. And this is not a partisan fear. Democrats and Republicans alike are vastly more concerned than excited. Interestingly, Americans are generally more mistrustful of the technology than people in other countries.

This surely has something to do with the terrifying announcements that have come out of Silicon Valley recently. A widely shared belief that there’s at least a 10% chance that AI could cause human extinction has, rightly, scared the bejesus out of many and follows repeated statements that artificial intelligence will end all jobs as we know them. Assuming we do avoid an AI apocalypse, vague promises of an AI cure for cancer and a universal basic income or some such to replace wages across the economy sound hollow coming from a clutch of out-of-touch billionaires with questionable moral codes in a country with huge holes in its social safety net.

The political backlash is built on a deeper discomfort, though, beyond fear of the dystopia threatened by the masters of the valley. A fear built in the here and now and fueled by a brooding mistrust in US democracy itself, distrust of a political system that allowed a clutch of weird, sci-fi addled plutocrats to pursue a civilization-threatening project behind people’s backs. As noted Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, “the push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives.”

People are not wrong about this. As AI ethicist Rumman Chowdhury points out, the dominant narrative out of Silicon Valley, that AI systems are becoming so powerful that nobody – including the companies that developed them – can stop them, is a stratagem to avoid responsibility for whatever harm their products may cause, depriving meat-and-bones humans of any recourse to law.

The popular backlash is unlikely to stop the buildout of datacenters. Donald Trump remains steadfastly on the side of the moguls hoping to build an AI future. In response to the popular backlash, the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to nix the rule that requires states to solicit public input on applications for air pollution permits for industrial facilities like datacenters and the power plants that feed them, which could keep locals in the dark until construction starts.

The sorry truth is that tech’s power does insulate it from small democratic pressure. “If there is one sector in the US that is still globally dominant and profitable, it is tech,” Boston University historian Quinn Slobodian said. “They can be confident that even if there is a change of leadership, the next person will have to dance with them anyway.”

Critically, there is a bipartisan consensus that ensuring the US’s capabilities in artificial intelligence remain ahead of China’s is of paramount importance. Fear of Chinese catch-up is likely to keep driving policy, overriding voters’ concerns about the risks embodied in this new technology.

And yet voters’ rejection of datacenters, the most immediate, concrete expression of the AI project, raises a question about how the technological revolution of our time will deal with intense popular skepticism and navigate democratic governance. It poses a challenge to a technological elite which exhibits nothing but contempt toward democratic rule.

This is not, of course, the first time that some technological revolution brings about societal upheaval without asking for democratic buy-in. The people that brought about America’s transformation from an agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse did not survey farmers about what mechanization would do to their farms. The Luddites of 19th century England would have loved the chance to put approval of the steam-powered loom to a referendum.

But technological change over the last few decades has not delivered the kind of uplift to everyday workers that their ancestors enjoyed as they were displaced from agriculture to join a highly productive industrial labor force. Automation, instead, has flushed workers without a college degree into a low productivity economy where hotel and restaurant workers, nursing home caretakers, janitors and 7-11 cashiers eke out a living on little more than the minimum wage. Americans have earned their skepticism about the wonders of AI.

One must wonder how such a transformative project as the mass deployment of artificial intelligence across society and the economy will navigate today’s democratic political systems. The technological elite’s contempt for the people’s concerns suggests that they hope to somehow bypass popular concerns in pursuit of the AI program. It seems unlikely that a crew of billionaires who dream of building enclaves at sea, outside the legal jurisdiction of any state, will simply accept democratic constraints. The question is what they will do to overcome them.

Until China became a hi-tech powerhouse and proved them wrong, the political class across the liberal market democracies of the West was convinced that capitalism needed democracy to thrive. But the neoliberal project that guided policy across much of the 20th century was largely about putting capitalism beyond democracy’s reach.

The emergence of independent central banks like the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to set interest rates free from political pressure, is perhaps the prime example of this process. The agreements that led to the creation of the World Trade Organization were largely about putting trade policy beyond the reach of domestic politics. Myriad international treaties were similarly designed to protect economic intercourse from democratic challenges, to provide businesses insulation from political agendas and guarantee the political stability they required to invest.

But the neoliberal project was not driven by “a foundational belief that democracy needs to be snuffed out entirely,” noted Slobodian, author of “Globalists” which traces the history of neoliberalism, as well as an explanatory tome on Elon Musk, “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.” It “acknowledged at some basic level the legitimacy of democracy, which needs to be counterbalanced.”

The barons of Silicon Valley are not so forgiving. “The Silicon Valley leadership class has a programmers’ mentality,” said Slobodian. “For them, the messiness of democracy has no function or utility. It is only bad code.”

Peter Thiel, the weirdest of the Silicon Valley billionaires, who can’t but bring up the Antichrist in every conversation, has argued that democracy and liberty are incompatible. Similar strains of thought are also popular with the less idiosyncratic billionaires in the Valley ecosystem. OpenAI’s Sam Altman salivates about an “awesome” future in which human presidents are replaced with an AI that “can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level, you know, how they think about this issue and that one and how they balance the trade-offs and what they want and then understand all of that and like collectively optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the US.”

The technos’ conflict is not exclusively with democracy. It is with any institution that dares impose constraints on whatever Grand Project they plan to unleash on the world. This could be reconfiguring human interactions by plugging everybody into social media, inventing a new form of money that can evade government control, civilizing space or bringing about a superintelligent Golem.

Musk has no patience for corporate governance tools that may limit what he can do at the helm of his empire. He aspires to be answerable to no one and will organize his companies to that effect. Thiel can’t even countenance competition. It “means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival,” he has fumed. Across the Valley, these thoughts draw from an unshakeable faith in the civilizational, transformative greatness of their endeavor. Technology will solve the world. They will provide the technology. Everybody else, please get out of the way.

There is, however, a historical discontinuity to the story of these masters of the universe: They used to think of themselves as the Good Guys in the liberal democratic fold. Most of them were aligned with the Democratic Party, culturally liberal, empathetic, and willing to accept some modicum of taxation to finance redistribution. Emerging after the collapse of the Soviet block and the end of the Cold War, they saw themselves and their companies as agents of the End of History in Francis Fukuyama’s sense of the word.

Social media–Silicon Valley’s original Grand Project– would overcome the censorship and limits to expression that underpin authoritarian rule, unshackling freedom of expression and opening the floodgates for liberty and democracy. The project sounded so good that the masters of the Valley managed to convince Congress in 1996 to give them a free pass: section 230 of the Telecommunications Act, which said social media companies were not responsible for anything posted on their platforms, based on the dubious argument that they just provided the blackboard but had no say over what was written on it.

Then, the tech moguls’ love affair with democracy went sour. For it turned out that social media could also do a lot of damage. Reports of teen suicides and online bullying bred unease about social media, which built into open mistrust as it became evident that the billionaires at the helm of these technologies knew about the potential perils of their products and yet kept adding features designed to hook users to their screens.

When social media platforms emerged as vectors of misinformation and political manipulation during the 2016 election, the romance between the tech bros and society fractured irretrievably. Founders and their funders who were used to being revered as purveyors of rainbows and puppies, found themselves under harshly unsympathetic scrutiny.

By the time Covid hit in 2020, the former paragons of liberal democracy had found a new role as magnifiers of conspiracy theories, enemies of “woke”, partisans in a libertarian revolt against “government control”. Joe Biden’s attempts to use antitrust law and other regulations against the techno-plutocrats’ empires pushed them to the dark side, where Trump and his angry Maga movement awaited their embrace.

How long will the honeymoon last? Mark Zuckerberg seems excited about the gold chains, the new hairdo and the mixed martial arts. Perhaps his embrace of the Maga-friendly manosphere is genuine. Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Altman all seem comfy in Trump’s squishy embrace. And Trump’s Washington keeps giving Silicon Valley what it wants. The administration is promising to punish European countries who dare fine the US’s hi-tech behemoths. The president has called the power plants built to feed AI datacenters “beautiful”. And he will never do anything to hinder crypto, which is proving so lucrative for him and his family.

Still, the furious backlash against datacenters suggests that Silicon Valley’s Maga-friendly strategy may run out of runway. Their allegiance with Trump, whose popularity ratings are plummeting, may start feeling like an anvil around their neck.

Abdul El-Sayed, the democratic socialist running for the Senate in Michigan, put it this way in a conversation with Jasmine Sun: “This entire industry feels misplaced, and it’s being driven by the interaction between all the worst players. Number one, tech billionaires who are already billionaires, who don’t really need more money but want power. And then VC firms who want to make more money. And then big corporations who want to automate your job. So who wins here? Definitely not the people who live there.”

Silicon Valley may have oodles of money to change the conversation. But it is right to be terrified that this argument may win the day. As Slobodian put it, “the tech barons may not care about democracy, but democracy cares about them.”

Eduardo Porter is a journalist focused on economics and politics. He writes the newsletter Being There on Substack

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com

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