桑德斯与奥卡西奥-科尔特斯提案暂停数据中心建设

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is getting serious about AI.

“In my view, and in the view of people who know a lot more about this issue than I do, we are in the beginning of the most profound technological revolution in world history,” Sanders said at a March 25 press conference. “Artificial intelligence and robotics will impact our economy, our democracy, our privacy rights, our emotional well-being, and even our very survival as human beings on this planet.”

In response, Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a bill to ban data center construction “until Congress passes comprehensive AI legislation.”

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on March 25, the day they proposed a national moratorium on data center construction. (Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Many Americans share their AI skepticism. One recent NBC survey found that only 26% of Americans had a positive impression of AI, while 46% were negative.

There’s a potential here to build an anti-AI movement that could be a political juggernaut.

There are potential allies across the political spectrum, from Sanders to Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida. When asked in February about the risks of AI, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said that Americans losing access to paying jobs was “at the top of the list.” The conservative Republican teamed up with moderate Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) on legislation to track job losses from AI.

Prominent AI experts are warning that the technology poses existential risks to humanity. Child safety advocates worry that chatbots will expose teens to inappropriate content and worsen their mental health. Labor groups — from taxi drivers to Hollywood actors — are trying to stop AI from taking their jobs. And activists nationwide want to stop construction of data centers in their own backyards.

However, it’s unclear whether these groups will be able to unite into an effective coalition. While many people are hostile toward the AI industry, they don’t always agree about the nature of the threat or what to do about it.

While some opponents see AI as an existential risk to humanity, others dismiss those warnings as part of an AI industry hype campaign. Grassroots campaigns against data centers tend to focus on their excessive water use, but some AI safety advocates believe (correctly) that the water issue is greatly exaggerated. After local activists stop a data center in their own neighborhood, they may not stay engaged with larger questions about the overall impact of AI.

So while there is the potential for these groups to work together — Sanders is clearly trying to make that happen — there’s no guarantee that it will work. It seems more likely that the AI industry will continue its relentless growth even though almost half of Americans wish it would slow down.

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The pause people

On Saturday, March 21, I attended “Stop the AI Race,” the largest AI safety protest in US history. Activists at the San Francisco event worry that superintelligent AI could seize control of the world and kill all human beings.

Stop the AI Race protesters marching from Anthropic’s office to OpenAI. “You wouldn’t download the torment nexus” is a reference to the viral tweet which read in part “Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” (Photo by Kai Williams)

“For the past fifteen years, I’ve watched in slow motion as humanity has sleepwalked closer and closer to suicide,” said David Krueger, a University of Montreal professor involved in organizing the event, in a speech in front of Anthropic’s headquarters.

“This technology threatens everybody’s life, and it’s not okay to pretend like this is normal,” said another speaker, Nate Soares, co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Not everyone attending was mainly concerned about existential risk — a couple of the speakers focused on AI chatbots encouraging teens to commit suicide, for instance. But most people I talked with seemed primarily worried about AI taking over the world and killing people.

It’s not a new concern. In the early 2000s, Soares’s co-author Eliezer Yudkowsky started writing about the catastrophic risks that advanced AI might pose. Nor is it uncommon in AI circles. Legendary AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio have similar concerns. Industry leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman have also warned about existential dangers from AI.

People concerned with AI safety have tended to play “an inside game,” as Alys Key put it in Transformer.1 They’ve often eschewed public activism in favor of technical research and elite persuasion.

The “Stop the AI Race” protest represents a step toward more public activism, but the protest was still largely focused on persuading specific elite actors.

“We didn’t try to have the largest anti-AI protest possible,” the protest’s head organizer, Michaël Trazzi, wrote to me. “Instead [we] tried to focus on some specific pause AI ask that we thought [AI company] leadership / employees could get behind.”

Michaël Trazzi giving a speech in front of Anthropic’s headquarters. (Photo by Jeff Baker)

This strategy was informed by Trazzi’s experience conducting a hunger strike. In September, Trazzi and another protester, Denys Sheremet, spent two and a half weeks sitting in front of the Google DeepMind office, demanding that Google commit to stop releasing models if everyone else agreed to stop.

Trazzi and Sheremet stopped for health reasons before Google agreed to the request, but Trazzi still views it as a success. The protest attracted significant media attention, and four months later, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis replied “I think so” when a journalist asked him at Davos if he’d advocate for a pause that all the other companies were participating in.

Trazzi told me support from Google employees was crucial to the hunger strike; he looked to replicate this dynamic with Anthropic. “Our main goal with this protest was to address the employees of Anthropic who, when they joined, thought the company would scale responsibly,” he wrote to me.

The concrete details of what an AI pause might look like are complicated, technical, and liable to generate disagreement. Trazzi’s campaign for a conditional pause has elided these details, helping to bring a larger coalition together. Previous US AI safety protests had been closer to 25 people. Stop the AI Race got 200 people to show up.

Leftists and AI safety advocates haven’t always gotten along

Several times throughout the San Francisco protest, Trazzi and others expressed excitement that “we have Bernie on our side.” But when leftists and AI safety advocates have tried to work together, it hasn’t always gone well.

Phil Hazelden is a programmer who believes AI poses an existential risk to humanity. He attended a February 28 UK protest co-organized by the AI safety group Pause AI and a left-leaning group called Pull the Plug. Hazelden concluded that “unfortunately, most of the speeches were frankly dumb.”

“Mostly I felt like the vibe was a sort of generic lefty anti-big-tech thing, which is not something I want to lend weight to,” he wrote. “I think it’s important for different groups to be able to ally on points of common interest, even if they have deep enduring disagreements. But this didn’t particularly feel like the other group was cooperating with me on that.”

As Politico reported, AI risk groups and the Sanders camp sometimes back dueling candidates in Democratic primaries. In North Carolina’s fourth district, for example, Rep. Valerie Foushee faced a primary challenge from Sanders-endorsed Nida Allam. Foushee narrowly defeated Allam in a March vote. Among Foushee’s backers was a super PAC led by prominent AI safety advocate Brad Carson.