AI取代工作引发的公众愤怒将远超数据中心

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NEED TO KNOW

• Anthropic could raise more than $100b in its IPO slated for late September or early October.
• A draft executive order for a frontier developer self-regulation regime circulated the White House, but has now stalled.
• Investigations into the Hugging Face incident found OpenAI’s agents collaborated as a “collective.”

But first…

THE BIG STORY

The latest debate over the public’s hatred of data centers has been raging for a couple of weeks now. Is it really all about the environment? Just a general distrust of Big Tech? Or is it, in fact, about data centers themselves?

One of the reasons the intense public antipathy toward data centers prompts so much discourse is that data centers have relatively little material impact on the vast majority of people. And yet, a majority of people do indeed hate them.

But the coming wave of changes wrought by AI will have a stronger, more direct impact on many people’s everyday lives — and in one area they consistently care about more than any other: jobs.

It was reported this week that Anthropic plans to tell Wall Street that the total addressable market (TAM) for its products is more than $30t — a figure based on all the paid work the company believes its AI models could capture. Work that, for the most part, actual people are currently paid to do.

TAM is an inherently pie-in-the-sky figure designed to impress investors. But even a tiny fraction of that figure starts to have real implications for the labor market.

We haven’t seen mass unemployment from AI yet. But it seems naive at best to suggest that AI won’t have major implications for the availability of jobs people want to do. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman may have recently said his timelines for transformational AI had been too short, but his reasoning was about how quickly companies and society are adopting AI, not how effective it is.

Anyone who uses AI models with any regularity can see that they are getting good enough at various tasks to already replace some jobs. They, after all, seem perfectly capable of replacing op-ed ghostwriters in the Wall Street Journal.

Even Bill Gates, in his latest intervention on AI, puts AI’s impact on jobs at the top of the list of challenges he says we aren’t doing enough to address. In a lengthy post on his own website, he wrote that “many jobs will disappear forever,” citing customer support, software engineering and paralegal work as some of the first likely to go.

Gates repeated his call for taxes on robot labor, and added a proposal to tax token usage. He also included a new plea for reserved roles for humans — jobs that AI simply isn’t allowed to do. But the whole framing doesn’t seem particularly optimistic that any of that, or indeed any adequate response to AI at all, will happen.

“I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately,” he wrote. “There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era.”

So far, most industry proposals for what, exactly, can be done about AI’s economic impact on workers have been vague allusions to a universal basic income, or giving the (US) public stakes in companies, or a world of abundance so great that having an income won’t be necessary. But the hurt is going to be felt in the job market long before any of those options are seriously on the table, if they ever are.

The truth is that if preparations for this aren’t made soon — if some way to take the sting out of having careers upended and job opportunities eliminated isn’t found — then the vitriol directed at data centers will be merely a taster.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” has been an enduring catchphrase for a reason, and it’s not about a record Dow. People care very much about their personal material circumstances. When those are directly affected by AI, and the blame is put at the feet of the companies that produce it, it will be challenging to find many people who aren’t deeply, deeply angry at much more than data centers.

— Jasper Jackson

THIS WEEK ON TRANSFORMER

• We’re sleepwalking into an AI surveillance dystopia — James Ball lays out how the technology needed for industrial-scale observation already exists
• The report into OpenAI’s escaping models reveals a deeper problem — Jasper Jackson and Celia Ford on the problems with the Hugging Face incident investigation

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THE DISCOURSE

Bill Gates has entered the chat:

• “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice … Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history.”
• “Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition … None of our current institutions were designed to handle a technology that spreads so fast and touches so many parts of our lives. So we’ll need to make new ones.”
• “My message to leaders is: You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded.”

Tyler Austin Harper tweeted:

• “One reason I am reflexively skeptical of the AI industry’s claims is that the very people we are supposed to hail as geniuses also completely failed to anticipate that branding their antichrist box the Best-Case-Mass-Layoffs-Worst-Cas[e]-Extinction Machine was a non-savvy PR move.”

Sam Altman thinks that, yeah, the AI industry should ease up on the doom:

• “A lot of the people building AI have been off saying there’s a 25% chance we’re going to destroy the world — and yeah, we’re going to race ahead to do it because otherwise those bad guys will do it first … We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated.”

Dean Ball instead decided to attack Social Security:

• “The main thing I have to say to the young generation of Americans is that your grandparents and great-grandparents committed a kind of accounting fraud when they ran our country a century ago with social security … It is best to consider this with as minimal residue of sentiment as possible, to really sit with it, to stare it coldly in the face. Unwinding the great fraud of the high modernists is your job, whether you wish it to be or not.”

Matthew Yglesias noted:

• “This nuclear strength attack on Social Security seems really at odds with most of OpenAI’s public communication about AI’s impact on growth and the labor market.”

Richard Ngo, who left OpenAI in 2024, addressed those who didn’t:

• “By this point almost everyone working at OpenAI or Anthropic (except perhaps a dozen executives) should be viewed as cogs letting themselves be turned by ideological forces. When you’re in proximity to that much power, one of your main moral duties is not to be a cog.”
• “You don’t need to stay to gain influence, because you’re almost definitely too scared to wield that influence in ways that matter … Everyone involved has locked themselves into a mindset where they’re incapable of making real choices, except for how fast to barrel down the train tracks that their fear has laid out for them.”

Daniel Kokotajlo thinks it’s more like:

• “These companies are rationalizing why they need to win, and will continue to do so even as it becomes increasingly obvious that their actions are endangering everybody in pursuit of a power grab.”

POLICY

• Trump administration officials reportedly circulated a draft executive order to create an organization overseeing a system of self-regulation for frontier AI companies, but attempts to get buy-in from senior officials and the president have stalled.