耶鲁教授评盖茨AI警告：硅谷动机已变，数据中心成政治痛点

Bill Gates published an op-ed last week. Really, um, being very critical of AI in a way that was surprising, I think. Did you read it? Uh, I've read parts of it. I haven't read the whole thing. It was like 6000 words. It's quite long, but it was very splashy. He really came out saying, we're not prepared for this. This is going to be potentially really catastrophic. It was quite something. It was quite something. Gautam Mukunda, lecturer at Yale School of Management, as well as a Bloomberg Opinion contributor, has also read it.

And, um, you know, thought about it in the context of what, uh, Silicon Valley's leadership has been doing or not been doing. Gotham I think back to the early days of, uh, you know, when people were excited about the internet. Google had this motto, don't be evil. And everyone was trying to make the world a better place. There was that HBO show, Silicon Valley, where, you know, they kind of openly mocked that idea of, you know, we're trying to make the world a better place.

Um, and it feels like Silicon Valley in 2026 is very, very different from that. Yeah, it really is. And that there's been a generational trans transition. There's been a transition from people who are primarily technologists to people who's clear, whose motivations are primarily financial. Um, this has been a, uh, but there's been a set of behaviors where I think of is a capstone, not the trigger for what's going not not, not the root of the problem where, you know, like, if we were to do the list of Facebook scandals, we would kind of be here for a few days, right?

Like, like it's not a short list. There are any number of others. And I think I just finally became a place where the public pushed back and said, you know, this is a chance for us to to put limits on these people. In one of my earlier columns, I said, you know, in the United States, every data center is a referendum and Silicon Valley is losing that referendum about as decisively as I've ever seen anyone lose one. Well, one of the big concerns that gates brought up, and I think that a lot of people have is about jobs and I potentially replacing jobs.

Bill gates called for something called human reserved jobs within companies. Can you talk a little bit about that, and maybe a little bit about what kind of a threat I poses to jobs right now? Yeah. So he said out. He said that there should be categories of jobs that only humans are allowed to do. And he gave a couple of examples. Uh, I'll say I personally I'm kind of skeptical about that. One is the solution. Um, he himself said that those categories are going to change over time, and they're just be, you know, they're just going to be a huge amount of dispute about what people what categories would that be?

How do we assign them? And market pressures where companies will sort of find ways around those circles. Um, but the large the fascinating thing about AI is we have had an enormous amount of discussion about like AI's job creating devastating jobs, and it just isn't showing up in the data. Right? It just is not in its early days. Not any dispute about that. Nobody's going oh, we're seeing in the data, um, why we're not seeing it in the data is a really interesting question, but we definitely aren't.

So I guess to follow up on that, um, at some point it's going to start showing up in the data. And right now, um, data centers has become the issue that people have really gathered around. Um, we're seeing it from elected officials in places like Texas where you don't really expect it because it's such a deep red state. And I believe Greg Abbott even called Texas the epicenter of AI development. Um, yet when we talked to political analysts like Henrietta Trace of Vita Partners, she points out that yes, it's a big deal now.

But post-election post midterm election, the big, um, tech companies are just going to give money to whoever comes out ahead, including Democrats and Republicans and all that. Um, you know, job owning about data centers. And we don't want this in our backyard is going to die down. And they're going to move towards like, let's create more things to build more jobs. Once again. How do you think about the political impact that this has already started, where Facebook is cutting 0 million checks to both Democrats and Republicans in this cycle?

Um, I am totally confident that that is what the leaders of Silicon Valley are trying to do, because it is way easier to write checks than it is to engage in some introspection and actually think about why people are, you know, actually sort of honestly trying to answer the question, why do people hate us? But I'm pretty skeptical it's going to work. And that's just for a very simple reason. There in the as far as I can tell in the history of polling.

The issue on which liberals and conservatives are most strongly in agreement is they both hate data centers. Right? Like we are a country united by only one thing right now. We all hate data centers. Now, you may think that's right. You may think that's wrong. I'm not making an argument that that belief is correct. I'm just telling you that is the facts on the ground. And however rich Silicon Valley is, it's not clear to me you can buy your way out of that.

Well, I mean, gates did talk a lot about the impact that AI is going to have on all aspects of our culture and our economy, including jobs. I mean, he compared it at one point to 911, um, saying it would affect national security, education, taxation, elections, all of that. Do you think that's true? I mean, are we UN. And he said governments were unprepared for this change. Do you? Do you think that's true? Do you think this is something governments need to really jump on and start really preparing for a pretty catastrophic level change.

So I don't know. Right? There's going to be a huge there's there's definitely going to be change. My very strong suspicion is that change is not going to look that much like we think it does. Right? So, um, there's the whole wave of, you know, of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars of investment that are sort of driving the frontier of these models of forward and trying to do that from using them and from, from like sort of watching how other businesses use the businesses, use them.

It strikes me that that may not actually be where the impact comes from, that the impact may be much more likely to be sort of low end services that aren't frontier models, but that provide things that people didn't have before. So if you can't afford a lawyer and Claude is a better option for you than doing things on your own, if you can afford a lawyer, then you definitely should be using. You definitely should be using a lawyer.

But for most Americans, having an AI is appealing to me and better than nothing is pretty powerful. That's something we really need to get a handle, get a handle on very quickly because you're going to start to see as for example, in elections, we're going to see that the ability to generate infinite amounts of semi plausible text freely is already changing internet discourse and sort of political discourse in ways that we're just just beginning to think about.

Is there anyone in Silicon Valley, any, um, corporate executive that you admire right now that you think is kind of standing up and doing what you believe is the right thing? Um, so I think, uh, even when I don't agree with him, I will say that I think Dario Almada is completely sincere in his belief that this is a huge problem, um, and that we need to get ahead of it and try to do it. There are lots of other people who seem to be primarily financially motivated, and they're talking their book.

I have never met him. I have never personally interacted with him. But every everything he does sort of tells a consistent story that he thinks this is one the most important thing happening in the world right now, which again, I'm not sure he's right about that, but I don't do