I find that anyone outside of tech who I explain the general premise of “The Adolescence of Technology” or the general aspirations of the AI labs are pretty aghast and sickened. The idea that there is an attempt to hurdle towards a world where all labor is commodified by a small group of people who stand to reap massive financial benefits from this change, without the consent or input of the general population is obscene on its own terms.
The solutions to these problems proposed by labs seem similarly distasteful. People don’t want to be dominated. A world where one must perpetually rely on the benevolence of tech CEOs through UBI or self imposed safety measures seems like serfdom.
I think that a much bigger obstacle to the acceptance of these technologies will not be environmental and child safety lobbying, but the fact that the on video or in text, stated aspirations of people who run these companies like Dario et al. seem disquieting and hostile to the average American.
I've been thinking about this comment a lot! I think you're right, essentially, that the aversion is on a values level & not just about whether they get value from ChatGPT. this makes me sad as someone who feels sort of caught in the middle, but thanks for sharing.
in my young, lefty social circle, i'm worried the pressure to boycott AI is creating a class of well-meaning people who know nothing about the technology that is about to transform their lives
Does knowing about AI help? Does it help to know what kind of transformer architecture has just left you economically unviable? It is the case that even a cursory understanding of the situation is sufficient to radicalise the public against AI. The transformation is not one they can wield given knowledge about the systems. We are not subjects in any meaningful sense of this technological transformations, but reluctant objects.
Great essay! I think the other factor driving data center opposition is electricity inflation. Electricity price inflation is nearly three times higher than the overall rate of inflation. Before there was an explosion in data centers construction, the effects of data centers were mainly felt by the communities directly around them. Now the effects of them are much more diffuse and opposition to them is going to beyond traditional NIMBYism. I think the cost element on top of worries about the social ramifications of AI is having a lot of people to wonder if it’s all really worth it.
Agreed! I don't think you can report on opinions on data centers without bringing this up. VA's electric company has raised rates. Bipartisan resident anger is real.
I think there's also an element of Loudon being the richest? second richest? county in the country and *still getting screwed* with hideous power lines/data centers/ugliness/decreased property values.
DC's tech companies are more in the suburbs (Reston, etc) than the city, and a lot of us do work in tech/tech-adjacent fields, but the constant exposure to politicians does not exactly decrease cynicism about this year's new savior. ;)
Yuuup. Energy bills have gone up 20% where I live. We all know it is because of AI data centers being built on our grid that provide no jobs, no value, nothing but huge ugly humming boxes that suction up potable water even when our summers are so dry the corn dies and jack up our utility bills. It's obviously losing bargain when the trade is for what most people use as a glorified gimmick on their phones. The only major differences in normal people's lives that we're liable to see on the ground any time soon is that it's going to cause folks to lose their jobs (as companies decide that workers can be replaced by it and jobs consolidated, even if the tech isn't there yet), and it's going to make democracy more fragile. Sucks!
That SF is no longer considered cool and erotic (as it was until the 21st century) is a failure of tech culture to embrace the voices of humans and its own diverse population over digital feedback and immense wealth. DC has never been cool or erotic, so you're correct there. And yes, please travel more. Listening to more people outside of the teeny-tiny Substack backrub discourse will give your work more empathy and relevance.
This piece captures the AI populist moment brilliantly, but it also illustrates exactly why I’m so concerned: The AI populist coalition in DC is fighting the last war. The debate is over how the government can regulate AI, while completely missing the existential threat over the government’s legitimacy that AI will pose.
Think about what happens when AI gets broadly adopted in the legal profession, but judges still move at human pace. Patents, permits, proceedings—every government function is on a fast track to becoming a 100x bottleneck to progress, while many agencies struggle to provide even basic services (consider the DC ice-crete that until very recently blocked many crosswalks, while sewage spews into the Potomac).
We accept that government moves slower than the private sector, but there’s an implicit bargain: the slowness buys us fairness, safety, due process. But if AI moves fast enough that government becomes structurally inadequate AND fails to protect people from AI harms like mass unemployment or security threats, then both sides of that bargain collapse. We will see rapid delegitimization of democratic institutions without any coherent alternative, amidst a surge of populist rage.
What terrifies me is that no one in DC seems to grasp this or even think it’s worth planning for. I live just outside DC in NoVA and stopped going to AI
meetups because it felt like the Twilight Zone—people here either don’t understand the pace of change or are deliberately refusing to reckon with it. I am seriously considering relocating to SF not only for career reasons (I work in tech) but just to not have to be around people who are standing on the precipice of AI-accelerated institutional collapse and still wasting time grumbling about how data centers are ugly and worrying about how AI will improve political deepfakes.
The implicit bargain framing is exactly right — and it's worse than a bottleneck. When AI-augmented firms can generate regulatory filings faster than agencies can read them, the asymmetry doesn't just slow things down, it inverts the power relationship. The regulator becomes the regulated. DC is debating guardrails while the road itself is moving.
Your work is always fantastic, Jasmine -- it's like parachuting into a completely different world, that simultaneously fascinates (and horrifies!) me. But always worth reading.
This is going to sound like a super-dumb question, but why not build these data centers in a place like the Nevada desert, and just connect them to really long transmission lines? Is there a reason they need to be built so close to big population centers?
I think in some ways NoVa is an aberration. a lot of the early internet data center infra was there, and accelerated by the Pentagon/federal gov/defense industry’s need for good internet in the 90s/00s. then there were compounding benefits to addding more density
I think that besides NoVa, most datacenters are more rural areas. but that has its own complications with longer transmission lines requiring permission from more localities, and more heating/cooling/water issues too. it’s also worth noting that local govs with data centers get a TON of tax revenue from them, so maybe some people think it’s worth the trade & others don’t
it’s all stuff I should research more though! and thanks for the kind words.
This was well written and full of excellent takes. Thank you for putting this together and sharing it with us.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic after seeing the Super Bowl ads and then trying to understand the disconnect between the AI-bubble that thought they were funny and the general public that rated them in the bottom 3%.
I wonder if part of this has to do with these tools being entertaining novelties for the vast majority of people. The tools often speak like techbros without custom instructions and likely just serve a utilitarian purpose for the typical person. So they don’t understand why it’s ratting the world.
I also think that it’s under appreciated how much investment in AI / data centres has sucked the life out of other activities. I imagine many people have been told “no you aren’t getting that new “thing” because we need to invest in AI”. Or “that project is cancelled for an AI project instead”.
All that together with everything you have highlighted and likely many other things makes the typical person negative towards what AI is doing.
Simply put - software engineering and tech is actually a tiny fraction of the real-world economy (in terms of people and activities) yet AI was built by tech people and for the needs of tech people.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the rest of the economy is pissed.
Please keep writing these kinds of articles. Really love your reflective honest style.
thanks! I agree w a lot of what you said — people are just not getting the value in the way that techies are, and I have heard a lot of that “my org is only prioritizing AI related projs” from people in other industries
Jasmine - this was excellent. I live in the D.C. area and riding my motorcycle west past Dulles and into Loudon county with farmland and stables interspersed with huge data centres is quite the experience. The landscape is changing so quickly and, while I am AI-pilled myself, I sympathise with those who have seen their neighbourhoods blighted with huge datacentres.
You should consider doing a piece on what AI is doing to the IT services / consulting industry. It is an industry that has "dinosaurs before the meteorite" vibes to it. I spent a few weeks in India and there is both a sense of impending doom and unbridled excitement there..
ahh I bet! have thought visiting India or the Philippines or something; have heard from tech executives that offshored labor is first to get cut with AI
Loved this, completely on point observations. We used to have such an amazing indie/hacker startup scene in DC back in 2011 that petered away over the years, I wish you could have seen it.
I find that anyone outside of tech who I explain the general premise of “The Adolescence of Technology” or the general aspirations of the AI labs are pretty aghast and sickened. The idea that there is an attempt to hurdle towards a world where all labor is commodified by a small group of people who stand to reap massive financial benefits from this change, without the consent or input of the general population is obscene on its own terms.
The solutions to these problems proposed by labs seem similarly distasteful. People don’t want to be dominated. A world where one must perpetually rely on the benevolence of tech CEOs through UBI or self imposed safety measures seems like serfdom.
I think that a much bigger obstacle to the acceptance of these technologies will not be environmental and child safety lobbying, but the fact that the on video or in text, stated aspirations of people who run these companies like Dario et al. seem disquieting and hostile to the average American.
I've been thinking about this comment a lot! I think you're right, essentially, that the aversion is on a values level & not just about whether they get value from ChatGPT. this makes me sad as someone who feels sort of caught in the middle, but thanks for sharing.
Perfectly said.
Travel more this was excellent
on it
in my young, lefty social circle, i'm worried the pressure to boycott AI is creating a class of well-meaning people who know nothing about the technology that is about to transform their lives
agree
Does knowing about AI help? Does it help to know what kind of transformer architecture has just left you economically unviable? It is the case that even a cursory understanding of the situation is sufficient to radicalise the public against AI. The transformation is not one they can wield given knowledge about the systems. We are not subjects in any meaningful sense of this technological transformations, but reluctant objects.
Great essay! I think the other factor driving data center opposition is electricity inflation. Electricity price inflation is nearly three times higher than the overall rate of inflation. Before there was an explosion in data centers construction, the effects of data centers were mainly felt by the communities directly around them. Now the effects of them are much more diffuse and opposition to them is going to beyond traditional NIMBYism. I think the cost element on top of worries about the social ramifications of AI is having a lot of people to wonder if it’s all really worth it.
Agreed! I don't think you can report on opinions on data centers without bringing this up. VA's electric company has raised rates. Bipartisan resident anger is real.
I think there's also an element of Loudon being the richest? second richest? county in the country and *still getting screwed* with hideous power lines/data centers/ugliness/decreased property values.
DC's tech companies are more in the suburbs (Reston, etc) than the city, and a lot of us do work in tech/tech-adjacent fields, but the constant exposure to politicians does not exactly decrease cynicism about this year's new savior. ;)
Yuuup. Energy bills have gone up 20% where I live. We all know it is because of AI data centers being built on our grid that provide no jobs, no value, nothing but huge ugly humming boxes that suction up potable water even when our summers are so dry the corn dies and jack up our utility bills. It's obviously losing bargain when the trade is for what most people use as a glorified gimmick on their phones. The only major differences in normal people's lives that we're liable to see on the ground any time soon is that it's going to cause folks to lose their jobs (as companies decide that workers can be replaced by it and jobs consolidated, even if the tech isn't there yet), and it's going to make democracy more fragile. Sucks!
wow, where do you live?
Rural Pennsylvania!
thanks for the context, super helpful
That SF is no longer considered cool and erotic (as it was until the 21st century) is a failure of tech culture to embrace the voices of humans and its own diverse population over digital feedback and immense wealth. DC has never been cool or erotic, so you're correct there. And yes, please travel more. Listening to more people outside of the teeny-tiny Substack backrub discourse will give your work more empathy and relevance.
I predict you're writing on staff for The New Yorker within five years.
someone should tell them
This piece captures the AI populist moment brilliantly, but it also illustrates exactly why I’m so concerned: The AI populist coalition in DC is fighting the last war. The debate is over how the government can regulate AI, while completely missing the existential threat over the government’s legitimacy that AI will pose.
Think about what happens when AI gets broadly adopted in the legal profession, but judges still move at human pace. Patents, permits, proceedings—every government function is on a fast track to becoming a 100x bottleneck to progress, while many agencies struggle to provide even basic services (consider the DC ice-crete that until very recently blocked many crosswalks, while sewage spews into the Potomac).
We accept that government moves slower than the private sector, but there’s an implicit bargain: the slowness buys us fairness, safety, due process. But if AI moves fast enough that government becomes structurally inadequate AND fails to protect people from AI harms like mass unemployment or security threats, then both sides of that bargain collapse. We will see rapid delegitimization of democratic institutions without any coherent alternative, amidst a surge of populist rage.
What terrifies me is that no one in DC seems to grasp this or even think it’s worth planning for. I live just outside DC in NoVA and stopped going to AI
meetups because it felt like the Twilight Zone—people here either don’t understand the pace of change or are deliberately refusing to reckon with it. I am seriously considering relocating to SF not only for career reasons (I work in tech) but just to not have to be around people who are standing on the precipice of AI-accelerated institutional collapse and still wasting time grumbling about how data centers are ugly and worrying about how AI will improve political deepfakes.
I have similar concerns about institutional collapse!!
The implicit bargain framing is exactly right — and it's worse than a bottleneck. When AI-augmented firms can generate regulatory filings faster than agencies can read them, the asymmetry doesn't just slow things down, it inverts the power relationship. The regulator becomes the regulated. DC is debating guardrails while the road itself is moving.
DC looks great on you
Reads like a melody
<3
Are you planning on spending more time reporting outside of SF? Reading this made me think it would be good for the project if you did
yes 100%
Your work is always fantastic, Jasmine -- it's like parachuting into a completely different world, that simultaneously fascinates (and horrifies!) me. But always worth reading.
This is going to sound like a super-dumb question, but why not build these data centers in a place like the Nevada desert, and just connect them to really long transmission lines? Is there a reason they need to be built so close to big population centers?
I think in some ways NoVa is an aberration. a lot of the early internet data center infra was there, and accelerated by the Pentagon/federal gov/defense industry’s need for good internet in the 90s/00s. then there were compounding benefits to addding more density
I think that besides NoVa, most datacenters are more rural areas. but that has its own complications with longer transmission lines requiring permission from more localities, and more heating/cooling/water issues too. it’s also worth noting that local govs with data centers get a TON of tax revenue from them, so maybe some people think it’s worth the trade & others don’t
it’s all stuff I should research more though! and thanks for the kind words.
Power and data transmission infrastructure are already in place in Virginia because the 2000s buildup for telecom and internet occurred there.
Nevada has no water, so it can’t cool the systems.
This was well written and full of excellent takes. Thank you for putting this together and sharing it with us.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic after seeing the Super Bowl ads and then trying to understand the disconnect between the AI-bubble that thought they were funny and the general public that rated them in the bottom 3%.
I wonder if part of this has to do with these tools being entertaining novelties for the vast majority of people. The tools often speak like techbros without custom instructions and likely just serve a utilitarian purpose for the typical person. So they don’t understand why it’s ratting the world.
I also think that it’s under appreciated how much investment in AI / data centres has sucked the life out of other activities. I imagine many people have been told “no you aren’t getting that new “thing” because we need to invest in AI”. Or “that project is cancelled for an AI project instead”.
All that together with everything you have highlighted and likely many other things makes the typical person negative towards what AI is doing.
Simply put - software engineering and tech is actually a tiny fraction of the real-world economy (in terms of people and activities) yet AI was built by tech people and for the needs of tech people.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the rest of the economy is pissed.
Please keep writing these kinds of articles. Really love your reflective honest style.
thanks! I agree w a lot of what you said — people are just not getting the value in the way that techies are, and I have heard a lot of that “my org is only prioritizing AI related projs” from people in other industries
This was such a great piece!
Jasmine - this was excellent. I live in the D.C. area and riding my motorcycle west past Dulles and into Loudon county with farmland and stables interspersed with huge data centres is quite the experience. The landscape is changing so quickly and, while I am AI-pilled myself, I sympathise with those who have seen their neighbourhoods blighted with huge datacentres.
You should consider doing a piece on what AI is doing to the IT services / consulting industry. It is an industry that has "dinosaurs before the meteorite" vibes to it. I spent a few weeks in India and there is both a sense of impending doom and unbridled excitement there..
ahh I bet! have thought visiting India or the Philippines or something; have heard from tech executives that offshored labor is first to get cut with AI
Loved this, completely on point observations. We used to have such an amazing indie/hacker startup scene in DC back in 2011 that petered away over the years, I wish you could have seen it.
This was a great essay! Come back to DC soon