Why Democrats Suddenly Fear And Loathe AI
Data center opposition and doomsday prophecies are not 'progressive' values
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants a moratorium on data center construction. “We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity”, Sanders argued on social media. Instead, we should let Sanders, 84, reshape our economy, democracy and the future of humanity, presumably.
Sanders complains about land, water, and electricity demands that data centers create. He worries about the “catastrophic impact on the lives of working-class Americans, eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs in every sector of our economy.” Worst of all, AI “could soon become smarter than humans and escape human control — with potentially cataclysmic outcomes.”
It is all reflexive neo-Marxism, and the CCP wants us to heed his words. But no conspiracy theory is necessary to understand this. Bernie Sanders does not understand how to use AI, much less how to regulate or control it. It is a scary, newfangled invention by wizards, both capital-intensive and imbued with powers that he considers indistinguishable from magic. Moreover, Sen. Sanders sees AI as a threat to the progressive socialist project of humans managing every American’s entire life for them, cradle to assisted-suicide grave like a good Canadian.
The same thing happened with GMOs, genetically modified foods. Only a decade ago, the alarmists were organizing to stop them with all the earnest alarums of a climate movement. ‘Frankenfoods’ were sure to poison all of us and destroy the environment. In reality, every last item in your local grocery store was already ‘genetically modified’ long ago because all food is genetically manipulated. Laboratory methods are simply faster.
Fears that humans with bodies full of DNA would somehow prove allergic to DNA proved to be as utterly retarded as that statement sounds. Yet to this day, Golden Rice, a GMO food with higher nutrients than regular rice, still struggles to find market acceptance even in countries with widespread malnutrition because of the smear campaign against it. Depending on what you count as a GMO food product or the downstream economic impact, they currently account for over $230 billion in economic activity. AI will ultimately dwarf this economic impact.
Ultimately. Because AI is still not …quite… ready to take over everything, and much of the impact will come in the form of efficiencies that Democratic Party constituencies do not want. Artificial intelligence vastly increases productivity, reducing the need for certain types of work while empowering workers who know how to use AI to do their jobs better. Medical diagnostic outcomes are measurably improved by AI use, for example. Waste is also reduced, and herein lies the problem. Nurses and doctors are a key Democratic constituency.
So are teachers, another profession facing huge exposure to AI on top of a declining birthrate. Teachers are a small source of funding for the Democratic Party overall, but they are one of the top union sources, giving Democrats about 98 percent of their contributions. Almost one in four legal jobs could be replaced by AI, and lawyers are another prominent Democratic constituency. Finance, accounting, securities and investment jobs are yet another example. All the unionized executive assistants, administrators, and clerks will soon experience drastic reductions in force, too. Journalism, especially print media, will never hire all the passionate young J-school grads being produced by colleges that will also cut their unionized administration now. Animation, film, and television jobs are also highly-endangered Democratic constituencies.
Moreover, these professions are associated with DEI and the epoch of anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-meritocratic hiring practices, the era of identity checkbox scripts in Hollywood, and racialized politics injected into absolutely every last domain of American existence. It was all to lift up the Intersectional categories and put them in charge of all these professions that are now in the crosshairs of AI. (Ironically, human resources is likely to suffer comparatively little to AI.)
Now, I am not dismissing the employment concerns of random readers. Rather, this is simple acknowledgement that AI is the new ‘learning to code’. People who lose their jobs will learn AI to find new jobs. AI will even make finding a new job more efficient. The effects of AI will take time to appear in the economy, which will adjust to the changes. This is terrifying to people like Bernie Sanders who regard themselves as the defenders of the ‘working class’ as they understand it, which is to say they miss the workers of the real economy who voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
Their solutions, as always, are robbery and threats. “Once we take power, whoever the president is, we’re going to break up your companies,” Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona actually said to Semafor. “So all the investment you did to create these mergers are going to be for naught. Your investors are going to be pissed at you, and you’re likely going to end up getting fired as the CEO because you wasted so much money and corrupted yourself in the process.” Gee, why are Democrats experiencing a funding disadvantage, right now?
Sanders has a plan, of course. He can fix everything. First he will stop AI, and then he will confiscate $4.4 trillion from 1,000 American billionaires, just like California Democrats taxed California billionaires, except this time, the billionaires will not just leave America the way they have left California, because reasons. Rep. Rho Khanna of California put the stamp of Golden State approval on Sanders’s proposed legislation, calling it the “defining vision for our age”. Which is true, if you envision an age of capital flight from the United States.
As to who will create the new jobs, well, that is to be left up to government, obviously. We cannot have billionaires investing in the real economy to create new jobs, willy-nilly, and we certainly can’t have AI powering new jobs with data centers. That would be oligarchy, and we cannot have oligarchy.
Instead, Sanders would reverse the Medicare cuts (and ignore the Medicare fraud) to create new jobs (in Medicare fraud). He would give every family he considers middle class or poor one $3,000 check and expect no inflationary effects. It will work, he says, because he loves America more than the billionaires do. That’s why he wants us poor, miserable, and losing the AI race to China, you see.
The new trend of Democrats opposing data centers is typical of how they behave when powerful technologies come along that they cannot control. The moaning about oligarchs is jealousy over their unique ability to undertake huge venture capital projects without the permission of all the socialist hall monitors. Environmental regulation is one more way that those hall monitors deter investment.
Nuclear power is a similar story. In fact, now that AI demands huge amounts of power, new reactors are being designed for the first time in decades, and once again professional NIMBYs will seek to exert veto power. And anyway, the future of the data center is probably in orbit, where you might catch a glimpse of it while lying on the grass in your backyard at night. Noise complaints will be a thing of the past and no one will worry about water or power consumption. Of course, that means Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will own the data centers. Call it ‘bro space oligarchy’ as opposed to gay space communism.
It is significant, and telling, that reporting on the schism between Anthropic and the Department of War almost always leaves out, or at best minimizes, the substantiated charge that the company is the Biden AI team. Tarun Chhabra, former Biden National Security Council official, is head of the company’s national security policy. Elizabeth Kelly, former head of the U.S. AI Safety Institute under Biden is in charge of “beneficial deployments”, which is the company euphemism for social engineering. Anthropic’s National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council includes former Biden-era officials Christopher Fonzone, former General Counsel of the office of the Director of National Intelligence as well as an Assistant AG at DoJ and Jill Hruby, former Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security.
On the board of Anthropic, we find Netflix co-founder and prominent Democratic donor Reed Hastings. Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, endorses Democrats and donates to their campaigns. He was Biden’s AI “safety” guy who worked to get all the AI players to voluntarily commit to “responsible” AI development, focusing on “security”, “safety”, “trust”, “guardrails”, and a regulation-centered approach — in other words, Anthropic was created by, and is still run by, the people who want to be our AI priesthood and rule over us with their data centers. They would be the oligarchs, in other words, but they would run the world with the ‘correct’ political program, and that would make it okay.
Their idea of “safety” has nothing to do with keeping you safe from AI, in other words. Nor will they save your job from AI. After all, once you become unemployed, you become a potential new dependent on the system — a constituent. “AI safety” means AI controlled by Democrats. It means woke AI. In case you have forgotten what that looks like, here is a reminder:
All of this is predicate to understanding just what those same people mean when they disingenuously screech about “autonomous weapons” and “mass surveillance”. These words do not mean the same thing to Anthropic as they might to the subjects of their propaganda, namely you. Anthropic is chiefly concerned with restraining the autonomy of the Pentagon. Claude, their AI, conducts “mass surveillance” through the same data brokers that advertisers use to serve you results on a social media app. These are scare-words from people who are scared of losing an ideological war for control of AI.
“In a previously unreported exchange in early December, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael was outraged by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s answer to a hypothetical question”, Reed Albergotti reports at Semafor. “If the US were under attack — with hypersonic missiles hurtling toward US soil — and Anthropic’s AI models could thwart the missiles, would the company refuse to help its country due to Anthropic’s prohibition on using its tech in conjunction with autonomous weapons?”
According to people familiar with the administration, Amodei responded that the Pentagon should, in the midst of the attack, reach out and check with Anthropic. But sources familiar with Anthropic’s view say the AI company offered to make a missile defense carveout for otherwise prohibited weapons.
And there you have it: Anthropic wants to carve out exceptions to their rule, on a use case-by-use case basis, and they think some softer version of this will sound better to anyone who has a clue about warfare at hypervelocity. ‘Oh, well of course in that instance, we would allow it’ is not enough when war comes at you fast. The Pentagon reportedly used Claude to do some mission planning for Operation Epic Fury without asking permission, and they should not have to.
We might pose another hypothetical besides. If the CCP has agents all over the United States with citizenship, and the Pentagon needs to locate and nullify potential threats amid a sudden war in the Taiwan Strait — something like Operation Spiderweb, perhaps, using drones that launch from a shipping container — who would you rather entrust with an AI to find the Chinese agents: the people who took out Maduro, or Anthropic?
Democrats will not save us from AI, and we don’t need saving from AI. Democrats fear AI because they fear the changes it brings will be bad for them. They may be right about that. They are losing their chance to control it, and this must be terrifying, to them.