🗺️ AI frontier models as America's new frontier

Who decides who gets to cross? The AI safety establishment is already printing the permission slips

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

Ask any normie American—one not terminally online (I’m assuming those descriptors have yet to become redundant)—why they dislike the new data center going up outside town, and their opposition will be prosaic rather than cinematic. Some combo of “it draws too much power, uses too much land, drinks too much water”—or even all of the above.

Yes, beneath those complaints might sit vague worries about vanishing jobs or smart machines slipping the leash. But they play a smaller role. Overall, these are the objections of people who have scanned some headlines or watched a TikTok video.

Something else is happening in the background that everyday folks are missing. For the professional activist class—Down Wing through and through—opposition isn’t really about how many bottles of water are or aren’t supposedly needed to process a single chatbot prompt. That class sees data centers as a convenient vector to attack the AI Revolution, which itself is merely a manifestation of the True Enemy: human freedom exercised in the pursuit of material progress through technological advance.

Some AI maximalists speculate that human- or superhuman-level AI would be “humanity’s final invention.” (The machines will take it from there.) Yet if this technology turns out to be anywhere near as powerful and transformative as they expect, we might also be seeing the final fight between Up Wing and Down Wing thinking.

What does seem pretty clear at this point is that the constellation of interests that (a) told us climate change was the ultimate challenge for humanity—and, to be clear, I do think carbon pollution is a real problem—and (b) told us that dealing with this climate threat required societal upheaval just to prevent our extinction is now (c) portraying the “final invention” as the actual Final Boss for our species.