Should new AI data centers be paused?

All right, everybody, welcome back to your favorite podcast, the number one podcast, in fact, in the entire universe, the AllIn podcast with your besties, we're all here, it's the original quartet. Everybody loves when the core four are here, and we have a donkett for you today. Guys, we got to start out with Bernie Sanders. I know this is becoming a bit repetitive, but AI is the topic. We reached a new level of retardation this week that we cannot avoid. Bernie Sanders has a major de-cell pitch, a moratorium on new AI data centers. Here's his argument, number one, the billionaires are pushing AI because they want more money and power. Number two, it's going to be massive unemployment. And he cites Gates, Dario, Elon, saying that AI would replace most jobs. Number three, he has an interesting point, actually. AI is harmful to kids because it decreases social interaction. Actually, we kind of agree with that one, I think, across the board. But here's his pitch, Sacks. His pitch is, you want your kids using these chatbots.

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Why should they care about beating China? Because AI is a profound technology. It's going to have huge economic and national security implications. And the thing that Bernie gets wrong is that he can't stop the progress. I mean, he can't stop China from making progress. We can stop progress in the US, but it's not going to stop China from advancing these technologies. A lot of this is just math. And just because we stopped doesn't mean China is going to stop. So this would be the biggest own goal ever if we took our leadership in the AI race and just handed it to China. But look, I appreciate Bernie's honesty in a way, because he is actually telling the truth about what he wants. And I remember just a week ago when President Trump signed an executive order to advance a national AI framework, a lot of critics and a lot of Democrats were saying this was a violation of states' rights and we need to support the states in regulating AI. And here Bernie is acknowledging that this is not about states' rights, because he's saying that there needs to be a moratorium on new data centers, even if the states want them. So he doesn't support states' rights either. He just wants all the progress to stop. And I think this is really the truth of the matter, is that all this talk about states' rights or affordability, it's all a red herring. And what's really going on is there's a large and growing contingent of people who just want all the progress to stop. But again, we can't stop China from making progress. All they would be doing is seeding leadership of this AI race to China. What people like Bernie really want is they want the US to become like Europe. You know, Europe has half the share of global GDP that they had 30 years ago. And that's because of their hostility towards innovation and technological progress. And that's kind of where Bernie wants us to be is he wants us to go down the path of Europe. And the reason he says is because God forbid someone gets rich. Well, look, capitalism sometimes results in the unequal distribution of wealth, but socialism always results in the equal distribution of poverty and misery. And if the US stops developing AI, if we hand this leadership to other countries, it'll make the United States poor, it'll make the American people poor, and it will cede our leadership globally. We will not be the permanent power in the world anymore.

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Well, look, I mean, you're right that we have to flip the narrative around. And I do think that the tech companies have done a really bad job explaining the benefits. We talked about this with Tucker. I think he brought up some really good points. And you're right, like the the AI companies lean way too much into the whole job loss narrative as as a way to explain their value prop. And I think it's just either what Chamath has said, which is about their next fundraising round, or it's a form of laziness because it's easier to describe job loss or job replacement than it is productivity, right? Like multi-factor productivity is a difficult concept to explain. So I do think that they've played into this narrative. But I think that what we have to do here is just debunk these narratives. Again, no evidence of job loss yet, no evidence of the water problems. I think the electricity issues with data centers are addressable. You have to let the AI companies build their own power. They don't have to connect to the grid. In fact, that's what President Trump has called for for the last six months is to let the AI companies build their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid. That problem is easily addressed as well, talking about the affordability problem. But you're right, we have to get the message out how this technology will benefit Americans. The bottom line is, I've always said I'm a techno-realist, not a techno-accelerationist, because at the end of the day, we don't have a choice. China is going to develop the technology if we don't. We don't really have a choice.

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I think it's important to understand that politicians have an incredible sense of self-preservation. So the question is, why would Bernie Sanders think he would not look totally foolish in putting that video out? And the reason it went viral is not because it sounded so crazy. It was that to some faction and percentage of people, it sounded rational and reasonable. And the problem that highlights is that we have a huge perception issue in AI. We have a handful of companies. All the PR that you see from those handful of companies is a bunch of circular deal-making, a bunch of capital that flows from one to the other. It causes these stocks to go up of which a small percentage of people benefit. And at the tail end of it, it's accompanied by a completely different set of articles that everybody also reads about this sort of Damocles that's about to fall on their head, whether it's electricity prices or whether it's their jobs or whether it's the jobs of their children or the quality of their education. So we have a big perception problem. So the question at hand is how do we fix it? How do we get back to the place where a video talking about stopping all progress would seem as laughable as it should be? And I think you can go back to the Gilded Age and you can ask the question, how did the industrialist leaders of that era respond through that 1880 to 1920 age of industrialization? When you had all of this technological upheaval accompanied by a handful of people with incredible success, right? Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford. What did they do? And I think the lesson we can borrow from them is we now need to be on the forward foot as an industry. Enough of the stupid haircuts, dumb watches, ugly clothes, ostentatious displays of wealth. We've all done it. I've been guilty of it. It has to stop. Absolutely stop. And instead, we need to start to use a percentage of the balance sheets of these companies in order to benefit as many Americans as possible. That is the absolute minimum. Andrew Carnegie built 2,500 libraries. The idea was, as he built the railroads, you're going to scale GDP, you're going to scale education and knowledge. Those libraries are artifacts that allowed people to feel a dividend from that industrial revolution. John D. Rockefeller took all of his wealth and invested in institutions and universities. Henry Ford specifically focused on wages. We need to self-organize better, and we need to be more on the forward foot. We need to start doing things that are practically measurable by tens of millions of American citizens. And it starts to beat back the perception problem that we have. Because Sacks pointed out last week, the data does not support the misperception. But the problem is, and Sacks and I were talking about this last week, the misperception is gaining steam. And so I think we need to use these tools that we have to provide some more practical benefits that every man, woman, and child can feel. Otherwise, this thing is going to build, and you'll see crazier and crazier versions of this Bernie Sanders video.

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