OPINION:
About 70% of those surveyed in a recent Heatmap poll would rather not have a data center built or operated near their neighborhood.
That tracks with findings from other surveys and is, to a certain extent, validated by the few dozen cancellations of announced or planned data centers, some of which are almost certainly related to local concerns.
Those who live in states with high electricity prices — and that means blue states — tend to blame those high prices on data centers rather than the real culprit: the choices their own governments have made regarding energy.
Consequently, we seem to be headed toward a world in which red states wind up hosting more data centers than blue states, despite the tax revenue from data centers that would ordinarily draw Democratic governors like flies to honey.
In the bubble that is Washington, lawmakers such as Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, have warned that the rise of artificial intelligence will lead to either the hegemony of the machines or the loss of millions of jobs.
Or worse, the rise of yet another group of rich people and the inevitable repression of the proletariat.
Mr. Sanders’ solution (not surprisingly for America’s favorite socialist) is to have the government own the companies involved in AI and distribute whatever profits such government-owned and -operated companies could manage.
This would require us to believe that a federal government that cannot win or even declare war, balance its own budget, slow the current of illegal drugs flowing into our nation, address its own systemic financial problems associated with Social Security and Medicare, or stop the fraud that plagues its many giveaway programs is somehow capable enough to run complex, globally important corporations.
Yet Mr. Sanders might be right. Who can really say?
I have consistently expressed concern with the inability or unwillingness of the data center folks to defend themselves in the public arena. I get it; their plan is to play the inside game and hope to build enough data centers in enough places so that citizens become inured to their presence and governments become dependent on the taxes that flow from the centers.
That is certainly one way to approach the challenge, but what if they are wrong?
The main (and perhaps only) question worth asking and answering in this national conversation is this: If the U.S. is not going to pursue data centers, if we are going to make a national decision that we do not care about who wins the AI contest, what will the consequences be?
We have spent a lot of time talking about how expensive data centers are and how AI is either going to take over the nation or be a set of marginally valuable tools (or something in between).
We have spent no time examining what will or might happen if we do not pursue it; if we allow someone else to take the lead; if we cripple our creative class through enough regulation that they go elsewhere or decide they would rather go into finance or whatever.
That is, of course, the most relevant question.
Are we comfortable allowing the communist regime in Beijing — which bears us and the remainder of the world no good intention — to take the lead and develop whatever we think AI and its close cousin robotics might wind up being?
Are we comfortable ceding the economic and technological high ground to a regime that presidents of both political parties have identified as promoting slavery and conducting genocide?
Are we so concerned about the creation of another cadre of rich people — many of whom will no doubt become parasites on the larger society — that we are willing to allow the collectivist regime in China, a regime that kills its own citizens and holds in bondage prisoners of conscience, to dominate AI?
Our friends on the left often encourage us to consider our brothers in other parts of the world. Even at this late date, which do you think those in other countries would prefer: a world in which Chinese communists rule with the help of artificial intelligence or a world in which the United States holds the commanding technological heights?
The choice we face in the United States is binary and remorseless. Either we dominate artificial intelligence and whatever flows from it, or communist China will. There is no third choice.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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