Today’s rapidly evolving technologies hold immense potential to advance once-unimaginable breakthroughs in human progress. From medicine to robotics to space, artificial intelligence (AI) and the compute that powers it provide an exceptional opportunity to reshape our lives for the better. These engineering feats are no accident. They are being powered by free markets, private-sector innovation, competition, and the risk-taking all three encourage.
Despite this, tech doomerism is seemingly everywhere right now. This publication is your place to follow and learn more about the possibilities of these emerging technology frontiers.
Just as fear swirled around the once-emerging technologies of flight, textile automation, and electric lighting, growing alarmism is currently capturing the American psyche around AI and its surrounding infrastructure.
In many ways, this anxiety is understandable. Some of the biggest names in AI have loudly floated apocalyptic scenarios resulting from the technologies they are developing—like vast job losses, unchecked cyberattacks, and even the end of the world. These predictions unsurprisingly catch like wildfire in the media. After all, negativity sells. None of this is novel, but that doesn’t make it any more true. Many of these claims have been substantially softened, particularly relating to job losses, with several of the big AI labs publicly walking back past catastrophic predictions. And while motivations behind all of this may vary, so far, much of the evidence also cuts against the alarmism.
When the news Americans consume is saturated with sensationalized, often misguided coverage of new technologies not yet fully understood, telling them these tools will eliminate the jobs enabling them to put food on the table tonight, it is no surprise to see many turning against those technologies. This is nothing to discount and must be meaningfully addressed, not mocked.
The disinformation problem must also be confronted, and nothing demonstrates this more than today’s conversation around data centers. This publication will cover them under a section called Supercomputers (thank you for proposing this rename, Neil Chilson), a name that accurately captures the hardware carrying out quadrillions of operations to train and run the most advanced AI models ever built. Recent polling found 71 percent of Americans oppose local construction of data centers for AI. Importantly, this opposition is largely being fueled not by general opposition to AI or anti-tech sentiment, but by local environmental and quality-of-life concerns, many of which are exaggerated, unfounded, or controllable.
Politicians are taking note of this rising unpopularity. Populist, anti-market policy is on the rise in response, with proposals targeting data centers ranging from tying up companies in uncertain permitting limbo to outright moratoriums gaining steam. Some of these politicians were enthusiastic about encouraging more of this investment in their states less than a year ago.
This suggests that despite many of these politicians understanding the economic benefits these data center projects offer to communities and the general importance of American AI innovation, they are caving to what polling has picked up as a snapshot of passion, frozen in time. Rather than reasoning with voters and combating disinformation with the truth, better ideas, and results, they are contributing to a growing sentiment and advancing policies that risk causing lasting damage to America’s ability to remain technologically dominant and competitive.
While no one should be naive enough to presume none of this disinformation has spread organically, there is growing evidence that America’s adversaries are actively working to drum it up. The X Safety Team recently identified a suspected Chinese bot farm of 200,000 accounts, 200 of which were “posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy. These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense.”
This is just one reported example of suspected foreign efforts to sow discord among Americans over AI and the infrastructure behind it. It is unlikely to be the last, and should come as no surprise. American AI innovation is not only essential to national security in the most obvious sense—as part of a general defense strategy in a global, ever-evolving technological landscape—but also as a modern economic engine. Advanced AI is poised to offer one of the most significant wealth creation opportunities in history, and if America hamstrings itself on this front, our adversaries will continue marching forward anyway.
The national security risks posed by falling behind in the global AI competition make proposals like data center moratoriums, a legislative ban on supposed “superintelligence,” and the growing chorus of calls for a pause on American advanced AI development all the more dangerous. Even if proponents of these radical policies were to succeed in their efforts to cripple America’s private sector AI industry, our adversaries would not follow our lead. China, for example, fully grasps the weight of this moment and is steaming forward to expand its own AI capabilities. Whoever leads in AI will wield a commanding advantage in everything from economic growth to military power. Do we want to live in a world where China sets the terms? Or will America meet the moment?
The purpose of this publication is not to suggest that AI comes with no risks. It is to assert that the risk of suppressing AI development is far higher than the risk of forging ahead. It also aims to build a well-rounded, evidence-based understanding of the profound good these technologies have the potential to unlock and the consequences of allowing fear to drive us. Yes, the transition will bring real disruption, just as in other times of historic technological progress. That disruption deserves serious attention, including job training to help workers in impacted industries adapt.
Nevertheless, periods of transformative progress—driven by markets and a robust private sector—have left humanity overwhelmingly better off. They’ve turned luxuries, from air travel to automobiles to antibiotics, into normal parts of everyday life. They’ve created not only more jobs in place of those made obsolete, but jobs enabling a far better quality of life. Just as we don’t look back and wish the gaslight companies had successfully defeated the adoption of electric lighting, as they fought hard to do, history is unlikely to look fondly on those who try to strangle the innovation behind the light bulbs and telephones of today. And there is no shortage of equivalent examples.
AI is already supercharging the fight against cancer, democratizing knowledge and expertise, and yes, creating new jobs while transforming others—and not just in Silicon Valley. It is spurring rapid advancements in robotics designed to help people with mobility issues, how we fight wildfires, and commercial autonomous driving proven to result in far fewer crashes.
The question before us is not whether or not this frontier technology will continue evolving, but whether or not those who believe in the Western project will be the ones driving that evolution. For many, the scale of this transformation is frightening, and understandably so. The consequences are immense. But fear will not prepare us for this moment. Leading can. And this moment is only the tip of the iceberg. The AI revolution is here, it’s happening, and it has the power to do tremendous good for humanity—perhaps far more than the Industrial Revolution.
Much like the hysteria of the 1970s that helped smother the nuclear energy buildout, a buildout that might have left us with both a far cleaner and more independent energy grid, today’s alarmism threatens to constrain technological progress on an even greater scale. The speed and scope of today’s innovation boom—driven primarily by the private sector—much more closely resemble a transition into a new technological era than a bubble waiting to burst. AI provides us an extraordinary opportunity to push the boundaries of human prosperity, but only if we allow it to. More institutions are necessary to fill the gap in covering this revolution. I’m founding The Compute Optimist to begin filling that gap.
Ed Tarnowski is the Founder and Editor of The Compute Optimist. He is also a Resident Fellow, Technology and Innovation at the R Street Institute, a Senior Contributor at Young Voices, and the Washington, DC Regional Director for America’s Future. All opinions expressed are his own.