Kevin O’Leary makes a great villain.
The celebrity investor spent decades honing his image as the least likable rich guy on “Shark Tank,” reveling in what he calls brutal honesty. Last year riffed on that persona in “Marty Supreme,” highlighted by a scene where he spanks Timothée Chalamet with a ping pong paddle.
So it’s not surprising that he’s just emerged as the hateable face of the AI Data Center Backlash, as he promotes a massive development in Utah.
Stories about opposition to the O’Leary-backed, 40,000-acre Stratos Project have hit national outlets and social media in the last month. Tucker Carlson, who knows a hot button when he sees one, had O’Leary on his show last week, setting him up as a real-life Mr. Monopoly out to exploit Utah taxpayers.
Now O’Leary is arguing that people who don’t like his project are professional protesters, funded via shadowy boogeymen.
But the details about O’Leary’s project and the people who hate it are beside the point: Opposition to data centers is a widespread, bipartisan phenomenon throughout the US, as recent Gallup polling shows.
The technocratic backlash to the backlash is to tell people who don’t like data centers that they’re wrong, and that data centers don’t really hog precious water or energy. (Business Insider published a prize-winning series about these claims and counter-claims last year.)
But this one feels like it’s broken containment. Data centers are convenient repositories for everyone’s fears and anxieties about AI — not just what it may or may not do to our environment, but to what it will do to everything, starting with our economic future.
Again: That anxiety is totally reasonable. Because everyone — starting with the people running the biggest AI companies — predicts that AI will unleash massive changes in the workforce.
We’re also told that all of this is inevitable, and that we don’t really have a say in it — you can’t hold back technology! — and that all we can do is hope to adapt. So pushing back against a data center project in your town seems like a pretty reasonable kind of protest vote. Maybe I can’t keep AI from upending my life, but at least I can keep it out of my backyard.
So what if you’re a well-meaning AI booster who thinks the backlash is truly misguided, and that fighting against data centers is as dumb as fighting against highways?
Analyst Ben Thompson has a suggestion: Pay off the backlash by cutting checks to people in data center towns.
If data centers are a resource for our AI future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data center up the road weren’t sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits that my local government may or may not spend appropriately, but rather were to result in a check in the mailbox every year, I suspect you could get a lot more people on board!
The sober answer to this, of course, is that AI data centers are already supposed to be paying the people in the towns they’re in. They bring jobs in the short term, and are meant to spur all kinds of economic activity in the long term.
But it’s one thing to tell someone the ominous-looking building down the street is going to make some electricians a bunch of money. It’s another to hand everyone a check. And if it’s the Kevin O’Learys and other technocrats writing the check — taking cash from their pockets and putting it in yours — maybe it makes the worrisome future of AI easier to handle, in the present tense.
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