I have a new essay in the @nytimes this week. The topic: Why Americans Hate Data Centers. And more important: the only thing those building the data centers can do about it. 🧵

This is very good analysis. 100% endorse. “ The bottom line is things are moving fast, and I’d bet neither Washington nor Beijing yet know quite what to think about dialogue, what it can produce, and what it cannot.”

Listen if your model of what has happened is that the EAs have launched a coup I think you have very bad judgement. Here is what actually happened: a very large number of people have slowly grown aware of the potential AI has to radically transform human society. Most people who contemplate this are uncomfortable with this—because they do not like change, because they do not like ceding agency and control to something they do not understand, because they distrust Silicon Valley, because they fear the apocalypse, because they fear the dystopian-lite future many AI futurists advocate as a the “good” outcome. Take your pick, it could be any of those. The point though is that the majority of people who become aware of the technology’s trajectory are not comfortable with it. For a long time this did not seem to matter because people kept these feelings to themselves. They weren’t confident they understood the issue; the entire problem seemed far-out there and sci-fi; they didn’t want to look bad; and if they were politicians, they did not want to needlessly upset an engine of the National economy. Nevertheless the unease has been growing for months and months and months now and if you did not realize this you were living in a bubble. Well now your bubble has popped. An event occurred that made it suddenly OK for folks to express the anxieties that had slowly been building up this year, and the expression came in one big flood. It is a classic “preference cascade.” The people who are trying to gin this up to some master plan of a group of activists have their head stuck in the ground—it reminds me of the liberals who refused to see Trump’s genuine grassroots popularity until they were whacked in the head by it.

The reason that is rarely articulated, for obvious reasons, but which is nonetheless true: for many this fills a void of meaning. They get be one of the decisive few at the decisive moment in the history of life. Very similar to the emotions that motivated many revolutionaries of days past. All of the sudden the small things one does—the books one reads, one’s office set up, one’s bedtime routine—take on an awful cosmic significance. The whole history of carbon life is culminating with *me* — and what I do, and the few elect here with me, matters, and matters immensely. We are the agents of history, the only people in the world doing something that truly, deeply matters. And if we all die? Well we were all going to die anyway. But this is the one way we might *not* all die. And I get to be a part of it.