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Sanders stakes a data center construction pause on the future of humanity
Wired reports a split on the American left over whether frontier-lab extinction talk distracts from harms already happening. The one bill in that account pairs an existential justification with a permitting instrument.
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What happened
- A September 10 Instagram post by the NYC DSA argued that AI alarmism and AI hype are the same story, both keeping attention on a science-fiction future to distract from present harms.
- The post, from the tech working group of the country's largest DSA chapter, drew more than 25,000 likes.
- A day earlier, six Working Families Party candidates, four of them backed by Sanders, released statements calling on Washington to regulate AI to prevent existential threats to humanity.
- Sanders's data center moratorium bill, released in March, tied a pause on construction to the need for federal regulation to protect the future of humanity.
- Timnit Gebru has accused Sanders and others on the left of taking their cues from what she called literal doomsday eugenicist cults.
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Why it matters
- constraint A construction pause is answered by the people who seek approval to build and buy power, so an AI policy function staffed only for model evaluation has no document to produce against it.
- decision Anyone drafting a company position now has to pick which premise to answer, because one camp treats lab capability claims as accurate reporting and the other treats repeating them as doing the labs a favour.
- exposure Data center projects are the target both wings can agree on. Sanders's AI positioning puts him alongside Steve Bannon.
A commenter under the DSA post wrote "Horrible and dangerous take," then "Sometimes sounding the alarm is justified" [5]. The slide and the reply disagree about one question: whether to repeat what the frontier labs say about their own products.
Wired reports that some on the left see no value in elevating theoretical concerns above harms already happening, and believe that repeating the labs' danger claims empowers the companies [19]. Alan Deng, a member of the Tech Action working group, told the magazine that "AI has become the latest tool of capitalist exploitation. The damage that unregulated and misused AI is already causing is clear across the country" [8]. He added, "As socialists, we don't trust these corporations to craft their own regulations" [9]. Alexander McCoy, a Democratic strategist working on AI issues, drew the opposite conclusion from the same claims, telling Wired that "The same people concerned about frontier governance and the development of superintelligence are also addressing those current harms" [10].
For anyone who has to file something, the operative part of the record is the bill. Sanders, 85, has asserted that AI has the potential to eliminate humanity [11], and Wired reports he was early to opposing data centers, which it calls a massive organizing pole for the left this year [13]. His moratorium works on construction. Wired's account does not describe an enacted rule. A pause on building falls to whoever files for the site and the power [21].
The dates sit close together. Jacob Coxon, who had recently quit Anthropic, warned that the industry could bring about the end of humanity on September 8, two days before the carousel went up [6][7]. According to the magazine, Rumman Chowdhury, who founded the nonprofit Humane Intelligence and previously led Twitter's machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team, understands the concerns the working group expressed [18]. One NYC DSA member with a tech background told Wired, "Some of us are looking at Bernie and saying, what happened?" [17]
Two things vary here, and they vary separately. One is the justification: present harm or future catastrophe. The other is the obligation: which document it forces, and which team inside a company writes that document. Only one combination shows up in this record, and it is the one people mis-staff, because an existential justification produced a construction instrument [12][21]. A present-harm justification can just as easily produce an instrument aimed at model development.
What to watch
- Whether the existential framing in the Working Families Party candidate statements turns into bill text that names an obligation on model developers.
- Whether Sanders's data center moratorium bill picks up co-sponsors from the right-wing populist side of his new alliances.
- Whether the NYC DSA Tech Action Working Group follows its post with a policy ask that names a specific instrument.