In The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells looks at the nationwide backlash to AI in I Expected Tech Fatalism. Americans Are Putting Up a Remarkable Fight Instead – see link here (Aug. 31, 2026). A few excerpts below:
“Three in four Americans said they’d oppose the construction of a data center in their communities, according to a recent poll from Heatmap Pro and Embold Research.”
“Opposition this year was higher than 70 percent in every region in the country; more than half of Americans supported a national moratorium.”
“According to The Information, 500 jurisdictions have passed bans or moratoriums, including 150 local bans passed in July alone.”
“You can see in the survey data a mutually reinforcing list of complaints that are anchored in environmental concerns about energy and water use and spread to worries about pollution and noise and scale and effects on local electricity prices and from there to broad distaste for or distrust of A.I.”
“If you call it a turn against Silicon Valley or delayed payback for a decade or two of its broken promises, you have to account for the fact that Americans not only obsessively use tech products but also tend to view many of the big tech companies favorably. “
“On the ground, the fight over data centers looks like a conflict over the nature of progress, the shape of the future and who gets to determine the terms by which citizens submit to the visions of technologists and their financiers. To many who believe in the promise of A.I., it looks like a degrowth cul-de-sac — and a test case for whether dreams of frictionless technological progress can survive democratic blowback.”
“But one of these groups is simply much larger than the other. Only nine percent of Americans surveyed by Pew Research in June said they were more excited than concerned about A.I., perhaps because opponents had heard more about the risks it poses than the concrete gains it might deliver. “
“Yet one way of reading the backlash is as a many-headed protest against inevitability — about not just the technology itself but also the whole package of breakneck build-out, social disruption and insane wealth creation it has come wrapped in. Is this really the only future on offer?”
“Data centers are a physical manifestation of so many things that people are upset about in our day-to-day lives,” Levin continued. “It’s not a fight about technology,” he said. “This is a fight about control. This is about who controls the future.”
[My blog contains links to relevant readings in the style of an annotated bibliography where I write a short note and link out to interesting articles. I generally refrain from providing my opinion as these are very complex topics that require depth in discussion. I do build up the pieces towards sharing my own reflections.]