Let Them Eat Code
The AI reckoning is coming. Be sure of it.
“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully. “Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.” “And he has Brain.” “Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.” There was a long silence. “I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
My last job in the public service was briefing the Prime Minister on U.S. politics. I was writing words for him to say to President Obama; guessing the cadence and tone that would land with Malcolm Turnbull.
Come the 2016 election, my bosses and I had spent a year canvassing politicians, officials, academics and journalists on the likely outcome. Of the dozens of smart, informed people we spoke to, both American and Australian, not one thought Donald Trump would beat Hillary Clinton. Some claimed otherwise afterwards. I remember the truth of it.
The “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape sealed it. No bible-thumper was voting for that. We wrote 70 pages on a Clinton White House. We wrote 14 on Trump.
The lesson stuck. Elites routinely don’t get it. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly among them. And it is happening again.
AI is not exciting to most people. It is a marginally useful tool that helps them write politer emails. One day, apparently soon, it might take their job. Steve Bannon, the architect of that unlikely Trumpian victory, is the canary in the coal mine.
Here he is, talking about Silicon Valley’s tech elite:
“They believe that essentially they’re feudal lords and everybody else is a serf. I equate this younger generation under 30 or 35 years old as nothing more than Russian serfs. You don’t own anything and you’re not going to own anything. That’s why the average age of the first-time buyer of a home is 40 years old, where it used to be in the low 20s.”
Bannon sounds like an old-school leftie, banging on about capital versus labour. He’s not wrong, though, and far better attuned to the fears of the electorate than beltway insiders or Silicon Valley’s techno-utopians.
Previous technological disruptions gutted factories and coalfields. This one hits the people who thought their education made them safe. As Bannon puts it: “You’re just going to be a pet in the end.” The notion that this newly dispossessed majority will meekly subsidise the data centres that make them redundant, built in their own towns, drawing on water and electricity meant for their use, is fantasy.
The wealthiest 1 percent of American households hold $55 trillion in assets, roughly equal to the bottom 90 percent combined. As Bernie Sanders likes to point out, three Americans now hold more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. The last time the gap was this wide, they called it the Gilded Age.
Maine lawmakers are considering a moratorium on large data-centre approvals. Ten other states have bills to restrict or ban them. And it is not just the buildings. Mark Zuckerberg lost two jury trials in a single week: $375 million in New Mexico for misleading users about child safety, a negligence finding in Los Angeles for designing platforms to addict children. The political system is responding to a population that senses, with growing certainty, that the game is rigged.
The data centres and hyperscalers have talking points for the electricity and the water. They may even solve them. But no amount of renewable energy or cooling innovation will fix what is actually breaking: the social licence of an industry growing too influential, too fast, with the benefits landing on too few.
The tech lords have noticed. This week OpenAI released a 13-page policy paper proposing a public wealth fund, taxes on automated labour, and a four-day workweek. Sam Altman compared it to the New Deal. Aside from the bog average writing – I found myself stopping to mentally edit the anodyne rhetoric and poor logical flow – the incentives point the other way.
OpenAI became a for-profit company last year. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and president, gave $25 million to Trump’s super PAC last year and pledged $50 million more to a political action committee opposing lawmakers who want stricter AI regulation. The paper landed the same day as a New Yorker investigation questioning Altman’s trustworthiness on safety.
Recognising a problem is not the same as solving it.
In the decades before the French Revolution, the aristocracy paid no taxes at all. The entire burden fell on the peasantry: land taxes, salt taxes, forced labour on the roads. Nobles extracted dues from every farmer who used their mills and bakeries, which they held as monopolies. When Louis XVI, facing state bankruptcy, convened the Assembly of Notables in 1787 and asked the aristocracy to contribute, they refused. They preferred the collapse of the state to the loss of their exemptions.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire who bankrolled JD Vance’s path to the vice presidency, put it plainly in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” By freedom, he meant his own.
Resentment is a drug. The deep, settled conviction that the system is rigged and that no amount of effort will unrig it. It is most potent in young men who have stopped believing there is a reason to make their bed in the morning. The question is whether the high lords of our age, the Musks, Zucks, Altmans and Huangs, have learned anything from the past.
Don’t bet on it.