This blog has been emphasizing the importance of paying attention to the intersection of politics and artificial intelligence. Recent events make this point more urgent. As The New Yorker put it, AI is now a major election issue. And as AI is an unpopular technology, it is hardly debatable how a “pro versus anti-AI” race would go. Politicians are using this framing more and more.
I’ve written earlier about the perception gap between the attitudes of people involved in the AI industry and everybody else and why the political consequences of this might be.
This time I would like to show an analogy about the development of public attitudes towards AI and then look at the shape of the political and legislative backlash.
If you would like to read more about the intersection of AI an politics, subscribe!
Technologies and Public Perception
Transformative technologies go through certain stages before settling into their final place in public perception. When they appear, the public usually wants in on the action. People wanted to ride the railroad, drive a car, be on Facebook liking their friends and counting reactions to their photos.
Once the novelty wears off, the public’s enthusiasm cannot be sustained. The casual supporters start disappearing. But those who are affected negatively—those who lose their jobs, for instance—cannot just casually walk away. So while support wanes, opposition does not. This is the state every new technology arrives at.
How the technology’s perception develops from here depends on how many people it can reach, on how organized its opponents are, and on how smart its politics are. It was clear from the start that AI was going to reach more people than any previous technology. Organized opposition did not exist. So perception was going to be dependent on political and communication dynamics.
The more I listened to discussions about the consequences of AI development, the more they were all eerily familiar. Not the specifics, but the pattern of how narratives were developing. When comparisons are made at all about artificial intelligence development, they usually focus on climate policy or nuclear proliferation. When it comes to political dynamics, I think a good analogy is the immigration issue.
Artificial intelligence is the new immigrant
Artificial intelligence is something that touches everyone’s lives. Everybody has an opinion about it. It has a cultural dimension: there is something about the nature of it that touches our identities. It is also supposedly posing a danger by taking our jobs. Anecdotal evidence of how it is impacting everyone is all around and is usually not in sync with what we hear from the media. In fact, expert discussions on it feel distant from everyday experiences. And the prevailing voter attitude is a lack of control over it.
All of these were true of the immigration issue.
Some diclaimers: I am not trying to paint this analogy for its intellectual merits, but because I believe that the stages of how the immigration debate developed can help explain why artificial intelligence is so unpopular and can shed light on elements of artificial intelligence communication that might not otherwise be apparent. Of course, I am talking strictly about communication dynamics as they come across to a non-expert voter. And when I mean populist later, I mean no normative dimension to it.
Stages of a narrative
Looking at the stages narratives go through is maybe the best way to illustrate the similarities.
1. Perception
The first part is perception. Suddenly, everywhere we see immigrants; everywhere we see artificial intelligence. This seems obvious enough, although in the case of immigration the perception was not always the reality.
What matters is the confirmation of the perception, leaving no further room in the future for denying it. I am not listing this because anyone was thinking of doing so, but because denial is always a communication possibility, if not the most honest one.
The immigration issue produced a sad but determined confirmation. AI produces a jubilant, victorious confirmation.
AI companies not only acknowledge the spread of AI but also talk about its future consequences: how it will remove 50 percent of white-collar jobs and potentially also destroy humanity. Not only do they acknowledge it; they actually spend time making it sound more powerful.
2. The reasons
As the perception is confirmed, a voter wants to understand why it’s happening. This is an important point, because this is when the framing of the issue becomes fixed. In both cases, the frame contains the notion of inevitability.
Inevitability can contain specific elements. With immigration, it meant a historical and cultural tendency we have no power against. With AI, the arguments emphasize the necessity of building it because somebody will anyway, or point to the futility of stopping technological progress. The point is, it’s not really a choice.
Voters usually don’t like inevitable consequences. And changing familiar scenery—whether cultural or technological—is never easy. Just ask your average user how much they like it when new software becomes “better,” necessitating changes, downloads and all that, or when new, more modern equipment is installed in their workplace. But workplace improvements, faster computer software—those things can be good, worth the trouble.
Good or bad?
Is immigration/AI a good thing? And I think this is the part where the most fundamental mistake has been made.
All the answers to both questions are macro-level: it’s good for the economy, it boosts production, makes society more diverse, or it will lead to huge developments in medicine and science. None of these concern the voter directly. None of these mean an advantage to the voter.
(The auxiliary argument in AI communication—that it might be catastrophic—also falls under the category of not being advantageous to the voter.)
But voters have their own system of decoding. They have learnt: when you ask whether an economic development is good and the answer is that “it is good for the economy,” it’s very similar to looking at unappetising food, asking whether it’s delicious, and being told it is very healthy.
But it’s not just the lack of arguments itself that strengthens the populist backlash, but what happens when the voter disagrees (3B on the chart). The voters’ concerns get washed away. In the case of immigration, this happens more through condescension and cultural conflict. In the case of AI, voter concerns are treated as irrelevant, possibly irrational.
Lines 3A and 3B go back and forth as they interact with each other all the time.
More and more people use artificial intelligence. They get used to it, meaning that when it performs well, it simply does its day’s work. But every time the context window runs out, every hiccup, every hallucination, the voter builds doubt. How much? What is this for? But the answers don’t change.
Which gives a perfect opportunity to a political opportunist. A majority on one side, but no one really articulating this majority position. The voter is not only affected negatively but angry, not just materially but culturally. The possibility of identity, economic and anger politics all together. Perfect enemies to blame.
Enter the Populist
So our populist comes and says: I will protect you. I am on your side. They are not! He starts strengthening the anger either on cultural or on economic grounds. And maybe most important of all, he promises the voter to prove the inevitability wrong. Which, in the case of artificial intelligence, means asking a common-sense question:
Why are we building it then?
And there is no answer. Because AI is framed as inevitable. Because the people designing AI systems see things very differently. But most importantly: because no one ever made the case for AI. Notice how the question is not about data centers or frontier models. It’s about why have it at all?
This stage that we reached a few days ago.
Look at what Abdul El-Sayed said in a recent interview:
Most of the time, when people think about the use of space, it’s for a trade-off. We’re going to build a school. Okay, well, it might be inconvenient to have that school right close to my house, but it’d be great if our kids got good educations, and schools come with playgrounds, and maybe it wouldn’t be that bad to have a school next door.
In this case, it’s: we’re going to build a data center. And they’re like, oh, so what’s it going to be? It’s just going to be this drone of a building that makes an odd sound all the time and sucks up all the electricity and could poison my water. Okay, what’s the trade-off?
The buildout of an industry that everyone’s telling me—including the CEOs—is going to come for my job. So what is the upside? And you’re like, well, you can ask meaningless questions and queries to your ChatGPT. And people are like: I don’t want that, and it’s not worth it.
So ultimately, I think in the end, if you just ask people—who could care less about your billion dollars—why they should put this in their backyard, they’re going to say: I don’t want it in my backyard. I actually don’t want it in anybody’s backyard. I actually don’t want it.
El-Sayed shows perfectly what the escalation is. It’s one thing to say, “I don’t want it in my backyard.” It’s another to say, “I actually don’t want it.” The fifth line of the chart—the consequence—is self-explanatory.
THE TREND
AI development is so fast that, for many inside, it can be easy to miss the trend. After all, there’s always criticism; some people are always saying things about slowing AI development down or stopping it. But it’s enough to take half a step back to see that, when it comes to political reaction, the trend is quite clear.
Once again, it is important to start from the voters. Popular resistance has been building independently. What might have been interesting here is that cultural elites, not usually opponents of technical development, have been surprisingly negative.
This is Bernie Sanders and his first call for a federal moratorium on AI data centers. Clearly a minority position back then—which we know because the senator himself would remind us it was called a “radical, fringe and Luddite idea.”
In the chart, I will consider this point zero, not to give it overly large significance, but to be able to show the speed of the backlash. Because we can see that less than a hundred days from here, new legislation, now closer to the center, is introduced but still positioned far from the mainstream.
The real turning point is point three: government acts. Donald Trump uses export controls to stop foreign access to Anthropic frontier models. This is a decision that is shockingly sudden and shows clearly to everyone that the state not legislating about AI until now doesn’t mean it doesn’t have power over it; it just means it chose not to use it.
And it’s especially important, I think, that Donald Trump made this decision, not an opponent of AI development.
Which leads to point number four: the first legal boundaries emerging from a relatively low-level legal intervention, almost as a side effect: Anthropic said it had no reliable way to implement the foreign-national restriction in real time, so it suspended access to both affected models for everyone.
Politics has its own speedometer. Outside events, as well as politics’ own calendars, can trigger drastic changes. This time it was the Michigan Democratic Senate primary result. It produced three important effects.
First, it catapulted to national fame someone running on an anti-AI position. The quote from El-Sayed is dated two days after him winning that primary. Second, the left wing of the Democratic Party, the one associated with the anti-AI position, seems ascendant. And the November midterms got cognitively closer. With them: polls detecting Democrats ahead. These changes mean that suggestions from El-Sayed and Bernie Sanders are, by position and not by policy, more mainstream ideas.
Less than a week after the primary, Bernie Sanders strengthened his position. No longer moratoriums, ideas or theories, but a clear threat. In a letter to AI company leaders, he wrote:
Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control. Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.
Changing the Trend
Just like AI development’s continuation is not inevitable, neither is it inevitable that the political dynamics follow their present trajectory. They will follow it unless there is some fundamental change in the underlying forces or in what the relevant actors do. I doubt any fundamentals will change. Thus, change can come from actors. And as the backlash originates from popular opinion, mitigating it is possible by changing what people think about AI.
It is almost comical how much the advantages of AI do not appear in communication. When Apple releases a phone whose camera jumps from “you need a huge screen to notice the difference” to “you need a screen the size of a building to notice,” it still makes damn sure you know why you should want it. It spends weeks building anticipation, stages a meticulously choreographed launch, puts executives on stage to explain why it matters, gives journalists demonstrations and floods the market with advertising.
A new frontier model comes with the “reassuring” information that, contrary to the media hype, the new model is only a little closer to killing humanity.
I am exaggerating only to bring closer the message that this is not about communication but attitude. AI brings tremendous benefits, not just on the societal level, but to individuals. There is nothing to prevent this from becoming conventional wisdom.
AI is fast. There might still be … months before the first overt calls to simply ban it can become specific proposals after the November Midterms.