👀 The AI backlash is the only thing growing faster than AI revenues
Humans are angry
Anthropic will turn a profit this quarter, two years ahead of schedule. This is off the back of extraordinary revenue growth. In the second quarter this year, the company is likely to gross $10.9bn in revenue, more than its entire lifetime revenue to date. Operating profits should weigh in at $559 million. It’s an extraordinary achievement and one set to feature in the annals of business history.
But the backlash against AI is growing ever stronger.
Earlier this week, Google’s former boss, Eric Schmidt, was soldily booed at a college commencement address
At another college commencement, boos shocked the commencement speaker who proselytized AI. Joanna Stern interviewed one of the college students, Houda Eletr:
Joanna: Do you use AI?
Houda: Throw it away….if you create this big thing that is supposedly going to save a human’s life, then you should give it to me in a human way.
A reader from New York sent me this photo:
There will be more booing.
Consider data centers and their local impacts.
At a hearing, American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed a jar of mud-brown water collected from a tap in Georgia, shortly after Meta started building a data center.
Poor ambassadors
The narrative around AI has been about promises for tomorrow, but sacrifices today. AI leaders have warned that the world could be destroyed by this technology.
They warned that large numbers of people, particularly graduates, would lose their jobs. But everyone knows the founders are making more money than Croesus. And now, there is construction, a physical manifestation, a real inconvenience, something you can point at.
And for what? So we can explore the stars using intelligent spaceships and ‘colonize the galaxy’ according to Demis Hassabis. (Demis is by far the most sympathetic of all the AI leaders, but even his messages feel out of touch.)
Engaging with this resistance won’t be effective if AI leaders throw distant fantasies at people dealing with muddy water coming from their kitchen tap today.
Neither will facts. The US energy system is getting a much-needed boost in investment to upgrade energy generation and the grid to more modern technologies. I am certain that in a decade we’ll look back on this as the time when the US grid prepared for the 21st century, becoming more resilient, efficient and greener. But that well-informed argument is completely irrelevant in the face of today’s resistance.
Fantasies or facts, these are all fodder for the technorat. Globalization or NAFTA made a graph on some economists’ slide deck go up. Grid renewal and ‘productivity’ excited the same neurons, but don’t speak to the heart.