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In a new survey of over 2,000 US adults conducted days ago, Politico found that the vast majority of respondents would pull the plug on the whole AI buildout if they could.
The magazine presented participants with an intriguing hypothetical: if you were working on developing AI and started seeing signs that the tech could destroy humanity, would you keep going?
The answers were telling: only 38 percent said they would continue, while 62 percent said they would stop and would “hope that other labs see the same signs and also decide to stop.”
Of those who self-identified as Republicans, 55 percent agreed they would stop the buildout, while 66 percent of Democrats said the same. Even undecided voters agree, with 58 percent saying they would pull the plug. If the presidential election was an anti-AI candidate versus a pro-AI one, in other words, the latter would be crushed at the polls.
The results cut to the heart of the AI safety narrative being driven by some of the most powerful tech CEOs in the world. The frenzied attempt by AI billionaires to “manufacture a crisis” around AI safety, as the famed investor Steve Eisman put it, seems to be having a knock-on effect of furthering the public’s anxiety around the increasingly unpopular technology.
Yet for as sour as public sentiment has turned, it seems no amount of backlash will sway career politicians in the Democratic or Republican parties.
Separate reporting by Politico revealed a quiet strategy by Democratic Party consultants who are privately begging candidates in battleground states not to criticize AI on the campaign trail. If dems go all-out in demonizing AI and data centers, the logic goes, the massive tech lobby could unleash a virtual Blitzkrieg against Democratic candidates ahead of the November midterms.
The politicians in question include Don Davis in North Carolina, Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, and Henry Cuellar in Texas, each of whom are running in states that have been carved up like hams by AI data center developers, Politico interviews with more than a dozen party insiders revealed.
“You know, these AI groups — they come out and they say that they’re concerned, that they want regulation. But then they spend huge amounts of money on defeating anybody who wants legislative regulation,” Washington representative Pramila Jayapal told Politico.
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