The Humanism Driving the Anti-A.I. Movement
In the past year, data centers have emerged as a central issue in both American politics and the gyre of discourse swirling around American politics. On blogs and podcasts, the commentariat has marvelled at the emergence of an elusive bipartisan consensus. And well they should: the most recent polling shows that an astounding seventy-one per cent of the population opposes data-center construction in their areas.
Equally astonishing, if not yet equally remarked upon, is the consensus about A.I. itself. Sixty-nine per cent of Americans are “concerned” about the technology’s role in society, according to a study that used data from NORC at the University of Chicago. A poll conducted by NBC last spring found that A.I. is less popular than such societal darlings as ICE, Donald Trump, and J. D. Vance.
The vibes, less pollable but perhaps no less palpable, are noxious. Students boo speakers who extol A.I. in commencement addresses, and consumers deride celebrities and brands that embrace the technology. For months after the film studio A24 announced a “research partnership” with Google’s DeepMind, aggrieved commenters took to the company’s Instagram to lambaste “AI24” for its treachery. “We don’t have to accept this future,” an anonymous graffitist scribbled across a subway station ad for the dystopian Friend A.I. device, as documented in a photo in the Times.
Until 2022, when large language models exploded into the public consciousness, with the release of ChatGPT, the primary idiom of opposition to A.I. was that of techno-eschatology. Silicon Valley doomers feared A.I. for the very reason that they revered it: because they believed that it was powerful enough to contrive some futuristic means of annihilating humanity (perhaps, as in the classic and memorably silly thought experiment dreamed up by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, by converting us all into paper clips). But the data-center backlash has enlarged the established taxonomy of A.I. skeptics. In addition to the industry insiders who caution that A.I. might go rogue, there are the A.I. populists—defined by the tech journalist and The Atlantic contributor Jasmine Sun as adherents to “a worldview in which AI is viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted.” Sun stresses that these aggrieved everymen know little about the technology itself, arguing their ideas are “transmuting” the “anti-elite and nihilistic attitudes that have dominated US political culture in the last few years.”
Both the doomers and the populists were in evidence at the Pro-Human Assembly, a big-tent A.I.-critical gathering held in Washington, D.C., and organized by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to insuring that technology serves humanity’s interests. The conference’s two headliners—Bernie Sanders representing the left, Steve Bannon the right—railed against the nefarious designs of the “oligarchs,” to the audible delight of the crowd; Alex Bores, a New York state assemblyman who narrowly lost a congressional primary on an A.I.-safety platform, gave a speech calling for heightened industry oversight. Panels featured labor organizers who warned that A.I. would undermine workers, and parents whose children confessed to chatbots that they had suicidal ideation before they killed themselves. Many of the panels centered on issues with A.I. that were somewhat orthogonal to the value of the technology itself. If A.I. were better regulated or better aligned, they seemed to suggest, it might become palatable.
Yet, when I asked attendees why they were there, few mentioned economic inequality or poor regulation, and none mentioned paper clips. For the most part, the going concerns were not about matters of policy as much as they were about matters of philosophy. The neuroscientist and writer Erik Hoel, who sported an impressive beard, told me that he hated that A.I. compromised human freedom. “I want a world where my kids are able to matter in the way that our generation was able to matter and make choices,” he said. Hoel, who had travelled to D.C. from Boston, became concerned about A.I. for the same reason that he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience: because of his reverence for human consciousness. “I became very deeply scared that we would have language, but without consciousness,” he said, a possibility that he has described on his blog as “semantic apocalypse.”
Others voiced fears about A.I.’s effects on creativity, about the way it might etiolate the visual and artistic landscape. A lanky thirty-year-old novelist, filmmaker, and practicing clown who went by Red Lamb (he had been to clown school in France, he said) told me that he was “not a big policy-head” but that he dreaded the “slopification of the arts.” “No clanker has ever actually told a joke that I found amusing,” he said. “And I don’t think they ever will.” A twenty-two-year-old woman from the Young People’s Alliance, a youth-advocacy group, said that she felt she’d “lost brain cells” since she’d started using A.I. Like many of the people I spoke with at the Pro-Human Assembly, she seemed to be groping for a new lexicon—one that could capture her sense of a looming spiritual bankruptcy.
Even people with political affiliations spoke in a more expansive and less wonky register. Joe Allen, until recently the “transhumanism editor” on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, told me in a resonant Southern accent that “the satanic mechanical beast” makes “the world uglier” and enables “cognitive offloading.” The Lutheran Reverend Rob Rose, assistant to the Bishop of Florida, used even more dramatic language: though he emphasized that A.I. had legitimate uses, he told me that students who use it to write papers may be depriving themselves of the chance to exercise their mental faculties and thereby “robbing” themselves “of intrinsic value as a creation of God.”
During his speech, Bores announced a new initiative to push Democrats to regulate the A.I. industry, and a week later Sanders, along with fellow Pro-Human Assembly speaker, Texas Democratic congressman Greg Casar, introduced an act that would “ban artificial superintelligence.” But surprisingly few of the people I talked with mentioned Silicon Valley at all: Jennifer Frey, a Catholic philosopher at the University of Virginia who had spoken on a panel of religious figures, told me that it was important to her “to focus the conversation on those issues that religious leaders could speak most authoritatively about, such as what is distinctive and precious about human intelligence, and what threats A.I., A.G.I, and A.S.I. pose to the inner, spiritual lives of the human person.” She added, “We’ve heard so much about the threats to our external freedoms—job displacement, the consolidation of wealth and power—but to my mind our religious leaders need to pay attention to how A.I. might disrupt or weaken our spiritual capacities.”
In the lobby, I ran into a friend, Ari Schulman, an erstwhile computer scientist and A.I. engineer who defected to edit the tech-skeptical magazine The New Atlantis. When I asked him what he thought of policy solutions to the problems with A.I., he was pessimistic. “I think that this is the same mistake that the left made with social media,” he said, alluding to Biden-era efforts to break up tech monopolies. “They made it all about billionaires and antitrust, as if you could just get better, nicer people to be in charge of the tech companies and maybe make Facebook three products instead of just one product, and then it would be fine. But, no, this was just evil, bad technology. The problem was the technology.”
“The problem was the technology”: if there was a refrain that seemed to connect all the disparate grievances I heard at the assembly, this was it. The various pro-humans were not only alarmed by the differentials in wealth and power that A.I. has consolidated and reinforced, the noise pollution that data centers emit, and the dismaying prospect of human extinction (though these difficulties concerned them, too). They were also worried about what would happen in the best-case scenario, if the technology worked as planned.
According to Sun and other commentators who have embraced the term “A.I. populism,” A.I. is reviled primarily because it is a manifestation of a political system that serves the few at the expense of the many. After a recent reporting trip to the Midwest, where fights over data centers are roiling, Sun summed up her position succinctly: “AI populism is more about populism than about AI.” And there’s something to this theory: the backlash against L.L.M.s is continuous, at points, with more general populist backlash. But it is also continuous, perhaps even more so, with a long tradition of tech-skepticism. The anxieties that I heard voiced in D.C. echoed the anxieties I’d heard, over and over, in the course of recent conversations with other members of the emerging anti-A.I. coalition, a group that includes teachers, doctors, young people, labor organizers, artists, and religious communities.
When I spoke to a range of A.I. critics in the weeks before the Pro-Human Assembly, I learned that many of them had as much in common with—and, indeed, were, themselves—parents agitating to keep screens out of the classroom, and with the growing number of Americans eschewing smartphones, as they did with the resentful nihilists whom Sun describes.
“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that some of the richest critiques of A.I. have come from artists and religious leaders, both types whose professions oblige them to become comfortable with the sort of philosophical language that the political establishment tends to avoid. Many of the people I called were interested in what a flourishing human life looks like, and in how A.I. alters the texture of daily experience. Michael Grayston, a pastor with a congregation in Austin, whom I called after discovering his writing about A.I. and faith, told me that he is wary of the technology on theological grounds. When God created us, “He created us with a need for other people”—a need that chatbots can convince us they are fulfilling but which they can never truly fulfill. The Catholic commentator Marc Barnes, who has argued persuasively that speaking to a chatbot is a sin, made a similar point: A.I. chatbots are a “simulation of the human person” that appears to afford the sort of communion that humans are called upon by God to enact, when in fact it affords only a hollow facsimile.
This is not A.I. populism, as Sun describes it, so much as anti-A.I. humanism; its champions worry about what would be left if human pursuits became pointless. I was struck by how many A.I. skeptics converged on the same formulation: what is this activity for? When I called Lila Byock, a mother of two and the founder of Schools Beyond Screens, a coalition fighting the influence of big tech in schools, she said, “I think that we just need to ask ourselves, like, what is school for? What is education for? One of the really basic problems with using A.I. in education is that it is designed to make tasks easier and to reduce friction, and friction is how learning happens.”
Jenny Trinitapoli, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and one of the architects of a policy restricting A.I. and devices in the Social Sciences Core classes there, echoed Byock almost exactly. She explained that she and her colleagues regarded the A.I. rules as an opportunity to “make a positive statement about, What are we doing in these small seminar courses? What are they for? And they’re not just for graduation, right? They’re for the habits of mind that our students are going to have for the rest of their lives.” Or, as Barnes, the Catholic commentator, put it: “What, really, do I want? What really makes me happy? What is a good, flourishing life?”
That A.I. raises such fundamental questions—that it threatens our moral agency and faculties of self-definition—may go some ways toward explaining why young people, on the whole, are more skeptical of the technology than their elders: not only because they occupy a more vulnerable position in the job market but because they have not yet had the opportunity to become who they are, to paraphrase Nietzsche. Owen Yingling, a senior studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, told me that he and his peers fear that A.I. will prevent them from growing into full-fledged human beings. “I see people’s parents, my parents . . . they love all the things they can do with A.I., because these are people who are fifty, sixty years old, who have already lived lives, have already become the person that they are,” he said. “But for us, because we haven’t done anything or become anyone, it’s a sort of existential threat.”
Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of Anthropic, characterized the threat somewhat differently. “I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI,” he wrote on X, last month. “I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry.” It is easy to see why the C.E.O.s of A.I. companies might promote this theory. Mistrust is a familiar force in American public life. Both A.I. populism and A.I. doomerism are, in their own ways, politics as usual. They correspond to two well-established modes of discourse—the one of white papers and probability distributions, the other of spirited (and justified) calls for redistribution. But if people hate A.I. because it is at odds with their vision of the good life—because they see it as fundamentally anti-human—then the existing categories won’t suffice. A new vocabulary is required to describe what is shaping up to be an unprecedented political movement, one focussed on questions outside the bounds of traditional public discourse.
In one way or another, everyone I spoke with at the Pro-Human Assembly and on the phone was expressing something that American politics, in its more recognizable guises, cannot quite wrap its arms around—a vision of what they thought a human life was for. What, after all, will we do when A.I. frees us from doing our jobs and thinking our thoughts and, ultimately, leading our lives? Use more A.I. so that we can use our newfound free time to—use more A.I.? The result is a kind of Ponzi scheme that bottoms out in nothing. Staving off the A.I. apocalypse can only matter if there is something, anything, worth preserving. Who cares if we are alchemized into paper clips if we have become spiritual paper clips already? ♦