Why public opinion turned on AI

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Gray Area with Sean Illing – Why Public Opinion Turned on AI

Release Date: July 17, 2026
Host: Miles Bryan (guest hosting for Sean Illing)
Guest: Jasmine Sun, journalist and “anthropologist of disruption” covering AI culture and politics

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the growing populist backlash against artificial intelligence in the United States: why it has accelerated over the last year, how it manifests in surprising political alliances, and what it suggests about power, democracy, and the tech sector’s ability to engage with public concerns. Jasmine Sun discusses the root causes of what she terms “AI populism,” recent flashpoints (like data center moratoriums and incidents of political violence), historic analogies, and how both Silicon Valley and policymakers are responding to this seismic cultural and political change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining “AI Populism” (01:29–03:24)

• Jasmine Sun: Describes herself as an “anthropologist of disruption.” She’s less interested in AI’s technical specs and more in how new technologies clash with existing cultural and institutional norms.
• AI populism is a worldview framing AI as an elite project being imposed upon ordinary people, sparking resistance. The opposition centers on issues of unaccountable power, not just technical safety.
  • “A lot of times the debate was not about like, is ChatGPT useful? ... The debate was actually something more like, there are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires who are coming into my city, coming into my life, and changing it without having any sort of democratic input.” (Jasmine Sun, 02:45–03:06)

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2. Data Centers as a Flashpoint (03:24–07:05)

• Data centers required for AI are being rapidly constructed across the country, triggering local anger over environmental, economic, and aesthetic impacts.
• The anti-data center movement brings together left and right, environmentalists, labor, and parents, creating a “big tent” alliance.
• Local opposition often isn’t just about the buildings, but about lack of agency and the sense of being steamrolled by tech elites.
  • “Being able to show up to the city council meeting for the local data center project might be one of the only channels they have to express 'I don’t like what’s going on with the way that AI is going in our lives.'” (Jasmine Sun, 07:05–07:36)
  • “The data center is like a symbolic representation of this thing being imposed on people’s lives and in their communities without their input or acquiescence.” (Miles Bryan, 08:10–08:24)

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3. The Scale and Shape of the Backlash (07:05–12:25)

• Backlash is widespread across the political spectrum; both Bernie Sanders (left) and Josh Hawley (right) have called for moratoriums or regulations.
• Tech insiders are “confused” by the ire, failing to grasp that public opposition is more about powerlessness than technical details.
• Violence is emerging: assassination attempts against high-profile AI leaders and officials associated with AI development.
  • “It’s pretty terrifying that assassination attempts are showing up in response to people’s worries about AI.” (Jasmine Sun, 09:25–09:35)
  • The lack of avenues for democratic bargaining (such as strong unions in the past) is partly to blame for this volatility.

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4. Historical Analogies & Lessons (11:55–13:41)

• Luddites and factory automation in the 20th century are precedents—when people had channels for negotiation (like unions), they were more accepting of disruptive tech.
• When social welfare policies were coupled with automation, people were much more willing to accept technological change.
  • Recommended reading: Carl Benedikt Frey, “The Technology Trap”

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5. Silicon Valley’s Slow Recognition (13:41–16:40)

• Six months ago, most AI insiders dismissed the backlash as the usual cycle of discontent that would fade. Now, they see it as a real threat.
• Data center moratoriums and regulatory opposition have forced OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to grapple with both messaging and the need to address material impacts.

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6. Industry Fears: The “Permanent Underclass” (16:40–19:31)

• There’s a widespread expectation in tech that AI will lead to “runaway inequality” and the creation of a permanent underclass with little economic leverage.
  • “The most people in the industry … expect some level of job disruption in the near term. … Most folks I talk to do think that AI will by default increase inequality.” (Jasmine Sun, 18:15–18:55)
  • Tech insiders even joke about “escaping the permanent underclass,” reflecting deep anxieties about the narrowing set of people shielded from change.

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7. Messaging Problems & AI Safety (24:55–29:38)

• The AI industry’s own messaging—talking openly about large job losses, existential risk, or even human extinction—has fueled distrust and public anger.
  • “[Sam Altman] says ‘by default, most people will be worse off because AI will shift power from labor’ … They’ll talk about like a 20% chance that we all die.” (Jasmine Sun, 24:55–25:14)
• Ironically, what excited AI researchers in private (“this might be a technology that changes everything, even destroys humanity”) has repelled the broader public and given ammunition to populist politicians.
• Even AI-safety advocates, meant as a check, may have contributed to panic and backlash through extreme language.
  • “Anthropic loves to compare themselves to nuclear weapons … unless I’m trying to be regulated and controlled like a nuclear weapon, I don’t know if I would constantly compare myself to a nuclear weapon.” (Jasmine Sun, 29:16–29:38)

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8. Attempts at Rebuilding Trust: Policy Proposals (30:23–33:55)

• Facing pressure, OpenAI and Anthropic have floated progressive policies:
  • Shorter work weeks, public wealth funds, redistributive measures
• However, politicians (especially progressive Democrats) remain deeply skeptical, doubting the sincerity of new corporate commitments in light of aggressive past opposition to wealth taxes and redistribution.
  • “They’ll look at things like the level of opposition to the California billionaires tax … and so I think these people say, ‘Yeah, OpenAI can talk a big game, whatever, but when it comes down to it, we see over and over that people protect their own wealth.’” (Jasmine Sun, 33:19–33:43)

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9. Cross-Cultural Perspective: Why No AI Populism in China? (35:51–40:32)

• Despite massive automation and youth unemployment, China hasn’t seen a populist backlash to AI, primarily due to:
  • Governmental suppression of dissent
  • A cultural and generational association of technology with progress and economic uplift
  • People view technology as “inevitable and mostly good,” focusing on how to benefit rather than resist
  • Example: Robot pharmacies serve real unmet needs and are mostly welcomed

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10. Political Ramifications for the U.S. (41:22–43:19)

• AI populism is expected to be a bigger factor in state and local elections in the near term, with 2028 poised to be the first presidential election where AI could be a central campaign issue.
• The backlash is being embraced by politicians as a convenient foil—a way to rally support for a variety of agendas given AI’s poor polling and the unpopularity of tech billionaires.
  • “It polls so poorly. People are so anti AI and anti data centers. … AI is a great reason to do it.” (Jasmine Sun, 43:00–43:10)

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11. The Problem of Insularity in Silicon Valley (43:32–44:58)

• Many tech workers have no social ties outside the industry, fueling disconnect and tone-deaf messaging.
  • “A lot of people in the AI industry have lost the ability to hear themselves and have lost the ability to empathize with what somebody who is not in the AI industry might think of their goals and their work and their views.” (Jasmine Sun, 44:00–44:20)
• This insularity may be partly responsible for the industry’s failure to anticipate the backlash and its struggle to win public trust.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jasmine Sun (02:45–03:06):
  “There are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires who are coming into my city, coming into my life, and changing it without having any sort of democratic input.”
• Miles Bryan (08:10–08:24):
  “The data center is like a symbolic representation of this thing being imposed on people’s lives and in their communities without their input or acquiescence.”
• Jasmine Sun (09:25–09:35):
  “I am no big Sam Altman fanboy, but like, it’s pretty terrifying that assassination attempts are showing up in response to people’s worries about AI.”
• Jasmine Sun (18:15–18:55):
  “Most folks I talk to do think that AI will by default increase inequality … other people lose their economic leverage and are not going to be able to have skills that the AI don’t, nor do they have the money and capital to buy AI to help themselves.”
• Jasmine Sun (24:55–25:14):
  “Sam Altman … says ‘by default most people will be worse off because AI will shift power from labor to … they’ll talk about like a 20% chance that we all die.’”
• Jasmine Sun (29:16–29:38):
  “Anthropic loves to compare themselves to nuclear weapons … unless I’m trying to be regulated and controlled like a nuclear weapon, I don’t know if I would constantly compare myself to a nuclear weapon.”
• Jasmine Sun (44:00–44:20):
  “A lot of people in the AI industry have lost the ability to hear themselves and have lost the ability to empathize with what somebody who is not in the AI industry might think of their goals and their work and their views.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:29–03:24: What is “AI populism”?
• 03:24–07:05: Data centers as a symbol of backlash; coalition against AI
• 08:10–09:35: Public meetings as the only channel for expression, and rise of violence
• 11:55–13:41: Historical analogies—Luddites, factory automation, importance of bargaining
• 13:41–16:40: Silicon Valley’s lagging awareness of real political risk
• 16:40–19:31: The idea of a permanent underclass; fears among tech elites
• 24:55–29:38: How AI industry messaging deepened public alienation
• 30:23–33:55: OpenAI & Anthropic propose redistributive policies; skepticism from politicians
• 35:51–40:32: China as a contrast: no backlash, different cultural/economic trajectory
• 41:22–43:19: AI and US elections—current and future impact
• 43:32–44:58: The insularity of Silicon Valley and its consequences

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Episode Tone & Takeaway

The episode is nuanced, reflective, and occasionally somber. Jasmine Sun expresses real concern about political violence, social division, and runaway inequality, but also offers hope that better democratic engagement and more attuned communication could forge a more equitable outcome. She is both critical of Silicon Valley’s blindness and wary of populist overreach, suggesting the issue isn’t just about technology, but how societies negotiate change, power, and trust.

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Where to Read Jasmine Sun

• jasmine.substack.com
• Contributor to The Atlantic, The New York Times, and more

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a deep, accessible overview of this episode’s content and argument.

Transcript

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[Miles Bryan]

I'm Miles Bryan. I'm guest hosting the Gray Area Today. Jasmine sun is a journalist living in San Francisco who covers the artificial intelligence industry. Jasmine is one of the best reporters out there on the culture and politics of AI. I asked her to come on the show to talk about an existential threat to the AI industry, a populist backlash that's building across the country and across both parties. We talked about what makes up AI populism, how Silicon Valley ended up getting caught flat footed and what this might all mean for American politics. Jasmine sun, welcome to the Gray Area. Thanks for joining us.

[Jasmine Sun]

Thank you for having me.

[Miles Bryan]

So you're a journalist, but you've also described yourself as an anthropologist of disruption, right? What does that mean?

[Jasmine Sun]

I think I use the word anthropologist to sort of describe the particular approach and dimension to technology that I'm interested in covering. I cover AI and Silicon Valley, but I think I'm somewhat less interested in sort of the day to day corporate dramas or the earnings reports. I'm much more interested in both how technologists, the people building AI think about the thing they are building, and then also what happens when those frontier technologies go and collide with existing cultures, communities, institutions. And so those like collision points, the disruption between some crazy new frontier technology like AI and people and all of the messiness and weirdness of people is like the thing that I am most interested in exploring.

[Miles Bryan]

So you've been writing about a phenomenon you call AI populism. How would you define that? What is AI populism?

[Jasmine Sun]

So, so I define AI populism as a worldview where AI is not seen as a ordinary technology, but rather specifically as an elite political project to be resisted. And the reason that I came to the term was I was thinking about the AI backlash and a lot of the reasons that people were increasingly anti AI, whether that's LLM slop, whether that's waymos in their city, whether that's a new data center project. And one thing that occurred to me was that a lot of times the debate was not about like, is chatgpt useful? To me, is the waymo safer than a human driver? The debate was actually something more like there are these big corporations and unaccountable like billionaires who are coming into my city, coming into my life and changing it without having any sort of democratic input. And when I talk to people who are opposing AI in various ways, they seem more concerned with this sort of concentration of power anti elite dimension, which is where I take the phrase populism rather than sort of classic AI safety concerns that are more about like, how many flops is this model and like, what are the technical characteristics that might introduce risk.

[Miles Bryan]

Right, that's so interesting. And I want to take us to data centers, which I feel like is maybe the best example of how, you know, sort of an aspect of the AI revolution has taken on a lot of emotional weight and symbolism and has gotten people arguing, you know, past the technical specifics.

[Jasmine Sun]

The thing about the AI industry, and especially based on the way that AI is built today with the large language models, they require an incredible, incredible amount of computing power. So all of these extremely high powered fancy chips that are located in data centers, which are these big windowless buildings just full of chips to run AI on and server racks. And server racks. And to be clear, data centers have existed as long as the Internet has. So most of the originally data centers started showing up in places like Northern Virginia in the early 2000s as sort of the Internet and computing industry grew. But because AI requires so much computing power, data centers are now popping up like all across the country, everywhere. These AI labs and companies feel primarily constrained more by how fast they can build data centers, even more so than basically any other resource or factor. The backlash, of course, has occurred because one, they are big construction projects that sometimes are located near people's homes or in areas that used to be like farmland or forests or natural areas. So there's the ordinary kind of opposition to new construction that you might see. But I think that there is a dimension that is AI specific and for some people, opposition to data centers and their locality is one of the primary ways I think they are vocalizing a broader opposition to AI.

[Miles Bryan]

Yeah, talk to me about that. Like what have you heard from people upset with data centers or, and you know, researching this topic that makes you think like, you know, the data center itself isn't Necessarily. What has inspired people to get so, so angry?

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I mean, again, it's a bit hard to disentangle. And I think one of the characteristics of AI populism is that it's a very big tent. Some people hate AI because for labor reason, others, for environmental reasons, others for kids, safety reasons. Right. And so one of the most interesting things about Learning about the AI backlash and visiting these folks in D.C. and sitting in on these meetings is you'll have people from very different kinds of interest groups and political backgrounds who are allying because they share a desire to regulate AI or an opposition. And so when you look at, say, like, the Bernie Sanders explanation for the data center moratorium, it is about all these things. It's about frontier risk, and it's about labor, and it's about the environment, and it's about civil rights. And when you read the local news reporting on why people are angry about data centers, for some people, they're worried about water use. Other people, it's electricity prices and affordability. Some people, they just hate AI. And you have all of these different reasons that people might oppose the data center project, but because of the range of reasons people have, they are creating these very powerful alliances and moratoriums have almost like a memetic quality of spreading across the country.

[Miles Bryan]

Yeah, we should stop and say, you know, just to make it clear for people who might not know, Bernie Sanders, famous progressive senator, has, you know, proposed a moratorium on new data centers. But the politics of this are super weird. You know, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator, was saying something similar. President Trump has been very pro data center. Maybe walking that back a little bit right now. You know, I covered. I covered this. I live in Philadelphia, and I covered it in the Philly suburbs. Activists fighting against a data center. And the tent was super weird. You know, you had, you know, lefty people who voted for Kamala Harris and more conservative people, and it left the sort of. The people involved, you know, fairly frustrated that they didn't have, like, political representation for. For how they were feeling.

[Jasmine Sun]

A lot of my friends in San Francisco or my sources in the AI industry, they're very confused by the data center backlash because they'll be like, you know, data centers predated AI, So I don't understand why we're mad at them now. They take two years to build. So stopping all the data centers now does not stop AI. And third, the data centers are just going to go to other countries or go to space. And like, again, these people are sort of correct about the Technicalities here. But I think the thing that they don't understand is that there is a tremendous feeling among a lot of people that there is no public input into what happens with AI. What AI is built for, what use cases are prioritized, whether it affects people's jobs or kids or lives, whether it shows up in education or the workplace. Most people don't know anybody who works at an AI lab. They. They don't know anyone who works in AI policy. We all know how well calling your congressperson works. Right. And so I think what people feel is like being able to show up to the city council meeting for the local data center project might be one of the only channels they have to express. I don't like what's going on with the way that AI is going in our lives. And so if you were frustrated about AI, what other sort of channels for agency do you have?

[Miles Bryan]

Yeah, that seems like the heart of it. Like the data center. The data center is like a symbolic representation of this thing being imposed on people's lives and in their communities without their input or without their acquiescence.

[Unidentified Guest or Participant]

Yeah.

[Jasmine Sun]

And it's like we're going to trade off your, you know, your beautiful neighborhood, your electricity prices, your whatever for this, like, you know, crazy billionaire project to automate all jobs. Like, that doesn't seem like a good deal to people.

[Miles Bryan]

Right. It's like your neighborhood looks worse, but also like, you're going to lose your job and you're going to lose your sort of place in the world and, you know, maybe the human race. But you wrote a piece that got some of this, but it went to a darker place. You wrote about AI Populism's warning shots, and you wrote about some actual shots. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was targeted by a Molotov cocktail and a shooting in the span of a couple days. There was an Indiana councilman who voted for a data center who woke up to gunshots at his home and a note reading, no data centers. You know, why do you think about those incidents of violence as warning shots of something to come?

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I mean, it was pretty scary. I found it like, you know, I am no big Sam Altman fanboy, but, like, it's pretty terrifying that assassination attempts are showing up in response to people's worries about AI. I think one is just like, we've been seeing a rising wave of political violence and support for political violence in the U.S. especially among young people. That's been the case over the past few years. You have stuff like the Luigi and United Healthcare CEO or the Charlie Kirk shooting. Right. And so I think increasingly a lot of disaffected, maybe nihilistic young people are turning towards political violence as a way to express the political beliefs that they, I suppose maybe don't feel they have other channels for, or maybe that person's just unwell. But I think I do expect to see more of it because again, sort of my theory of discontent and political discontent is that, you know, if people feel that they have institutional channels to bargain for their rights, whether like they feel like the democratic process is working or they're part of a union and they believe that their union leader is going to go bargain about how automation is going to show up in the workplace, most likely they will go through those available channels. When it feels like the official channels are not working, I think that opposition becomes much more diffuse and it becomes much more volatile. And that is one of the reasons that we're seeing, you know, like in creative communities, people just witch hunt each other. Like you're using AI to write, you're using AI to write. I think we will see more like political violence against people who are seen as whether AI leaders or supporting AI leaders.

[Miles Bryan]

That's really scary.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I think it is really scary. I'm quite worried about it for sure. But I think again, my sense is that it comes from this sense of like, what else is there to be done when you have such levels of concentration of wealth and power and there is no democratic input right now into how AI is regulated, built, whatever.

[Miles Bryan]

Yeah, it's like a jump straight from complaining at your community meeting about the data center to like an act of violence.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I mean, I was talking to some friends about like, you know, during the 20th century in the, in the U.S. there was also a wave of factory mechanization and automation. But unions were really strong during the 20th century. Oftentimes when it was like, okay, we're going to bring in these machines, but they would sit down with like the factory union leader and they would say like, okay, you can bring in the machines, but we're actually going to couple that with a wage increase or we're going to couple that with a 35 hour workweek or earlier retirement. And so it was seen as like, there was a channel to make a deal about how automation could show up in your workplace. And so I think that meant that people, while there's some disruption, we're more likely to acquiesce to this thing as something that's lifting all boats. And I don't think that's happening anymore. Most of the industries affected by AI are not organized in labor unions. Again, democratic channels are very questionable. And so.

[Miles Bryan]

Yeah, that's so interesting. It's like when people have agency to be part of the changeover, part of the process, it went a lot smoother. I was going to ask you about historical analogies. Is there an example from the past of when, you know, sort of a change was a technological change happened that, you know, like, AI didn't allow for input from the people involved? Like, I'm thinking about the Luddites. I don't know if there's anything else that came up, you know, like, what's sort of like an example of this going wrong in the same way it is now?

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I mean, I think the Luddites are the classic example and they are a good one. You know, when, like, when the automated looms were introduced, there was a bunch of violence against the looms. The book that I really recommend here is Carl Benedikt Frey's the Technology Trap. He's an Oxford economist and he sort of studied a ton. A ton of historical examples in Europe and China, all over the world, including the Luddites, including some of the 20th century automation. And his primary question was, in what context do workers successfully stop automation and in what context do they allow it to sort of be introduced? Or, like, how does the political environment or the balance of power between, say, people and their leaders change what happens? And he did find, for example, that if automation was introduced alongside social welfare policies, like a higher minimum wage or some sort of redistribution, people are much more willing to accept it.

[Miles Bryan]

I want to just talk about kind of Silicon Valley's understanding of this backlash and reaction more generally. You know, you're painting a pretty. A dark picture. You're right in the belly of the beast in San Francisco. I'm sure, you know, you talk to lots of people involved with AI every day. Like, is there a moment where it clicked for them that, like, this is. This backlash is something they have to take seriously and is real, or has it happened yet?

[Jasmine Sun]

That's so. I definitely think that over the past six months, I've noticed a huge difference in how seriously people in Silicon Valley take the AI backlash.

[Miles Bryan]

Like, what have you noticed?

[Jasmine Sun]

I guess people just talk about it more. I remember I'd bring up AI populism to people last year, and people would normally say, oh, it doesn't matter. Like, technology always introduces some discontent. Like, people get used to it, you know, like, it's like the Internet. Like, people get Annoyed, but they get used to it. And that was like the standard reaction I would hear last year. This year it's no more of that this year. I mean, I think the reason that OpenAI and Anthropic have felt pressure to introduce like economic policy suggestions for job automation is because they're seeing people worried about it. I think the data center moratorium and the data center backlash have been both surprising and meaningful in getting a lot of AI leaders to recognize that they have both a messaging problem and a sort of actual problem with the product and with the technology that they're introducing. I think that a lot of increasing opposition to AI in Washington D.C. has caused people to see this at first. Trump, as you mentioned, is a very pro AI president. Him and David Sachs were accelerationists. They wanted AI to go faster and to sort of block all attempts at regulation.

[Miles Bryan]

David Sacks, who is like the AI czar for the administration, he was the

[Jasmine Sun]

AI czar, he's no longer the AIzar. But you know, it turned out that a lot of other contingencies, both on the left and the right, were pretty anti. Like for example, Trump and David Sachs tried to introduce this like big federal bill that would preempt all state level regulation. They would say for 10 years no state can regulate AI. And, and they try to sneak it into like, you know, another big omnibus bill so no one would worry about it. Congresspeople did realize it was happening and everyone was like, wait a second, wait a second. Whether for kids safety reasons or frontier safety reasons or whatever, like the idea of preventing any state from regulating AI for 10 years is crazy. And so a lot of people successfully organized in D.C. in Washington, to stop that preemption. And so I think that there is an extent to which the pro industry accelerationists underestimated the scale and the bipartisanship and the nature of the coalition that actually was very keen to make sure that it was still possible to regulate AI. And as a result of all these things, the moratoriums, the regulation fights, even just the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts, people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.

[Miles Bryan]

It's sort of funny that it took them this long that they got caught this flat footed. Because AI leaders have been out there for a number of years now, very directly saying that this is going to change the world in a way that might be very bad for normal people, that AI is going to take away a lot of jobs, that AI might eventually kind of supplant humanity as the kind of preeminent intelligence in the Universe, they were saying stuff that I think a lot of normal people, if they just listened to the words, would freak them out, and rightly so.

[Jasmine Sun]

Oh, for sure.

[Miles Bryan]

And this is just a way to tee up. This great piece you wrote for the New York Times called Silicon Valley is bracing for a permanent underclass. Tell us about that.

[Jasmine Sun]

This piece I wrote is about the notion of a permanent underclass, which in some ways is a bit of a meme that's sort of gone around Silicon Valley over the last year and in other ways represents, I think, a pretty real economic forecast that a substantial fraction of AI folks in the industry have. The basic notion of a permanent underclass is that because AI will someday be so advanced to fully replace human labor, to be a one to one replacement for human workers, whatever they do in that world, ordinary people, workers lose their leverage. You're not going to be able to make an income for work because it's always going to be cheaper, faster, more efficient to hire an AI. And this will lead to a process of runaway inequality where all the people who are already wealthy, already own capital, are going to be able to rent infinity at machine labor and everyone who's a worker is no longer going to have any leverage, not going to be able to get a job and be stuck in the permanent underclass where you're living on welfare, basically whatever the capital owner has managed to give you. And so I think it was a bit of a meme like people would joke about, like, oh, I got to escape the permanent underclass. You have two years left to escape the permanent underclass. There's this sense that there's this closing window of time because as soon as we get AGI, we're not going to have leverageless workers anymore. But you know, one thing that I learned or realized as I would have more conversations in Silicon Valley, is that the most people in the industry, VCs like AI researchers, executives, expect a some level of job disruption in the near term. I don't think that most people think it's going to be totally fine. Even when people say they're optimistic predictions, they usually say something like there will be a painful transition process. What that means is a bunch of people will lose their jobs in the short term and really struggle to retrain. And that the other thing that I've noticed is that most folks I talk to do think that AI will by default increase inequality. Right? It's going to allow some people to again rent infinite machine labor because they'll have intelligence on tap that they can just pay for Whereas other people lose their economic leverage and are not going to be able to have skills that the AI don't, nor do they have the money and the capital to buy AI to help themselves. And so basically I started to realize that, oh man, even the people who are building this technology and even the people who may think that the net outcome long term is going to be a really good one for people, have pretty grave concerns about how it's going to affect ordinary workers in the next five, 10, 20 years. And they also have no idea what to do about it because their whole business model is premised on this labor disruption.

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[Neil Apitel]

I'm Neil Apitel, editor in chief of the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we've got the first of a two part series on the systems that run the world. I'm talking with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton, a company that makes private and secure productivity software.

[Miles Bryan]

It's impossible to create a backdoor that can only be used by the good guys. No company is going to go to jail for you.

[Neil Apitel]

Often the response is, well, if you change the legal foundation here, we will leave. Yeah, how real is that?

[Miles Bryan]

It's dead serious. With all due respect to Swiss authorities and everybody else, I think it would be suicidal to continue down this path.

[Neil Apitel]

Subscribe wherever you get your podcast.

[Commercial Narrator]

This series is presented by Comcast Business.

[Miles Bryan]

What strikes me listening to you describe this AI People's the people who are excited about AI, who are building it, their fears about the future, that they only have a couple of years to kind of eke out their, their wealth and position in society before everything is set in stone by AI reaching this kind of endpoint. It's kind of like a science fiction version of this, you know, persistent and growing inequality that I think a lot of Americans are just freaked out by in general now for other reasons. Like that's kind of been the trajectory of the country for the last number of years or decades. So I see why it activates people so much because it's already something that, you know, people have been worried about in their own lives. And now you have a. I come along and say like, well, actually you're super screwed if you don't, you know, radically advance yourself in the next two years and not the next generation.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a way in which I think part of it is that in San Francisco people thought that like, oh, if I'm a software engineer and I'm making a six figure salary at age 24, I'm going to be fine. Right. And it was seen as a very secure job. Now the software engineers, the junior software engineers are the ones who are most imminently going to be automated potentially. Right. And so they're the ones who aren't getting hired. And so all these people who used to see themselves as part of this privileged class now feel the kind of economic precarity that like you said, a lot of Americans have been feeling for quite a long time.

[Miles Bryan]

Yeah, that's so interesting. Like the, the, the pool of people who sort of get to be above it, it gets smaller and smaller. And so, you know, that makes me think about like the AI populist leaders, like people like Bernie Sanders who've been sort of pushing the whole, you know, pushing against AI, pushing against data centers. One of their tactics is just to like play, just to play clips of people in this industry. Like, you read about, like Bernie had this like viral video of. I think he's just reading quotes from like, you know, Sam Altman, literally. And it's like, is this just like a problem they created for themselves? Like kind of whole cloth, you know, is this like a historic bungling of a new industry?

[Jasmine Sun]

Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, it's not just a messaging problem, but it's definitely partially a messaging problem. Right. I don't think that the AI leaders are doing themselves favors when they talk about like in the Sam Altman blog post from 2021, he says by default most people will be worse off because AI will shift power from labor to. They'll talk about like a 20% chance that we all die. And there's a, there's a few things going on. So one is, I think people like Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, he really believes it. If people say like, oh, he's just trying to like hype his product, I'm like, no, people clearly are more likely to shut down Anthropic and regulate AI because of the things he says. He clearly actually believes the things. Whether he's right is a different question. There's also a factor that I've been thinking about where Sam Altman for, you know, for the first 10 years of the AI industry, OpenAI was founded, I think in 2015 or 2016. They had no products, they had no consumer, you know, public facing thing. They were just trying to recruit a very small group of top AI research talent. And the AI community is very small. It's very insular. It's very weird, frankly. It's very Bay Area based. And the kinds of things that you say to recruit researchers and show that you understand them are not the kinds of things that you would say, if you were trying to get the public to like you. And so when people like Sam and Dario are really open about the risks, like, yep, this might kill us all. Yep, this might take all the jobs. Actually, for a lot of researchers, this compels them because they think, I want to work on something transformative, and I'm

[Miles Bryan]

really worried gonna kill everybody. Great. But then, you know, sign me up.

[Jasmine Sun]

That's on the record. And so now that they're trying to, you know, prepare for IPOs and they really care what the public market thinks, you'll see them starting to turn their rhetoric around because they are living with the consequences of all the things they said in 2021.

[Miles Bryan]

So the backlash is partially a problem of messaging, but it's also very much a problem based on what the AI executives and leaders in the field actually believe is going to happen. It's not like they could have just spun this better. It's they're just telling the truth about where they think this is taking the country. You wrote about this group within the AI community that has been trying to be a check on it, but might have contributed to some of these issues, maybe some of the messaging issues, specifically the AI safety people who've been making this case for existential risk. Can you talk about that?

[Jasmine Sun]

I think as long as people have been trying to build artificial general intelligence, there have been other people, sometimes the same people, who are very worried that by building artificial general intelligence and a thing, a being that is more intelligent than we are as humans, we might introduce unprecedented risk. People will say things like, just like humans are to ants or to chimpanzees, these future AI superintelligences will be to us. So if we build these superintelligences and we fail to align them and they have their own goals and they decide that they, they don't really care about humans, we're just in their way, then we might go extinct because the AIs decide that they don't need us anymore, or something like that happens. And so one thing that's really interesting is a lot of the people who have been at the frontier of technical research on AI, at the frontier of developing AI capabilities, are often the same people who are really worried that in developing those capabilities, we're going to introduce these crazy risks. Part of some of it's as simple as, like, you know, the thing I said sounds really sci fi, but some of it's as simple as, like, you have an AI agent, like a coding agent, you tell it to code something and it doesn't do exactly what you say. It's kind of like a bug, but a very complex bug where you say, you know, help me make some money for my online storefront. And it actually figures out that one of the easiest ways to make money is to commit fraud. Right. Like it, it starts like posting ads that are lies and tries to like scam people out of stuff. And the more you have these AI agents that sequences of actions on their own and that can strategize, the more likely they are to do something you don't expect or want it to do. And so that's kind of where these worries about loss of control arise from, is that these things are not, we're not going to be able to understand or control every single step that they take. And they might do something that is really scary and bad, but because again, so much of this sounds kind of sci fi, like these analogies of humans and ants which are very common in the AI safety community and, and everyone's talking about extinction risk. 20% chance.

[Miles Bryan]

Do they have PR people who are just constantly like this, like stop.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yes, that's definitely, they definitely have PR people who are constantly facepalming. I think that messaging does not always go over well. I mean, you know, Anthropic loves to compare themselves to nuclear weapons and if I were them, I don't know if I would constantly compare myself to a nuclear weapon unless I'm trying to be regulated and controlled like a nuclear weapon. There comes people I don't gen be their position.

[Miles Bryan]

Okay, so we're telling the story of the AI backlash that's emerged out of, you know, emerged and grown out of, you know, a lot of what the AI industry is telling us about what's going to happen. And this is a movement that kind of took the AI industry off guard, left them a little flat footed. But it's been gathering steam. It's bipartisan, it has a kind of Big ten coalition. You don't see much in American politics these days. And now you do have top AI leaders and companies trying to face it head on and try to deal with it, notably in some policy papers. I don't know if that's going to make much of a difference, but OpenAI put out a memo and I think Anthropic did too recently, kind of making case for changing the social contract in the AI era. Can you talk about what they said?

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, this is really interesting. So a couple months ago OpenAI put out this paper called Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age, which was kind of a Policy white paper where they were like, we're just throwing out some ideas. We think that AI is going to create the equivalent of the industrial revolution. It's going to require a new social contract between capital and labor. It's going to require some big government policies. And we're not going to commit to these, but we're just going to throw some ideas out. And what was most surprising about it is usually when corporations talk about their policy ideas, you expect pretty narrow, pretty narrow and incremental things. But the OpenAI paper was like, maybe we should have a 32 hour work week. Maybe OpenAI should contribute its equity to a public wealth fund that gets redistributed to all Americans. We should combat the concentration of power in companies like OpenAI. And you know, they said some normal stuff too, like we should give AI chatgpt to all the libraries, which is like what I expect from a company. But I think what people are actually surprised by was that it was a very politically progressive set of proposals. And when I asked them, are you guys going to fund this stuff? Are you lobbying for it? They were a little vague. But they did say we are talking to people on Capitol Hill and we're talking to people in the admin about ideas, including this public wealth fund. And I think that is true. I think I've heard elsewhere that the AI labs are in conversation with people in government about these sort of big redistributive mechanisms which I think they increasingly see as, as essential to keeping people on board with the AI project is people have to feel like they can

[Christy from Lululemon]

share in the world.

[Miles Bryan]

It's making me think about the historical comparison you made before to transition to factory work and the way that unions and workers were brought into that as a way to channel people's energy and give them a sense of agency in their own lives and route them away from violence or other destructive things. Is that right?

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I think so. I mean, these days the us the vast majority of people are not in a union. So that's not going to be the path, path we take today. But like, who are we going to negotiate with? It probably is Congress, the, you know, the national government. One thing I joke sometimes is I wouldn't be surprised if at some point next year we all get a check in the mail that's like gold foil, like Trump X OpenAI. Here's your AI Bucks.

[Miles Bryan]

That's our AI Bucks. We can, we can, we can spend that on our AI client, you know, to make a purchase via an AI sale. Do you have any sense of how these discussions are going over in the Trump administration or with high level Democrats. Like sounds like it's pretty early, but what do you hear from your D.C. sources?

[Jasmine Sun]

I think it's pretty early. I think that's right. Hard to make any predictions. My sense is that, you know, the progressive Democrats, people like Bernie Sanders, people like Elizabeth Warren and Ro Khanna, who have also introduced pretty sweeping AI plans and, and made AI kind of a center point of their recent messaging, do not trust the AI companies. Right. Which I think is very fair. They'll look at things like the level of opposition to the California billionaires tax that Rokana proposed and it's like a one time 5% tax on billionaires and immediately the Google co founders are like, we're leaving the state. And so I think these people say, yeah, OpenAI can talk a big game, whatever, but when it comes down to it, we see over and over that people protect their own wealth. So until it happens, I'm not buying it.

[Miles Bryan]

There's not a lot of trust built up there.

[Jasmine Sun]

No, no, definitely not. And so like, I don't think that the Democrats particularly trust these corporations when they put out their white papers. And I think that's a fair position to hold.

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[Jevony Representative]

foreign.

[Miles Bryan]

Competitor in the AI race. And it certainly has all the conditions for a populist pushback to AI. Youth unemployment in China is really high. AI technology is in some ways more advanced in taking over real world jobs there. Like I was watching a video about, you know, fully automated factories or a robot and a robot pharmacist. But you are the rare technology reporter from America who gets to spend time in China and you wrote a piece that surprised me where you found there wasn't really any populist backlash to AI. Why not?

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I was really interested in this question because I was finishing reporting my New York Times piece or writing it I guess, while I was in China for a few weeks talking to both AI people and non AI people there. So the main thing I would say is the reason there's not a big populist backlash in China is because there's not a lot of like social unrest and populist backlashes against anything. Because if the, the entire MO of the Chinese government, the number one priority is domestic social stability, is keeping everything under control domestically, any whisper of a protest gets shut down. That's why they have such strong speech controls. And so one is that I don't think China has much of a culture of resistance in general, whether that's in workplaces, politically, whatever. I'm not saying that there's no people who are dissenting. And so I think that has a cultural effect too. Right. Because people don't really it as useful or as an option to do so. And so when I talk to like family members of mine, they might be annoyed about various reason things going on with AI. But fundamentally the idea of opposing AI is seen as like almost unimaginable. Because the other thing for China is that people who are, if you're like 50 and you live in China, you're a middle aged person, you've lived through so many political, economic, technological revolutions in your lifetime. And so technology has always gone hand in hand with incredible economic advancement, with being lifted out of poverty. Poverty and it's sort of been the process of modernization has both been aggressive. Like there has been a lot of disruption in China, but it's also been one, something that the party has not offered opportunities to resist and two, something that I think most Chinese people still see as an inevitability that was mostly good for most people.

[Christy from Lululemon]

Right.

[Jasmine Sun]

Because in fact people's incomes did increase by dramatic amounts alongside the technological change. And so as a result, I think that people have a kind of similar attitude towards AI where it's much less about can I stop the AI wave and more how can I take advantage of the AI wave to get ahead economically? If I use these different AI tools, I'm going to be the one to get the job when other people can't. And if I don't for some reason, then there's 1,000 people in line behind me who are going to be very happy to do so. So I think it's almost this more pragmatic attitude where technology is seen as inevitable. It's seen as part of the process of economic modernization and advancement. And so people are much more thinking led, like, you know, how do I leverage it for myself?

[Miles Bryan]

You know, we were talking about this deep pessimism about what technology can bring us here in the United States. I think a lot of people look around and go like, well, the last couple of decades we don't have a, we don't have a cure for all cancer yet. But we sure have seen like our lives get worse in a lot of ways because of technology, because of social media or whatever. And then that, that pessimism probably fuels the, the backlash to AI, the skepticism about whether AI could ever deliver on its promises. And that experience is just not the same in China and probably much of the rest of the world where technological progress has been a lot faster and more concrete in people's lives.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, I mean my 90 year old grandfather was like, I would love an elder care robot that could help me do tasks around the house so I don't have to rely on my kids because I want more freedom and more mobility. And it is seen as more of a thing to help your individual goals. I mean, even you mentioned the robot factories or the pharmacies. And one thing that was interesting when I visited the, the robot pharmacy was one the PR people would happily say, yep, we're doing these robots because human workers take too many smoke breaks and bathroom breaks and it's too long to train.

[Miles Bryan]

Which is something that a PR person

[Jasmine Sun]

in the US would never say. But you know, in the US they're probably thinking the same thing. They just won't say it. And then second of all the other things you mentioned was this allows our pharmacy to operate 247 because there's a lot of people who need pharmaceuticals in the middle of the night who want to order them on the doordash equivalent. And previously there's actually labor shortage. Chinese workers were not willing to work night shifts. And so actually these pharmacies are offering real consumer surplus where now I don't remember what percentage, but like a significant percentage of orders to these pharmacies come in the middle of the night when there are no other pharmacies available and open. And even with the factories, part of the issue is that Chinese workers don't want to do factory work anymore. Young people don't want to work in the factories, and so everyone actually supports factory automation.

[Miles Bryan]

That anecdote is really interesting because I feel like it gets at. At the promise and peril of AI and sort of the role of the backlash movement, which I'm kind of wrestling with how I feel about. Because on the one hand, I do want to live an era of abundance where everything is cheap and easy to make, because factories can make it all the time with machine workers that don't require anything. I want to live in the future we were promised of flying cars and everything working well. But I also don't want to lose my job or see humanity wiped out by like an angry machine God.

[Jasmine Sun]

Totally. Yeah. I mean, I agree. Like, I, I like Whamos. I think they are safer. I would prefer that for that. The safer robot car drive me around so that I don't have to. I'm not a good driver. No one should let me drive. But yeah. And so I also wrestle with some of the same things, you know, to

[Miles Bryan]

close out the conversation. Let's come back to the United States. AI populism is, is brewing as a political force. We've seen it manifest in a couple of races. So, but it's early. We've got the midterms, and then we've got the presidential election. How do you think it's going to affect where American politics goes this November and in 28?

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, my sense is that this November it's going to be more about state and local races where AI really shows up. I'm going to be spending a bit of time in Michigan and Wisconsin this summer to tour some of the data center sites that are facing the most opposition and also because they're contested governors in Senate races, where AI in data centers have become sort of a core issue in both, both states, which I'm pretty interested to learn about. I think that the 2028 election, the presidential primary and election is really where I expect to see AI become a center point of the conversation. And I think that'll be Especially true if we actually start to see some of the employment impacts that people are expecting. As soon as we get a 2% rise in unemployment, if that actually happens, I think people are going to be very upset and we should expect a ton of focus on that issue. The other thing that I'll note with politics is that, and you're already seeing this a bit, there's a lot of political opportunism, I expect, where politicians are likely to actually raise the salience of AI above where people might ordinarily care about it because it's sort of become this convenient buggy. Man, it polls so poorly. People are so anti AI and anti data centers. On average, AI billionaires are so unsympathetic that no matter what your policy program is, AI is a great reason to do it. And so I think that a lot of politicians who are being clever about it are going to use AI and move it into the center of the conversation. Raises salience in order to manufacture urgency for some of the proposals that they're really excited about. So it's definitely something I'm watching for.

[Miles Bryan]

28, I want to close with where you are in San Francisco. You're kind of in the eye of the AI storm there. How has your reporting on the AI backlash changed how you feel or how you see your neighbors?

[Jasmine Sun]

One of the themes I've been thinking about the most is just the insularity of San Francisco and the insularity of the AI industry. I know a lot of people working in AI who literally don't have friends who do not work in the AI industry. These people are working 100 hour weeks. Their companies are like their entire social life. It is absorptive. And I think the thing that I often think when I'm talking to people, especially when we talk about these messaging issues that some of the AI leaders have had, is do you hear yourself? Do you hear how you sound? And I think that a lot of people in the AI industry have lost the ability to hear themselves and have lost the ability to empathize with what somebody who is not in the AI industry might think of their goals and their work and their views. And that's sort of what's creating some of these big gaps is when you say, yeah, there's a 20% chance we all die, but I'm building it anyway, or, yeah, we're going to have mass job disruption in the short term, but in the future we'll have robots and ubi. I think people genuinely don't realize sometimes how undesirable that world sounds to a lot of other people in our big country, in our big world. And so it's made me hope and want a lot of folks here to just also get out more and try talking to somebody else.

[Christy from Lululemon]

Because.

[Jasmine Sun]

Because their utopias or the utopias that people imagine in San Francisco are very different from, I think, the utopias that a lot of other folks do.

[Miles Bryan]

So touch grass and listen to vox's the Gray Area podcast to have a better sense of what's going on. Before I outro you, Jasmine, remind me where people can read your work.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah, so the best place to find my work is my substack, jasmine.substack.com I also freelance for other places. I'm a contributor at the Atlantic, but I usually send out links to everything on my substack. So that's the best place.

[Miles Bryan]

Jasmine sun, thank you so much for joining us on the Gray Area.

[Jasmine Sun]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Miles Bryan]

Okay, I hope you enjoyed hearing from Jasmine sun on this episode as much as I did. As always, we want to know what you think too. So drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] or leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. And once you're finished with that, go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. This episode was produced by Thor Neuer and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Kristen Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch. Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Bright Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up, and if you decide to sign up because of the show, let us know.

[Jasmine Sun]

Sam.