Faster, Please!

Americans are gloomy about the future (even one without ubiquitous data centers, it seems). And of the 59 percent of us who say our country’s best years are behind us, at least according to Pew Research polling, I would guess some significant number actively fear what tomorrow might bring. Not that I blame them a whole lot, really. For years, climate alarmists have warned that global warming risks ecological and civilizational collapse—that, unless we learn to live less well.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Let’s start with a short lesson in business history for America's AI companies and hyperscalers. The public’s trust and approval—its “social license” to operate—is rarely lost quickly, nor does it vanish after a single event. The nuclear industry offers an illuminating case study.

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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Call them super-optimists, singularitarians, or collectively the San Francisco Consensus. If these folks are right about the ongoing pace of improvement in AI capabilities and the nearly limitless upside (or downside from the doomer perspective) of those capabilities, sometime sooner rather than later, we will enter technological Terra Incognita, an undiscovered country for which we have no map.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Big changes are happening in the domains of space, energy, medicine, and, of course, artificial intelligence. Whether that change leads to sustainable, pro-growth progress or a retreat into stagnation may depend on how we implement it.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Given that I wrote a book titled The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, it should come as no surprise that I take strong issue with any assertion that self-described conservatives should oppose current and future advances in artificial intelligence. I couldn’t disagree more.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: I feel pretty confident that today’s advanced AI models are already a significant general-purpose technology that will generate a sustained boost in productivity and economic growth—that, as well as scientific and technological progress. It’s also quite plausible their impact will be substantially more than that as they continue to evolve. Really great times for Up Wingers. But timelines, timelines, timelines.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: With the massive buildout of data centers has come an equally massive backlash. They’ve been blamed for higher electricity bills, taking up too much water, and pushing out farmland. All this has led to a public outcry and efforts against their construction. But how much of the criticism is warranted? Has one of America’s fastest-growing industries become a political scapegoat?

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in Reason? how infinite in faculty, in forme, and moving how expresse and admirable in Action, how like an Angel in apprehension, how like a God? Everyone has a favorite clip on social media that’s from a film they’ve never quite gotten around to watching.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Ask any normie American—one not terminally online (I’m assuming those descriptors have yet to become redundant)—why they dislike the new data center going up outside town, and their opposition will be prosaic rather than cinematic. Some combo of “it draws too much power, uses too much land, drinks too much water”—or even all of the above.