The AI election
Today, Explained
The episode explores the disconnect between national polling, which shows low interest in AI as a voting issue, and the localized political movemen
Key takeaways
- While NYT/Siena polling shows less than 1% of voters prioritize AI, local Michigan residents are actively protesting data center developments.
- Will Lawrence is campaigning on a 12-month moratorium for building data centers in Michigan to ensure public oversight.
Main topics
- AI and Data Center Politics
- Michigan Congressional Campaign
Notable quotes
The risks outweigh the benefits.
Conclusion
The episode highlights that localized infrastructure developments can
Transcript preview
Speaker 6 (0:00) AI panic is everywhere. Speaker 1 (0:02) Artificial intelligence is taking over. Robots from OpenAI hacking into another company. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Speaker 6 (0:13) But where is that panic really coming from? According to a poll from The New York Times in Siena, only 1 % of voters listed artificial intelligence or data centers as their most important voting issue. I'm an old Speaker 5 (0:27) school person. Speaker 6 (0:28) I don't care about AI. Speaker 5 (0:30) You're saying that doesn't register for you. Speaker 6 (0:32) And sometimes I wonder if the freak out about rogue AI systems and superintelligence is something that's only consuming us here on the coast. Do they care about AI in so-called real America? What people in my district are saying is we think the risks outweigh the benefits. This week on America Actually, I'm talking to Michigan congressional candidate Will Lawrence, a political activist turned politician, on why he shaped his entire campaign around confronting the AI revolution. Let's dig in. Speaker 3 (1:12) Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox. Speaker 2 (1:49) I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Sofia Coppola. Sofia is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. We chat about the hilarious way that we met, our shared love of Paris, and what influences her iconic personal style. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube. or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. Speaker 6 (2:27) Artificial intelligence has gotten so much attention this cycle. First, it was data centers, which we covered early on back in New Jersey. Can you just give us a sense of, like, what we're outside right now? This Speaker 4 (2:39) is the new data center in Vineland, New Jersey. Everyone Speaker 6 (2:42) hates automated license plate readers. And flock cameras have become so unpopular that Democratic and Republican communities are backtracking from their commitments with them. We already know that AI is broadly unpopular in polling, but to what extent is it a voter priority? And what can even be done at this point? To help us understand, I've invited Will Lawrence, the Democratic candidate for Michigan's Battleground 7 congressional district, to talk about the politics of AI. For most of his life, Will was an activist. He co-founded the Sunrise Movement, the environmental activist group known for its civil disobedience. And he was considered a long-shot candidate for his primary. But he won through a focus on data centers. But Speaker 5 (3:28) what we know right now is that it's being used to make the rich and powerful still richer and more powerful. Speaker 6 (3:34) Lawrence called for a 12-month moratorium on building data centers in Michigan. And his supporters chanted, data centers lost, at his victory party. Like a lot of the left, Will has evolved with the time. And these days... He talks a little bit less about climate change and more about combating big tech. He joins me for this episode in New York. Well, Lawrence, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me here. Part of the reason we wanted to talk to you is because I think what you've been up to out in Michigan has been so interesting, but we want to start kind of with your political career before. You have a long history of activism, participated in protests early in high school, were arrested for chaining yourself to an oil pipeline. How did you catch the activism bug? Speaker 5 (4:17) So I'm a millennial. I'm 36. So, you know, war broke out when I was just entering middle school and seemed like a big problem. I was like, why are we? blowing each other up. I learned about climate change. I grew up in Michigan, loving the lakes, loving our water, and learned about how that was being polluted and how we were also polluting the whole climate. So these seemed like big problems to me when I was a young person, and I felt like maybe human nature was the problem and I needed to drop out of society and go live in the woods or something. You had that. Speaker 6 (4:44) That was Speaker 5 (4:45) the original thought. I Speaker 6 (4:45) had Speaker 5 (4:45) that thought, yeah, when I was in high school. But then I met people who introduced me to organizing and social movements, and I learned that, okay, there have been bad times throughout our history. bad people get a lot of power and they use it to do bad, but there are people who are working to do better who are fighting from the bottom up, and that just really gave me my meaning and my purpose in my life. I was like, okay, I want to be one of those people. Speaker 6 (5:08) I mean, there's a lot of high schoolers who have that thought. Not all of them are training themselves to oil pipe. Well, this was a few years later. That was when I was like 20. So I'm saying, what's the step between that kind of value recognition and the action, which a lot of folks don't take? Speaker 5 (5:21) So I was involved in clubs and stuff in high school, but I really didn't have a sense of like, you know, a purpose, a vocation, a direction. It was when I went to college, I met people who had, you know, gotten on the bus down to Mississippi in 1964 to register African-Americans to vote and pass the Voting Rights Act. Heard the stories about the Flint sit-down strike in 1937, the women who went on hunger strike in the 1910s to earn the right to vote. And those stories and then learning that actually we can. organized proactively together. That, again, gave me my direction. And Speaker 6 (5:50) then we Speaker 5 (5:50) got very involved in actually a divestment campaign at our college to divest from oil and gas companies, which I Speaker 6 (5:56) got Speaker 5 (5:57) started with that in 2010. And then we worked to unite other students around the country working on that same issue. And then one thing led to another. Speaker 6 (6:04) I want to track kind of the progressive movement from climate change even up until now. But let's kind of start with your congressional run. I mean, when you announced your run for Congress, did you think you would spend this? much time talking about AI, talking about data centers? I sure didn't because I got into the Speaker 5 (6:19) race last August and it really wasn't something many people were talking about. But it was in October that I started getting calls from residents, first in Howell Township and then in Lyon Township and then in Mason, all of which are in my district, where... hyperscale data centers were proposed. And people said, there's this thing going on. It smells fishy. Some of our officials seem like they've signed non-disclosure agreements and we don't like it. And so, you know, I spent my career fighting back against corporate power, standing alongside regular people. So it made sense that I would. be there to listen to them and Speaker 6 (6:52) then stand alongside them. I wonder what those initial conversations were like. You know, we went to New Jersey to hear about kind of a town hall of people being opposed to data centers. And I got to say, the concerns were varied, right? Some of it was environmental. Some of it was about electricity prices. Some of it was about a process that they feel like we're leaving them out. What were you hearing? Speaker 5 (7:10) Yeah. It's all those things. It's the concerns about water usage, energy bills, property values, noise pollution, light pollution, concern about all those things. But really, it's about control, I think, above all. Who decides? Because people feel like they just are not really given any say-so in the whole matter. There's these companies with... hundreds of billions of dollars from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. They come in, they sign the local officials to NDAs, and then it's like the decision has already been made and people have just got to grin and bear it. And they say, we don't trust you. Speaker 6 (7:42) We Speaker 5 (7:42) don't Speaker 6 (7:43) trust you to do right by our