Anyone who doubts that a populist disquiet is brewing against artificial intelligence should look at Ron DeSantis. There are many reasons the Florida governor failed in his campaign for the presidency two years ago. An inability to identify issues that move Americans was not one of them. At a time when many members of his party were making their peace with wokeism, he was excising it from his state’s university system. When politicians were locking down their constituents during Covid, he was opening up Florida.
Now, in his final year as governor and plotting his next move, DeSantis has found another crusade. Even as the build-out of artificial-intelligence (AI) infrastructure is being credited for nearly all U.S. growth over the past year, DeSantis is urging his followers to reject the “transhumanist” strain in AI technology “with every fiber of our being.”
Democrats have until recently had little to say on AI beyond lamenting “algorithmic discrimination” and other such wokeries. But there, too, things are evolving. At the end of the year Bernie Sanders told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union that the time had come to consider a moratorium on the construction of new data centers. Though its contours are still barely visible, a political movement against AI is taking shape.
