Progressives stand against progress AI, data centers, cars, nuclear power, anything that would make our lives better

I recently came across a news item that made me reflect on our strange political environment —always a painful experience.Bernie Sanders, the ancient socialist senator from Vermont, delivered a tirade against artificial intelligence, claiming that it had provided the tools for unscrupulous hackers to break into unauthorized bank accounts.Even as he railed about an “evisceration of our privacy rights,” Sanders introduced legislation to “ban artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause advanced AI development.”It turned out that Sanders got his facts wrong.There had been no AI-induced assault on bank accounts, just a new way of accessing these accounts that was authorized by the users but not the banks.But I was left wondering: Did Sanders really think you could stop the global spread of a revolutionary new technology by passing a law?And if you could — which you can’t — why on earth would you want to do it?Why would a politician who considers himself “progressive” declare war on the future?When one delves into the matter, a pattern emerges.Virtually all AI doomers — from politicians like Sanders and fellow senator Elizabeth Warren, through tech barons like Sam Altman, to “effective altruism” practitioners like Sam Bankman-Fried — hail from the left side of the political spectrum.They are progressives against progress.

They are terrified of change. Perceived objectively, without preconceptions, the left turns out to be radically conservative – trying, in case after case, to freeze our restless society in place.A good example is the curious hostility towards data centers — the server farms that stand upstream of the AI platforms.My state of Virginia is pretty much the galactic headquarters for data centers, with hundreds of installations that have created tens of thousands of jobs and generated billions in revenue for the Commonwealth.Yet Abigail Spanberger, progressive governor of Virginia, early in her tenure signed an executiv...