At the same time, the labor leaders I spoke with were hardly AI cheerleaders. Bair’s working groups in Pennsylvania are negotiating agreements to limit AI in call centers, hospitals, and classrooms. In his words: “We realize there is a time and place for AI but not at the expense of employees. AI is accelerating the displacement, but we’ve seen it coming in many shapes and forms.” McConnell told me his members raise concerns about AI, but that he doesn’t think moratoria are the solution. “Stopping construction by itself does not create an AI policy or protect workers from automation.” Even his members’ support for the build-out has limits, he was careful to add: “Enthusiasm does not mean blind support.”
It’s important to mention that their skepticism collides with a lack of options. The federal government has spent decades declining to seriously invest in our country. Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was a partial step, but it was nowhere near enough: even after it passed, the American Society of Civil Engineers still projected a $3.7 trillion gap over the next ten years between planned investment and “a state of good repair.” And that assumes current funding levels hold; the law’s authorizations expire in 2026. There is no New Deal on offer to employ the trades for a generation.
And so, the trades are stuck in an impossible position, one they’ve been in before. In a sense, none of this is new. Emergent technology often requires a significant upfront labor investment while threatening jobs in the long run. In the words of Todd Vachon, a labor studies professor at Rutgers: “Any legislation that phases out one form of technology in favor of another is going to draw opposition from the union supporting the technology being eliminated, while the union representing workers manufacturing the new technology will be supportive of it.” Anne Lofaso — a law professor at the University of Cincinnati — cited coal as “a very tight analogy.” The well-paid union mining jobs were always partly myth: many weren’t union, many weren’t safe, and the jobs disappeared as the technology improved. “Data centers are similar,” she told me: a promise of good union jobs, hazards for the workers, environmental costs for the communities making the greatest sacrifices.
But there’s only so far historical analogies can go. In Vachon’s words: “What feels different with AI is that this friction is pretty broadly felt and breaks labor into two distinct categories of who is and who isn’t threatened by AI, and it mostly falls along the line of blue-collar vs. white-collar workers.”
Vachon hit upon something that’s always bothered me about the data center backlash. Technology — almost by definition — has always replaced jobs. And for centuries, the professional class largely filed it under progress. Inevitable, even. But now that the automation is coming for people who went to college, pausing it has become a mainstream idea. If lawyers were asked to give up a decade of work to protect electricians’ jobs, would they? History suggests probably not.
That doesn’t mean we don’t need a pause. But construction isn’t the root of the problem. The root of the problem is AI. People don’t like it, don’t trust it, and don’t know what it’s going to do to our society. Data centers have existed for decades; we don’t see widespread protests outside a hospital’s server room (the erroneous conflation of all data centers with AI data centers was cited by multiple union leaders). In the same Annenberg survey, 68 percent of Americans said the government has done “too little” to regulate AI. A July Emerson College poll found 63 percent of voters concerned about AI, versus 14 percent excited. For Meyer, the reason so many workers oppose data centers — including, per one recent poll, a majority of union households in New York — comes down to AI itself. Specifically, who gains and who pays. “The benefits are so concentrated and the costs are so massive,” he told me. “People don’t like Big Tech billionaires trying to bully or bribe to get what they want.” The people he talks to “feel like AI is being forced on all of society” and see fighting data centers locally as “the best way to make an impact and exert some agency.”
People are scared of AI, and we’re so far away from even the most basic regulation. In July — just days after OpenAI disclosed that two of its models escaped a testing environment and hacked another AI company (cool!) — Congressmen Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) introduced the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act, which is exactly what it sounds like: a requirement that the most powerful AI systems be built with an off switch. Imagine Ford trying to sell a car without a brake. I generally hate the term “commonsense regulation” (who doesn’t think their own ideas are common sense?), but come on. This is common sense. A month later, the bill has gone nowhere. It’s challenging to even talk about AI without answers to basic questions like “How do you turn it off?” “Is it a bubble?” “Will it tank the economy?” “Will it channel wealth exclusively to the top 1% while everyone else suffers?” “Will it kill us all?” AI regulation is about far more than just the existential threat: it’s also about whether it will perpetuate America’s destructive and expanding economic inequality.
There is no mystery about why we haven’t yet regulated the AI companies directly. In what I believe will be remembered as the most iconic image of Trump’s second term, tech CEOs lined the second row of his inauguration, ahead of his own incoming cabinet. They had paid for the view, a million dollars apiece to the inaugural fund, and the corruption has only continued since then. The return on investment has been excellent. Republicans tried twice to attach a ten-year moratorium on state AI laws to must-pass legislation; when Congress wouldn’t cooperate, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to challenge state AI laws and threatened to withhold federal broadband money from states that regulate the technology. The federal government is not merely declining to put guardrails on AI; it is actively dismantling the ones states try to build.
