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First, we fear that AI will do terrible things because the companies selling it told us it would do terrible things. Last year, for example, Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei declared in an interview with Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive overall unemployment as high as 20 percent within 1 to 5 years.

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Second, many ordinary people view AI negatively because they feel that it is being forced on them.

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Third, datacenters are a highly visible reminder of AI’s costs. Datacenters occupy huge tracts of land — one proposed site in Utah will be twice the size of Manhattan. They guzzle electricity and water. When they generate some of their own power, they create major local pollution. Not surprisingly, there is intense opposition to datacenter construction. According to a Reuters Ipsos poll, 57 percent of Americans — two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans — would oppose a datacenter in their neighborhood. Only 14 percent would support one.

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Finally, AI is tightly linked in the public mind with the tech oligarchs who are pushing it. There is widespread awareness of the growing concentration of wealth and power at the top and how this is distorting our politics and harming our society. Aside from the MAGA faithful, Americans overwhelmingly favor government policies to reduce wealth inequality:

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