Meme - "Technologies People Resisted - And the Fears That Didn't Age Well
1. 1860s - Steam Locomotives & Rail Travel
"OAKRIDGE"
"NO IRON HORSES THROUGH OUR TOWN!"
"Too Fast! Too Loud! Too Reckless!"
Cow: "Uh oh ..."
Resistance: Too loud, too fast, too disruptive.
Fear: "Traveling this fast will ruin people's health!"
Fear: "The cows will stop giving milk!"
2. 1880s-1890s - Electric Lights
"Electricity? No Thanks!"
"BRIGHT IDEA OR BAD IDEA?"
Resistance: Why replace safe familiar lamps?
Fear: "Electric light is unnatural!"
Fear: "It will damage eyesight and disturb sleep forever!"
"DAILY HERALD: ELECTRIC LIGHT-A DANGEROUS FAD?"
3. 1900s-1920s -Telephones & Automobiles
"WHY TALK THROUGH A WIRE?"
"Horseless Carriages? Ridiculous!"
Resistance: New machines changing daily life too quickly.
Fear: "Telephones will destroy real conversation!"
Fear: "Cars will make society reckless and horses obsolete!"
4. 1980s-2000s-Personal Computers & the Internet
"KEEP IT REAL!"
"WELCOME TO THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY!"
Resistance: Why trust screens instead of paper?
Fear: "Computers will make people stop thinking for themselves!"
"BACK TO THE REAL WORLD!"
Fear: "The internet will instantly destroy books and real life!"
"THE INTERNET: TOO BIG! TOO RISKY! TOO WEIRD!"
"Every era has new tools. People often fear change - and many fears turn out to be exaggerated."
Left wingers are terrified of change and don't learn from history
Richard Hanania on X - "Trial lawyers lobby against self-driving cars because they need people to get injured and die. I’m surprised people can be this consciously evil. Usually you need a way to justify what you’re doing."
Trial Lawyers Lobby Against Autonomous Vehicles - "Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries... The American Association for Justice, the trial lawyers’ lobby, has been a prominent opponent to AV legislation (see also reports here). (They have been joined by Democrats worried about labor and demanding that heavy trucks be excluded)... In my view, product liability isn’t useful as a safety device in this field. Instead, the solution is simple. Every car should be required to be insured, regardless of driver. Indeed, Waymo vehicles are already insured at $5 million liability coverage per vehicle, far higher levels than most human drivers are covered. The UK’s Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 does basically this–a single insurer covers the vehicle whether the human or the automated system is driving; the victim is compensated directly by the insurer, no need to establish product defect; the insurer then subrogates against the manufacturer if the software was at fault. Victims get paid fast, manufacturers face the cost of their defects through recoveries and premiums, and the high-transaction costs (i.e. lawyer fees!) and messy manufacturer-versus-victim litigation is replaced by insurer-versus-manufacturer bargaining between repeat players who settle efficiently. The great thing about this system is that insurance almost certainly deters better than tort: fleets generate data that makes experience rating precise, so insurers become continuous safety regulators, whereas litigation delivers a noisy, lagged, lottery like signal depending on safety-irrelevant factors of the jury and the locale."
Why we should thank pigeons for our AI breakthroughs | MIT Technology Review - "People looking for precursors to artificial intelligence often point to science fiction by authors like Isaac Asimov or thought experiments like the Turing test. But an equally important, if surprising and less appreciated, forerunner is Skinner’s research with pigeons in the middle of the 20th century. Skinner believed that association—learning, through trial and error, to link an action with a punishment or reward—was the building block of every behavior, not just in pigeons but in all living organisms, including human beings. His “behaviorist” theories fell out of favor with psychologists and animal researchers in the 1960s but were taken up by computer scientists who eventually provided the foundation for many of the artificial-intelligence tools from leading firms like Google and OpenAI. These companies’ programs are increasingly incorporating a kind of machine learning whose core concept—reinforcement—is taken directly from Skinner’s school of psychology and whose main architects, the computer scientists Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto, won the 2024 Turing Award, an honor widely considered to be the Nobel Prize of computer science. Reinforcement learning has helped enable computers to drive cars, solve complex math problems, and defeat grandmasters in games like chess and Go—but it has not done so by emulating the complex workings of the human mind. Rather, it has supercharged the simple associative processes of the pigeon brain. It’s a “bitter lesson” of 70 years of AI research, Sutton has written: that human intelligence has not worked as a model for machine learning—instead, the lowly principles of associative learning are what power the algorithms that can now simulate or outperform humans on a variety of tasks. If artificial intelligence really is close to throwing off the yoke of its creators, as many people fear, then our computer overlords may be less like ourselves than like “rats with wings”—and planet-size brains. And even if it’s not, the pigeon brain can at least help demystify a technology that many worry (or rejoice) is “becoming human.” In turn, the recent accomplishments of AI are now prompting some animal researchers to rethink the evolution of natural intelligence. Johan Lind, a biologist at Stockholm University, has written about the “associative learning paradox,” wherein the process is largely dismissed by biologists as too simplistic to produce complex behaviors in animals but celebrated for producing humanlike behaviors in computers. The research suggests not only a greater role for associative learning in the lives of intelligent animals like chimpanzees and crows, but also far greater complexity in the lives of animals we’ve long dismissed as simple-minded, like the ordinary Columba livia... Programs trained with a mix of human input and reinforcement learning defeated human experts at chess and Atari. Then, in 2017, engineers at Google DeepMind built the AI program AlphaGo Zero entirely through reinforcement learning, giving it a numerical reward of +1 for every game of Go that it won and −1 for every game that it lost. Programmed to seek the maximum reward, it began without any knowledge of Go but improved over 40 days until it attained what its creators called “superhuman performance.” Not only could it defeat the world’s best human players at Go, a game considered even more complicated than chess, but it actually pioneered new strategies that professional players now use... Sutton, too, dismissed the claims of reasoning as “marketing” in an email, adding that “no serious scholar of mind would use ‘reasoning’ to describe what is going on in LLMs.” Still, he has argued, with Silver and other coauthors, that the pigeons’ method—learning, through trial and error, which actions will yield rewards—is “enough to drive behavior that exhibits most if not all abilities that are studied in natural and artificial intelligence,” including human language “in its full richness.”... If computers can do all that with just a pigeonlike brain, some animal researchers are now wondering if actual pigeons deserve more credit than they’re commonly given... In his most famous experiments, Wasserman trained pigeons to detect cancerous tissue and symptoms of heart disease in medical scans as accurately as experienced doctors with framed diplomas behind their desks. Given his results, Wasserman found it odd that so many psychologists and ethologists regarded associative learning as a crude, mechanical mechanism, incapable of producing the intelligence of clever animals like apes, elephants, dolphins, parrots, and crows... People who care about animals might feel uneasy about a revival in behaviorist theory. The “cognitive revolution” broke with centuries of Western thinking, which had emphasized human supremacy over animals and treated other creatures like stimulus-response machines. But arguing that animals learn by association is not the same as arguing that they are simple-minded.
shako on X - "natives: “yeah so we have huge amounts of unused land. we’d love to rent them to you in exchange for AI industry cash flow to our tribes”
nytimes: “these poor, poor exploited folks. they simply are not smart enough to understand”"
Aakash Gupta on X - "40 out of 86 Brown students scored a perfect 100 on their midterm. Then the professor moved the final in person, and 22 of those perfect scorers never showed up again. He'd suspected AI cheating from the start. The take-home midterm was deliberately harder than usual, yet the class averaged 96 when the historical range is 65 to 80. Some answers contained odd phrasing that matched what ChatGPT produced when he ran the questions through it himself. Roberto Serrano has taught economics at Brown for 34 years. He filed no accusations. He announced the final would be in person, count for half the grade, and that if the two distributions didn't match, the final alone would determine grades. Then the exodus. 27 students never showed up. 22 of them had perfect midterms. Of the 59 who did show, 19 failed. Several signed the exam and turned it in blank. The average fell from 96 to 48, the lowest in the course's history. He never needed a plagiarism detector. The cheaters identified themselves by walking away. A grade distribution became a confession. Here's the part nobody's sitting with. Serrano proved it. He sent the distributions to Brown's dean and provost. The provost never responded. The academic committee's reply amounted to calling it "a wake-up call." The students who bailed before the final walked away clean. Every university in America is now grading two populations, students and students plus ChatGPT, on one curve. The honest kids in Serrano's class watched a 96 average get set by machines, then sat a real final against it. The cheaters lost nothing. That's the incentive structure now, and it grades itself."
Sam Lyman on X - "NEW: BPI research reveals that a Marxist-Leninist group with documented ties to China has been a critical mobilizer in efforts that have blocked or delayed $23.6 billion in AI investment in the US. Its scalps include 10 data center moratoria, 1 permanent data center ban, and 4 rejected or scrapped AI projects. In Part II of our foreign influence investigation, BPI exposes the Party for Socialism and Liberation (or PSL) as the political arm of Shanghai-based Neville Singham, and lays bare a national campaign launched by the party to stop America’s data center buildout. Singham is the subject of multiple federal investigations into his reported ties to the CCP. Our research uncovers the anti-data-center organizing of his activist vehicle, the PSL, across 21 campaigns in 14 states, in roles ranging from lead organizer to one member of a broader coalition. This report adds to the mounting evidence that China and its surrogates are committed to stopping America’s data center buildout so that Beijing can gain the advantage in the AI race."
Crémieux on X - "Reminder that there are two types of anti-data center activists:
- Supporters of the Chinese Communist Party
- Stooges of the Chinese Communist Party
Anti-data center activism helps America's enemies and facilitates America's downfall."
Foreign Influence in the Campaign against American AI | Bitcoin Policy Institute - "international actors are working through state media organizations, nonprofit networks, and dark money groups to shape US policy and public opinion on artificial intelligence. The campaign against American AI is being waged across three vectors of foreign influence:
Foreign state media. Beijing’s English-language outlets — CGTN, China Daily, and Global Times — together with Russia’s RT have run attributed campaigns directly targeting US AI data centers and US export controls while the Chinese state simultaneously subsidizes its own AI buildout.
The CCP-aligned Singham network. A US 501(c)(3) ecosystem funded by Shanghai-based US expatriate Neville Roy Singham, who is currently under congressional inquiry for his reported ties to the CCP, has openly collaborated with China’s official state media organs and spent nearly five years producing parallel domestic content opposing US AI infrastructure, AI labs, and AI export controls.
Foreign-billionaire funding. Multiple foreign-tied charitable vehicles, including those of Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss and British billionaire Alan Parker’s Oak Foundation, have funneled more than $2 billion into US 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) advocacy infrastructure. A significant portion of that money now flows directly into the organizations driving the anti-data-center campaign."
I was told that this was a conspiracy theory and only Kevin O'Leary is making this claim
China fueling anti-data center sentiment across US: Trump admin - "Interior Secretary Doug Burgum agreed during a Tuesday appearance on Fox Business. “Any place that’s trying to build data centers is getting bombarded with foreign-directed propaganda to try to block these from being built,” Burgum said. “This is just another attack on the US and our ability to be competitive.”... he isn’t the only one to arrive at such conclusions — at least three reports from tech and Trump-aligned thinktanks and non-profits, including the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Power the Future and the American Energy Institute, drew similar conclusions about Chinese meddling in US data-center sentiments in studies of their own. “The opposition to US data center construction is not a spontaneous grassroots movement,” a recent American Energy Institute report read. “It is a coordinated campaign financed in substantial part by foreign donors, operating through a network of national advocacy organizations and their local chapters.”"
vittorio on X - "once you look into it, you'll find that the organized "anti-datacenter" campaign is coordinated Marxist propaganda"
Meme - "Anatomy of an Influence Operation: The Campaign against American Al
3 Vectors of Foreign Influence Aimed at Slowing US Al Development
CHINA STATE MEDIA -> Direct State Control -> CCP/China -> OAK FUNDING FOR BRI PROJECTS -> Kristian Parker/Hansjorg Wyss -> FOREIGN Billionaire TRAIL -> ROUTED THROUGH U.S. NONPROFIT INFRASTRUCTURE -> newventurefund/Greenpeace/Oil Change International/sixteenthirty fund/Americans for Financial Reform -> signed. Dec 8, 2025. Food & Water Watch COALITION LETTER. 230+ signatories demanding national moratorium on new US AI data centers -> S. 4214 SANDERS-OCASIO-CORTEZ MORATORIUM ACT Introduced Mar 25, 2026 - 107 days after the coalition letter -> US CAPITOL EVENT ON EXISTENTIAL RISK OF AI. Hosted by Senator Sanders April 29, 2026
CCP/China -> HOUSE INVESTIGATION INTO CCP TIES -> SINGHAM NETWORK. NEVILLE SINGHAM -> CODEPINK. JODIE EVANS, Wife of Neville Singham and Co-Founder of CODEPINK, peoples dispatch, tricOntinental. VIJAY PRASHAD -> SIGNAL BOOSTING ANTI-AI/DATA CENTER MESSAGING -> STATE AND LOCAL DATA
CENTER MORATORIUM BANS
. At least 54 local data-center moratoriums already enacted across US towns and counties.
12 more states currently considering statewide moratorium bills.
CHINA STATE MEDIA -> Xinhua, Global Times, CGTN, China Daily *content amplification*, -> PRC Media Mouthpieces. Founding dean of the state-affiliated Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance. ZENG YI. Premier-appointed Counsellor of China's State Council, chair of its national AI governance committee. XUE LAN -> US CAPITOL EVENT ON EXISTENTIAL RISK OF AI. Hosted by Senator Sanders April 29, 2026"
China uses ChatGPT to sow unrest in America - "China has been using ChatGPT to sow unrest in the US, generating fake images and cartoons in an effort to turn Americans against AI. OpenAI said a “cluster” of accounts based in China had been manipulating its ChatGPT bot to run “covert influence operations” targeting US voters with anti-AI messaging. It said the fraudulent accounts, which were based in China but masked their true location, created memes and pictures that aimed to “amplify divisions or exacerbate public distrust”, with the AI-generated images shared on X. They included material that claimed data centre construction is raising electricity prices in the US for ordinary families, criticism of US tariffs and false allegations that ChatGPT had suffered a data breach. OpenAI said the activity showed Beijing was trying to “gain a strategic advantage in AI development” by turning the US public against data centre development and the technology more broadly... These operators also used the chatbot to generate convincing English-language posts and spread anti-Semitic material in Chinese, including claims that “Jewish capital manipulates public opinion”... In February, OpenAI said Chinese law enforcement officials had used ChatGPT to plan operations for intimidating dissidents around the world. In November, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, found Chinese hackers had used its AI tool to launch a hacking campaign against 30 organisations."
Left wingers are obsessed with Russian interference, but are so easily manipulated by the Chinese
The AI backlash is only getting started - "The buildings summon a vitriol well beyond conventional nimbyism. More Americans say they would be happy with a nuclear reactor next door than a data centre. Even plans to build one in the Utah desert have met with passionate opposition. Data centres can be ugly, it is true. But the opposition reflects the technology’s reputation. ai bosses have spent years warning of a looming job-pocalypse and the danger that an AI-engineered super-virus will make humans extinct. Opponents of data centres variously believe they are shielding the environment, protecting jobs and saving the species—and they are not entirely wrong. Yet this backlash is itself dangerous. AI promises to change the world for the better, much as electricity or the steam engine did. Not long ago, the era-defining problem for the rich world was stagnant economic growth and the populism it unleashed. Now it has a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech. All this could be lost if countries starve the technology of computing power or regulate it into uselessness. Look at mRNA vaccines research, which has been held back after a backlash during the covid-19 pandemic. Scenarios in which some countries give in to popular rage but others forge ahead are also worrying. If America succumbs, it could cede the global ai frontier, and the attendant cyber and military capabilities, to authoritarian China. Europe and Canada are more risk-averse than America. If they choked off AI while the rest of the world kept pushing forward, their losses could be unrecoverable. More than two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, few countries have managed to catch up with the first movers... here are four pointers for politicians and AI companies looking for policies. First, spread the benefits of AI as widely as possible. Blockers need to be shown that their local area will benefit if they get out of the way. Wisely, data-centre firms are beginning to offer funding to nearby towns. Gradually, this approach needs to be broadened to society at large... Second, regulate hard when interventions are needed. The hair-raising prospect of AI-enabled cyber-attacks or bioterrorism is still not taken as seriously as it ought to be. Tackling those issues and others is essential in itself, but it would also weaken arguments to ban or hobble AI indiscriminately. Ideally, these efforts would involve international co-operation. Third, measure everything. The common view that AI is already leading to lay-offs and raising electricity bills is probably wrong. But without better statistics it is hard to be sure. Data centres must contend with viral worries over water usage, a confected issue. (Modern ones drink up no more than other industries, and much less in total than America’s golf courses.) Facts won’t cure misinformation, but their absence worsens it. Britain’s AI Security Institute and new AI Economics Institute may offer models for other countries to follow. Fourth, use AI to make the state better. It is not just the private sector that could use AI to lift productivity. Filing taxes should be a breeze; state-run health-care systems should link up data seamlessly and schools should experiment with ai-powered learning. AI may also make it easier for citizens to monitor what politicians are up to. People are less likely to oppose a technology if it is behind their grandmother’s cancer treatment or helping their child’s education. And they are more likely to trust that the state can oversee it if they believe that government works."
Polymarket on X - "JUST IN: Polaroid unveils an anti-AI billboard claiming that data centers could “drink” up the ocean’s water."
Theo Jaffee on X - "Ironically it takes about 1000x less water to store a photo in a data center for five years than to print it on a Polaroid"
Meme - Steve Everley: "Data center water use, contextualized (chart via @axios)"
"Estimated U.S. water use, select industries. Gallons per day
Cattle - 137.0b
Power plants - 133.0b
Residential water use - 23.3b
Golf courses - 2.0b
Steel production - 1.8b
Data centers - 627.0m"
Usually the cope is that you can eat cattle but not AI, so water for agricultural use doesn't count. Clearly, golf courses and steel are edible too
Meme - "Putting AI water use in context"
"AI vs the world's biggest water users
Al data centers - 0.5 km3/year
Homes - 327 km3/year
Industry - 400 km3/year
Maize (corn) - 770 km3/year
Rice - 992 km3/year
Wheat - 1,087 km3/year
Cattle - 1,260 km3/year
All human water use - 9,090 km3/year"
Alex Veremeyenko on X - "i'm obsessed with what's happening in AI reforestation right now this. Franco-Brazilian startup called MORFO took a patch of land in Brazil that was rock-hard and compacted from years of cattle farming. they replanted it using a single drone. months later the ground was covered n grass, bushes, and small trees. the land came back to life. here's how the whole thing works.
1. drones scan the terrain with high-resolution cameras and sensors
2. AI analyzes the imagery alongside soil samples, moisture levels, slope, and surrounding vegetation
3. the system picks from a catalog of 300+ native species, deciding exactly which plants will thrive in which specific spot
4. the drone fires biodegradable seed pods packed with seeds, nutrients, and moisture at 180 capsules per minute
5. satellite and drone imagery monitors regrowth over time, with AI tracking vegetation cover and biodiversity
6. two people and one drone cover 50 hectares a day. a person planting by hand manages about one hectare.
and MORFO isn't alone. AirSeed in Australia drops 250,000 seed pods per day into bushfire-scarred koala habitat, replanting swamp mahogany that koalas depend on to survive. Flash Forest in Canada fires 50,000 pods daily into wildfire-destroyed boreal forest, planning the replanting alongside Cree Indigenous communities. re-green won Prince William's Earthshot Prize after planting 6 million seedlings across 30,000 hectares of Amazon and Atlantic Forest. five companies across four continents built this same approach independently. nobody coordinated. the physics of the problem demanded it. knowing which seeds belong in which soil used to require years of ecological fieldwork, manual planting crews, and budgets that made large-scale restoration nearly impossible. now two people with a drone and an AI model trained on local soil data can replant 50 hectares before lunch. this is the AI work that'll still matter in 50 years."
Time to demonise data centres again
Chance Lee Bowker | Facebook - "Whenever someone says, "We don't need more data centers," I always wonder... Which part of modern life are they willing to give up? Nearly everything we do every day depends on data centers. The internet. Social media. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, YouTube, and Prime Video. Online gaming. Gmail and Outlook. Text messages, photos, cloud storage, Apple Music and Spotify. Amazon orders. GPS navigation. Video calls. Online banking. Credit card transactions. Smart home devices. Weather forecasts. Now think bigger. Hospitals rely on them for medical records, imaging, diagnostics, and life-saving research. Manufacturers use them to design products and automate factories. Airlines, railroads, trucking companies, and shipping networks use them to move people and goods. Emergency services, cybersecurity, satellites, military communications, and government systems all depend on them. Even our food depends on them. Modern farms use GPS-guided equipment, satellite imagery, AI crop analysis, precision irrigation, weather modeling, and soil monitoring to grow more food while using fewer resources. Conservation depends on them too. Data centers help power systems that track endangered species, monitor forests, predict wildfires, forecast hurricanes, detect earthquakes, and help communities prepare for natural disasters. The reality is simple: Our world doesn't just use data, it runs on it. There isn't a realistic "off switch." We're not going back to a world where businesses, hospitals, schools, farms, and families operate without digital infrastructure. That doesn't mean we ignore environmental concerns. It means we build smarter. More efficient cooling. More renewable energy. Better water management. Better planning. Better technology. The conversation shouldn't be whether we need data centers. They're already as essential as highways, power plants, and water systems. The real question is whether we'll choose to build them responsibly, or pretend we can live without the infrastructure that powers nearly every part of modern life. #DataCenters #DigitalInfrastructure #ArtificialIntelligence #BuildSmarter #Innovation #FutureOfTechnology"
China claims to have developed AI ‘cyber nuclear weapon’ - "A blacklisted Chinese company claims to have developed a “cyber nuclear weapon” that could be used to hack Western companies and governments. Zhou Hongyi, the chief executive of cybersecurity company Qihoo 360, said it had built an AI system that matched the capabilities of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, the most powerful US AI technology. It comes after Five Eyes nations warned that enemies were just months away from being able to carry out devastating cyber attacks... Anthropic claimed Alibaba had “brazenly” sent millions of queries to its Claude bot in an attempt to reverse engineer the AI tool."
