In a recent article, I compared today’s hue and cry against AI and data centers to the anti-nuclear campaigns that halted U.S. nuclear energy development four decades ago. Now others are picking that theme, most recently Michael Waller in National Review. Meanwhile, the anti-nuclear crowd continues to use the threat of nuclear war as a weapon against U.S. (but not Chinese) use of nuclear energy to power AI-driven data centers. 

While Waller points to Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders opposing AI in partnership with Randi Weingarten, whose American Federation of Teachers helped slam the door on nuclear energy in the 1980s, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists spreads fear that today’s AI systems “can cause nuclear war even if people nominally remain in charge.” 

Way back in 2011, I wrote a review of Deep Green Resistance, whose authors argued that “the enlightened few must rise up in resistance – not to reform, but rather to totally tear down the corporate capitalist economic system and even civilization itself as we know it.” 

In the review, I cited a communique from Arab Spring leaders in Egypt, lauded by the Occupy Wall Street movement, that endorsed Sharia Law as necessary “to ensure that … people never embrace the comforts (or equal rights) of Western civilization. The rationale? “An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things.”The Chinese do not believe this, nor do people worldwide eager to embrace human progress. True, many do ask whether they will be among the beneficiaries.  But blockchain backed by AI........

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