For some Democrats, this election won’t be the place to do this. But voters seem unusually tuned into the enormous volume of energy that will be needed to fuel any AI future, and into how oligarchic corruption is streamrolling local democratic aspirations. This comes, as Bill McKibben often notes, even as the Iran war and extreme weather horrors are heightening public awareness of our overreliance on fossil fuels, how it enriches petro-oligarchs, and the continued cheapening of alternative energy. Soon enough it will be time to seize the moment to talk about how to move toward powering the AI future we actually want with sun and wind.
Which leads, finally, to the distributional component. In the face of rising fears of AI-driven mass joblessness and exacerbated inequality, Matt Bruenig points out at The Argument that we already have policy tools at the ready to ensure a broadly equitable distribution amid the AI boom. These include socializing some tech profits, doling out dividends to the public from a government-owned investment fund, higher taxes on corporations, expanding the welfare state, and so forth. A more stable, more egalitarian transition is within our reach if we want it.
Perhaps some Democrats disagree with this or that specific idea. But just about every Democrat wants to ensure that the gains of this transition—including whatever major advances it inspires in medicine and other fields—are very broadly shared. Republicans are scrambling to get in sync with public anger by backing some regulation of data centers, and maybe some Republicans sincerely want to act against an AI apocalypse. But there’s zero reason to believe the GOP overall, as a party, has above-board long-term distributional intentions here. Trump has made gestures in the direction of a fairer distribution of tech profits, but he’s also a corrupt liar who’s overseen a very large upward redistribution of wealth, so believe that when you see it.