Signs that AI could lead to massive job displacement are already piling up: entry-level job postings in the US have sunk 35% by 2023, Mass layoffs have swept Big Tech and indeed AI leaders themselves they warn of what is to come.
Backstage at the Axios AI Summit in Washington on Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said a venture capitalist recently told him he’s writing software investments at zero in large part because of Anthropic’s Claude moves, and a major law firm told him it’s not hiring first-year partners because AI might one day work for lawyers.
Warner says the fear of AI-related job losses is “palpable,” even as data from an AI firm suggests AI has yet to start taking jobs. As these fears grow, they bleed into a different battle, which is who should foot the bill.
Warner has a proposal: tax the data centers powering the AI boom and use that revenue to help workers make the transition. It has yet to legislate, but the idea is gaining urgency as public anger toward artificial intelligence and data centers grows.
Across the United States, there has been a push for data centers, including a bill introduced Wednesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), calling for data center moratorium. The most pressing concerns are noise, pollution and rising electricity costs. But there’s a strong resentment beneath those concerns, a resistance to suffering the potential negative consequences of having a data center in your backyard fueling technology that some fear will replace workers.
Warner does not intend to support his colleagues’ bill. On stage at the event, he said: “A moratorium on data centers just means that China will move faster and that’s a point where we can’t lose.”
We don’t need to put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to artificial intelligence and data centers, he added. And while Warner believes in strict requirements that ensure data centers don’t pass on water and electricity costs to residents, he told TechCrunch he believes there’s another way for communities to export their “pound of flesh” in a way that addresses underlying job loss fears.
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“I’ve thought for a long time that there’s an obligation on the industry to help solve this and help pay for it, but one of the questions I asked was, who should pay?” Warner told TechCrunch. “It should be the chip makers, Jensen [Huang, Nvidia’s CEO]? Should it be the big language model companies? Should it be the Goldman Sachs of the world using these tools to cut a number of first-year partners?”
Ultimately, he said, he thinks “the easiest place to extract the pound of flesh is probably going to be out of the data centers.”
This could look like allocating data center tax revenue to train new nurses or fund AI upgrade programs — as long as there is a “tangible benefit to communities” as they navigate this economic transition imposed by AI companies.
Warner sees it as a way to balance the need to build data centers with some obligation to communities to bear their costs
The idea is not without precedent. Warner pointed to Henrico County, Virginia, which used tax revenue from a local data center start a new affordable housing plan.
Finding a way to connect the data centers to a tangible benefit to the community will be necessary, he says, because otherwise, “the forks go out.”
The public mood suggests he could be up to something. According to recent NBC News pollAI has a lower public approval rating than Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with 46% of registered voters viewing AI negatively compared to only 26% viewing it positively. In Virginia, this occurs in a sentence to to abolish state tax breaks to build data centers, costing the state and localities nearly $2 billion a year in lost tax revenue in one of the largest data center markets in the world. Warner says other states may follow suit.
AI and data centers, he said, “are easy to demonize.”
