The AI backlash is only getting started

Artificial intelligence faces a growing popular revolt in the West, with US protests blocking nearly $100bn in data centre projects and around 40% of American voters telling pollsters they want AI banned from most industries. In its cover story this week, The Economist argues the backlash is dangerous: AI carries transformative potential comparable to electricity or the steam engine, and throttling it through regulation or public opposition risks ceding the technological frontier — and its military and economic advantages — to China. The magazine's prescription is incremental: spread benefits widely, regulate specific harms hard, measure impacts rigorously, and deploy AI within government itself to build public trust..The Economist.From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..Advances in artificial intelligence have long terrified techies. Lately, voters are feeling the angst, too. AI is unpopular in the West and climbing up the political agenda. The fiercest fights so far have been in America, where protests against data centres have scuppered nearly $100bn-worth of projects, warring AI megadonors have just dumped tens of millions into a Manhattan congressional race and around 40% of voters tell pollsters that they want AI banned from most industries. But spats are breaking out elsewhere: after chipmaking profits soared recently, workers at Samsung in South Korea threatened a strike to secure special payouts.The backlash is only just getting started, because the technology is only just getting started, too. Britain’s flimsy prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has barely said a word about AI. Even Americans still rank it 29th out of 39 election issues.That is bound to change—and battles over data centres offer a hint of the struggles to come. 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.So the stakes are high. Can governments do anything about it? Grand proclamations about the shape of a “social contract” for a post-AI world are good fodder for blog posts but offer little help today. Besides, the unknowns are still large enough to make the exercise almost futile.Better to be incremental. While China’s economy was growing by 10% a year in the 1980s—faster than all but the most extreme forecasts for AI-driven growth—the mantra of its leader Deng Xiaoping was “crossing the river by feeling the stones”: pushing forward iteratively, planning for problems but staying flexible. Deftly handling the AI age will take a similar spirit.To that end, 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, with mechanisms showing people that they have an economic stake in AI’s progress, and will be helped to adapt to disruption through policies such as wage insurance. Only a shared sense of prosperity can temper the toxic who-wins/who-loses politics that emerged in the era of globalisation.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..Read more:.Gen-Z socialism rises on cost-of-living anger and AI anxiety.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.Machine politicsVoters are right to take a close interest in how AI could change their lives. The future will be messy, odd and unpredictable. Persuading them that their interests are being served by disruption has become as important as making AI models better. Failure will bring out more pitchforks—and destroy vast opportunities for humanity. .Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

The AI backlash is only getting started — and the stakes couldn't be higher

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