Michelle Goldberg, progressive pundit at the NY Times reports on an anti-AI mood in the country and wonders which political party will lead the movement against artificial intelligence.
What is sad, as a political Green is that the Green Party is not considered as a contender for leading the “movement” against AI. Goldberg assumes the contest will be between the two major parties.
A Green Liberty Caucus, working actively within the Green Party, would take the lead in denouncing AI as a tool for the billionaire class to exercise control of the masses, concentrate more wealth among themselves, obviate the need for human labor in key sectors, and do countless other things.
Certainly AI has good uses, Goldberg covers these, but that isn’t really the issue.
The issue is, why the urgency to build out the vast AI server capacity, and why insist on federal control of the industry. And why deny states’ right to regulate? Big Tech is similarly demanding that states and municipalities cede regulatory authority to site cell towers.
Read Michelle’s essay to get a basic perspective on the problem with AI. Goldberg raises the warning and notices she is in solidarity with a right winger on reasons to resist the rise of AI.
Goldberg has her finger on the pulse of the country.
Green Liberty would provide the Green Party, and candidates running for office, media statements, and position papers, to champion states’ right to regulate AI, and challenge the specter of a billionaire driven technocracy, advanced by the global plutocracy.
Green Liberty advances basic themes around freedom, ecology and justice and demands accountability, transparency and protection for whistleblowers in order to fight the corruption from big money in government and politics.
Green Liberty is inspired by indignation at the iconic state crimes, JFK and other 60’s assassinations; Iran / Contra and Octopus Murders of journalists; September 11th, the Anthrax attack, and all the warmongering these crimes have engendered.
AI is the tip of an iceberg of an emerging technocracy which is opposed to the people having democratic sovereignty. AI is the means for a technocratic, techno-totalitarian technate to consolidate its power.
Against the specter of a dystopian society, Green Liberty calls for an Egalitarian Revolution.
Act local, think global.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/ai-democracy.html
An Anti-A.I. Movement Is Coming. Which Party Will Lead It?
By Michelle Goldberg, NY Times
I disagree with the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, bitterly reactionary right-wing pundit Matt Walsh about basically everything, so I was surprised to come across a post of his that precisely sums up my view of artificial intelligence. “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away,” he wrote in November, adding, “Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us?”
A.I. obviously has beneficial uses, especially medical ones; it may, for example, be better than humans at identifying localized cancers from medical imagery. But the list of things it is ruining is long.
A very partial accounting might start with education, both in the classroom, where A.I. is increasingly used as a dubious teaching aid, and out of it, where it’s a plagiarism machine. It would include the economic sustainability and basic humanity of the arts, as demonstrated by the A.I. country musician who topped a Billboard chart this year. High on the list would be A.I.’s impact on employment, which is already bad — including for those who must navigate a demoralizing A.I.-clogged morass to find jobs — and likely to get worse.
Then there’s our remaining sense of collective reality, increasingly warped by slop videos. A.I. data centers are terrible for the environment and are driving up the cost of electricity. Chatbots appear to be inducing psychosis in some of their users and even, in extreme cases, encouraging suicide. Privacy is eroding as A.I. enables both state and corporate surveillance at an astonishing scale. I could go on.
And what do we get in return for this systematic degradation of much of the stuff that makes life worth living? Well, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has promised marvels. “The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense,” he wrote in June. “It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year.” Yet among the most high-profile innovations that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has announced in 2025 are custom porn and an in-app shopping feature.
It is true that new technologies often inspire dread that looks silly or at least overwrought in retrospect. But in at least one important way, A.I. is more like the nuclear bomb than the printing press or the assembly line: Its progenitors saw its destructive potential from the start but felt desperate to beat competitors to the punch.
In “Empire of A.I.,” Karen Hao’s book about Altman’s company, she quotes an email he wrote to Elon Musk in 2015. “Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing A.I.,” wrote Altman. “I think the answer is almost definitely not.” Given that, he proposed a “Manhattan Project for A.I.,” so that the dangerous technology would belong to a nonprofit supportive of aggressive government regulation.
This year Altman restructured OpenAI into a for-profit company. Like other tech barons, he has allied himself with Donald Trump, who recently signed an executive order attempting to override state A.I. regulations. (Full disclosure: The New York Times is suing OpenAI for allegedly using its articles without authorization to train its chatbots.)
Despite Trump’s embrace of the A.I. industry, attitudes toward the technology don’t break down along neat partisan lines. Rather, A.I. divides both parties. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is a fierce skeptic; this month he proposed an A.I. Bill of Rights that would, among other things, require consumers to be notified when they’re interacting with A.I., provide parental controls on A.I. chatbots and put guardrails around the use of A.I. in mental health counseling. Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders suggested a moratorium on new data center construction. “Frankly, I think you’ve got to slow this process down,” he said.
But a number of leading Democrats are bullish on A.I., hoping to attract technology investments to their states and, perhaps, burnish their images as optimistic and forward-looking. “This technology is going to be a game changer,” Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said at an A.I. summit in October. “We are just at the beginning of this revolution, and Pennsylvania is poised to take advantage of it.” He’s started a pilot program to get more state employees using generative A.I. at work, and, by streamlining permitting processes, he has made the building of A.I. data centers easier.
There are obvious rewards for politicians who jump on the A.I. train. These companies are spectacularly rich and preside over one of the few sectors of the economy that are growing. Amazon has announced that it will spend at least $20 billion on data centers in Pennsylvania, which Shapiro says is the largest private sector investment in his state’s history. At a time of national stagnation, A.I. seems to promise dynamism and civic rejuvenation.
Yet a survey published in early December shows that most Pennsylvanians, like most Americans more broadly, are uneasy about A.I. The poll, conducted by Emerson College, found broad approval of Shapiro but doubt about one of his signature issues. Most respondents said they expected A.I. to reduce the number of available jobs, and pluralities thought it would harm the economy and the environment. Notably, given that health care is one of the sectors where A.I. shows the most promise, 59 percent of health care workers in the survey were pessimistic about the technology. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they thought A.I. posed a threat to humanity.
One major question, going into 2026, is which party will speak for the Americans who abhor the incursions of A.I. into their lives and want to see its reach restricted. Another is whether widespread public hostility to this technology even matters, given all the money behind it. We’ll soon start to find out not just how much A.I. is going to remake our democracy but also to what degree we still have one.
Comments from Readers:
Dec. 29, 2025
Jon Webb
Philadelphia45m ago
I worked in AI most of my career as a computer scientist (AI used to mean figuring out how to use computers to solve problems people could do easily, through laborious programming and research, not what it means now, feeding data into a machine that can learn). I’m happy to be retired now, and not have to learn a new skill, while possibly bring replaced by a machine. But I don’t see AI in the way these fearful politicians do. I think of it more like the invention of the steam engine. People were displaced from their jobs (even if they still had jobs, many couldn’t make enough to eat). But after the horrible transition, everyone was much better off; clothing, food, and pretty much everything else was more plentiful, of higher quality, and cheaper. We should not fear AI, but we should do what we did not do when we globalized trade: use some of the enormous wealth created by it to make life less precarious. For example by finally funding universal healthcare, modernizing infrastructure, and creating a green economy. This would make a good life available to all of us. This is the vision I grew up believing in: a world where machines would do most of the labor, leaving the rest of us free to pursue our interests. We are on the verge of it now, but we have to work together politically to make it happen.
JA
Denver21m ago
This issue reveals the state of our democracy. A clear majority want AI regulated and legislation has been proposed in congress only to die there. States have passed laws, but Trump says he is overriding them and that all legislation for AI must be filtered through his administration. This means his advisor on AI which is David Sacks, one of the PayPal Mafia with ties to Palantir. So this is what mere voters are up against and so far we are losing big time. Also from what I’ve read these AI companies finances are way overextended. After all this are we gonna end up having to bail these whiny billionaires out?
The Old Boot
Danville, CA13m ago
Read Kevin Kelly’s book, What Technology Wants. It makes a strong case that technology cannot be stopped no matter how much we would like to stop it. Technology is co-dependent on humans, but we don’t control it. AI will be astoundingly disruptive. Get ready because there is no stopping it. So long as it conveys power and/or money to someone, it will advance relentlessly. Any country that chooses not to exploit it will be at the mercy of those that do. Frankenstein is not a seven foot monster. He is an AI agent.
S Burg
Massachusetts18m ago
Which party will lead on the AI issue? There was a time, long ago, when I would have expected the Democratic party to seize the AI issue. But I’m starting to get the feeling the Republicans might take the lead, even though doing so seems likely to alienate the tech oligarchs