Recently, Tom Nichols — the dissident or lapsed conservative who is a key Never Trump figure — wrote a Bluesky thread on the importance of federalism. He focused on the longstanding Democratic demand (albeit a futile one) that the president be elected by a national popular vote. I’ve made the same argument, though I’ve never treated it as a big focus since abolishing the Electoral College is all but impossible. You’re never going to get small states to disempower themselves by agreeing to such a constitutional amendment. But Nichols made the argument that some form of the Electoral College is an essential component of American federalism and that federalism is one sheet anchor of our liberties, as we’re finding out today.

A few days ago, I was looking at one of the many recent (post-shutdown) polls that show an increasingly dark mood toward the GOP and favorable signs for the Democrats. There was something else in those polls that surprised me: people are really, really down on AI. Now, to be clear, this is sort of cardinal assumption almost bordering on a prejudice in the world I live in: a fairly educated, generally left-leaning world. Everyone’s down on AI in various ways in that world and for many good reasons, even as many also incorporate AI into aspects of their professional lives. (This is a pervasive dichotomy: we’re generally AI skeptic; AI is also allowing our programmers to be vastly more productive.) What struck me though is how widespread the skepticism or hostility is. It goes across demographics and age, political persuasions.

There are many good reasons for this. The explosion of investment in AI poses various near and long term environmental dangers; it might … well, take your job away from you (downer); it’s driving up prices for energy, ubiquitous parts of the modern economy like computer memory; and … oh, there’s that one thing that even the biggest champions of AI talk about and are oddly fascinated by … the non-trivial chance that AI could lead to the extermination of the human race (bummer!). This is the list of horribles that leaves many us thinking what in the actual fuck are we doing here?