Virginia is leading the world into the future of artificial intelligence, with many of the state’s 674 data centers (and more on the way) serving as the hardware that provides the memory to drive AI. Data centers are also a growing political concern, with politicians at the local, state and federal levels arguing over what regulatory policies should govern data centers and AI.
Beth Macy, the Democrat running for Congress in the 6th District against incumbent Rep. Ben Cline, is a journalist who’s written five books. She hosted a campaign event last week with three local experts to discuss the future of artificial intelligence.
“There’s a lot of fear about data centers,” Macy said. If AI costs Americans their jobs, “what are our kids and grandkids going to do” for a living, she wondered.
Panelists included Jeff Pierson, a communication studies professor at Bridgewater College who will be teaching an AI Literacy-Communication Technologies course next semester, Afzal Upal, a computer scientist at James Madison University who studies machine learning, and Mark Lee, a serial entrepreneur and the vice president of engineering at Magnite.
The panelists generally agreed that the future is happening right now. “AI technologies are going to affect all aspects of our lives,” Upal warned. “There are no ‘safe’ jobs. We need to make sure there are guardrails.”
Pierson added that “The first thing a Congress could do if it was functional would be to try to prioritize these things.” However, his question was “how are we going to make sure humans are active in this and really the ones making the decisions?”
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One difficult step would be to redefine what a job is. “Costs are going up, the jobs are getting worse,” Lee said. Meanwhile, “AI is good at tasks, which is a very different thing than jobs. A job requires thinking, a job requires understanding and understanding the edge cases. That is the thing that AI is bad at.”
Macy said that AI should be more tightly regulated than social media was when it burst on the scene earlier this century. Social media has “driven us into politicized news silos” and thus undermined democracy, she said. Upal echoed that by warning that “nobody in human history has ever had the amount of data that social media companies have” about us.
The participants didn’t offer any easy answers about what regulation or legislation should look like. However, Macy set up some targets. “What I’m calling for is sensible, logical guardrails for AI to protect our safety, protect our jobs, protect our small businesses, and protect our kids,” she said. “We need to protect innovation. We need to rein in Big Tech by enforcing antitrust laws, because innovation only works when smaller technology companies can grow as well, which is good for both consumers and the tech sector as a whole.”
Macy said that Americans have seen moments like this one before.
“In 2001, China entered the World Trade Organization and our government said, ‘Trust us. This will be great for the American worker.’ Then 2.5 million people lost their jobs.” Virginia towns such as Bassett and Martinsville that were hollowed out when the factories shuttered haven’t completely bounced back. In her book “Factory Man,” Macy delved into the employment carnage that happened as companies sent manufacturing jobs to China.
She also blamed drug companies and the federal government for easing regulation and oversight of the marketing of opioids. “Since 1998, more than one million people have died of overdose because of a lie spread by a family of millionaires and wanted to be billionaires and bought off corporations and politicians,” she said.
Her books “Dopesick” and “Raising Lazarus” explored that opioid epidemic and its aftermath, although she says the epidemic still rages. Last year alone, there were an estimated 69,973 drug overdose deaths in the United States, according to the CDC.
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