As a rule, if there's a protest at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, I would not recommend arriving on time. A good crowd will always take time to gather, the important speakers come on towards the end, and it's often very hot.
The exception is if you're planning to attend a conservative rally against artificial intelligence: in that case, you should probably get there on the dot, as those are more of a “blink-and-you'll-miss-it” affair. At least, that was the case with the recent Humans First “National Data Center Revolt” demonstration: scheduled to start at 10am, things were already wrapping up when I arrived 20 minutes in.
I had decided to attend out of curiosity, as until recently most of the high-profile attacks on AI and data centres had come from Democrats. It was, for instance, Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar who introduced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act” bill, which would impose a permanent ban on “artificial superintelligence” and punish violators of the law with 20 years in prison. Trump, by contrast, is aggressively pro-AI; Big Tech CEOs are in and out of the White House all the time.
Did this protest — the first stop on a month-long tour of state capitals that would culminate in Silicon Valley itself — indicate that the mood among conservatives was changing?
Possibly not. Although Humans First boasts the support of big names like Steve Bannon and his “transhumanist” podcast editor Joe Allen, a mere 20 or so people were gathered in front of the capitol steps. They listened as Tea Party veteran and Humans First leader Amy Kremer railed against AI and data centres while a handful of men, who all looked like they knew how to skin and gut a deer, stood behind her.
Kremer, 56, attacked the pro-AI lobbyists spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Washington and poured scorn on the notion that opposition to Big Tech meant she was playing into the hands of China. On her proposed fightback, she said that “Texas is gonna lead the way! Whoo!”, before ending with a tragic story about a friend whose 23-year-old son had committed suicide after a chatbot had “manipulated him into taking his own life”:
“If this was being done by human beings, they would be in jail. There's no accountability, and so we are determined, and the American people are determined, to hold them accountable!”
Meanwhile, I noticed something curious. Several of the attendees were wearing monogrammed black “Humans First” jackets; they were chatting warmly among themselves. Bar a couple of journalists, everybody seemed to know each other.
Admittedly, there was a college football game on later that afternoon and Austinites have a near-religious dedication to the local team, but this was the day after an AI researcher named Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic over safety concerns, setting off an apocalyptic frenzy. Since we were all going to die, you’d have thought that somebody would have turned up.
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