Faster, Please! — The Podcast

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
What problem does a data-center moratorium solve, exactly? As these warehouse-sized supercomputers face growing public backlash, they’re blamed for higher electricity bills and strains on the power grid—all while failing to provide enough jobs or tax revenue. But are they actually the problem, or are they exposing problems that have existed for years in America’s electrical grid?
Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Shuting Pomerleau, the director of energy and environmental policy at the American Action Forum, where she studies electricity markets and energy policy.
We discuss New York’s controversial decision to pause construction of large data centers, whether AI is really driving up electricity prices, the economic benefits of data centers, who should pay for expanding the grid, and how states should respond to growing demand for power.
In This Episode:
* New York’s Data Center Slowdown (0:16)
* Dealing with Demand (7:09)
* What is the Right Step Forward? (14:24)
* Who is Paying Up? (19:27)
* Can Regulation Fend Off Data Center Growth? (23:39)
* Where Do Data Centers Go from Here (27:44)
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
But here are some edited highlights from the chat:
On New York’s data center moratorium…
My concern is that pausing this will send a very strong signal to investors, data centers and developers, a very chilling signal saying, “you’re not really welcome here.” This is such a fast-moving space. One year is actually a lot of time.
On what’s really driving electricity price increases…
What has been really driving the electricity increases mostly in the residential sector is the local distribution system—the maintenance, repairs, upgrades that cost a lot of money. It was almost like a coincidence with the AI data center boom and the sentiment against AI. We see that in electricity prices, but if you look into the real price level changes, it’s still quite flat both at the state level and across the country.
On the policy challenge of funding AI infrastructure…
What is a fair share? That is a question that has always been on my mind. The data centers are not all sitting there across the country doing their own thing separate from the remaining population. They’re providing digital services and great services for us, you and me, using AI. So, what is a fair share? How can they pay exactly how much they use?
On the economic benefits of data centers…
The opposition to AI data centers is probably one of the biggest pieces of misinformation out there. The right way to look at it is these are businesses that are paying taxes; they’re paying property taxes. If you look at Loudoun County, about 90% of the county’s operating budget comes from data centers.
On whether regulation can slow the AI data center boom…
I think of the AI data center boom in the United States as a fast-moving train. It’s going to move; it’s going to happen. I think the New York States moratorium, some of the local opposition across the countries may slow down some of the application of development, but not very significantly. I think what will have a material impact on the pace of AI data center development is all the discussion about who’s paying for it.
On what needs to happen with data centers…
First, permitting reform. It will alleviate the burden off of a lot of people’s minds, and a lot of stakeholders’ minds. Two is, we really need some reform in our grid, in terms of interconnection. I would say interconnection is your keyword, both on the generation side, connecting to generation sources and to large load customers.
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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
If my podcast guest today is correct, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence "heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought." That's about as pure a distillation of the San Francisco Consensus view on the importance of this technology as it gets.
Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Sebastian Mallaby, the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a widely read columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of the new best-selling book The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.
(Spoiler: It’s tremendous book about the man, the company, and the technological revolution. I really liked it.)
We discuss The Infinity Machine and the life of Demis Hassabis, including how his original vision for artificial superintelligence compares with the propulsive race unfolding today. We also explore how that competitive acceleration has affected the focus on safety, what role government regulation should play, and why many people may still be underestimating how transformative AI will become.
The Quest for “Success” (0:27)
Inside the Mind of Hassabis (8:29)
The Race for Monopoly (12:31)
The Economics of AI Anxiety (17:05)
Governing the AI Race (24:17)
The Biggest Leap Since Abstract Thought (30:13)
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
But here are some edited highlights from the chat:
On where AI is heading…
You look backwards; you see how fast the progress has been. To merely extrapolate forwards is probably to undersell the speed at which we’ll accelerate in the future because there’s an accelerating phenomenon here where the more advanced you are, the easier it is to get to the next level.
On Hassabis’s belief that AI development would look more like the Manhattan Project than a multi-country, multi-company competition …
In retrospect, it’s crazy. All one can say is that ex ante, the atmosphere in the community of AI builders when Demis began his company in 2010 was that this was a thing that simply didn’t work. AI could not recognize the photograph of a cat. AI could do nothing. It was deep AI winter. And so, under those conditions, you could assemble the entirety of the world’s strong AI believers in one conference in San Francisco, and it felt like a single community. So, this sort of Singleton scenario where you just have one lab, it was a natural outgrowth of that moment in time.
How AI competition has overwhelmed that vision…
Before 2022, Demis had the freedom because he was clearly the leader to define what the next project should be. He chose at one point to go and do this protein folding project. …This is kind of AI with a smiley face painted on it. Whereas once the chatbot went viral at the end of 2022, ChatGPT, then everybody had to pile in and build a competitor and there’s a lot less leeway to define your own path. So, I think the agency of the individual was quite strong until 2022 and thereafter the power of the race dynamic takes over.
What skeptics, such as many economists, have gotten wrong and right…
The number of improvements before even we talk about Mythos and the cyber capabilities of that one, I mean, it’s been an extraordinary ride in what is actually less than four years. So, I don’t take back anything I say about the speed of the advance of the frontier. Now that’s different to the speed of the deployment. There I have a lot of sympathy with the economist.
On the difficulty of AI regulation…
I’m actually quite optimistic in terms of the ability of a government agency to regulate… People often think of AI as a bunch of code that flies around cyberspace and you really can’t control it. But actually, it’s also a bunch of data centers which are huge physical installations. The government knows precisely where they are. They can’t be moved or hidden.
On his superintelligence timeline…
To be honest, I would say it’s already true. I mean, you try using Fable and if people are listening and they’re inclined not to agree with me, I just ask you, spend a couple of hours with Claude Fable and then see if you disagree with me…I think it is smarter than me by quite a long shot on any topic I ask it about.
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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
Will artificial intelligence displace workers or make them more valuable? Probably plenty of both. But how much in either direction, and how fast will all this change happen?
Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the world’s top economists studying how AI is reshaping productivity, jobs, and the American economy.
Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He is also the co-author, along with Andrew McAfee, of Machine, Platform, Crowd, The Second Machine Age, and the classic Race Against the Machine. He is a co-founder of Workhelix, which helps large companies measure, track, and maximize the return of their AI investments.
We explore what the next decade of AI could mean for workers, businesses, and the broader economy, and what the relationship between humans and intelligent machines may look like. We discuss why views from Silicon Valley and the East Coast differ so sharply on AI’s impact, why the technology has produced dramatically different results across companies, and why some firms and departments are already seeing meaningful productivity gains while others have yet to unlock AI’s full potential.
In This Episode:
* What AI brings to the table (0:35)
* Does AI bring too much? (6:49)
* Moving away from the Valley view (10:55)
* How perspectives are formed (16:05)
* Companies and productivity (23:01)
* AI in the foreseeable future (29:21)
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
But here are some edited highlights from the chat:
What’s the positive case for workers in an AI future that currently sounds like it only benefits CEOs, tech firms, and data-center builders
This is, I think, the best time to be alive if you’re somebody who's got agency and ambition and intention and wants to do something, create new things for themselves and for the world. But that's not the story that's out there. …There's going to be a lot of new jobs created. You got to tell both parts of that story. Of course, you want to lean into the second part of the story about the new stuff that's being created [and not just job disruption and loss], because that's where people should be focusing. There's no point staring at the things that are disappearing… My company, Workhelix, is all about doing that. So I'm doing what I can for my part. I would love to see more people lean into that part of the story.
Can someone coherently believe both that AI may become extremely powerful—possibly AGI or superintelligence—and that the future labor market can still be broad, humane, and full of useful work?
I think we're going to have several decades worth of humans and machines working together. I'd like to extend that window where we can still have an important role for humans to contribute and for us to expand that pie, not simply automate what's already existing. We should probably be preparing for some further time in the future when there's less of a role for people. But most of my friends here in Silicon Valley, I think their timelines are way too short for when humans no longer have a role.
If AI eventually becomes capable of doing almost all economically valuable work, would that actually be a desirable future for humanity, and what would make it a good society rather than a dystopia?
We should start preparing for a period where AI can do almost everything and we need to come up with mechanisms so that we still have freedom and power in that kind of world. I don't think that's automatic. And one of my biggest concerns, to be frank, is not that we don't have abundance, I think we will, but it's that we don't have freedom and autonomy. That's something that's not to be taken for granted, and we need to put in place ways that we not only have the wealth, but we also have widely shared prosperity and widely shared decision making rights.
Is AI already delivering real business value and productivity gains, or are the impressive lab results still mostly failing to show up in the economy?
The returns (AI productivity gains) have been somewhat disappointing. To me, that’s totally natural. That’s totally understandable. As you know, I’ve done a lot of work, we call it the Productivity J Curve on the need for complementary investments for intangible investments in new business process design and new skills for the workforce, even new products and services. Those take time. With past general purpose technologies like the steam engine and electricity, it took literally decades before you got those returns.
How should we think about AI’s usefulness when some high-profile business uses have produced embarrassing hallucinations?
They (AI) can also do wondrous things that are incredibly valuable. My advice is to keep a human in the loop. Ultimately, you, the person, is responsible for the output. You can identify where the good things are and not the bad things.
Can AI progress happen so quickly that society can’t adapt, and should policymakers worry about the speed of change, not just the destination?
How fast do we want to go with this? It's not infinitely fast. We want to be able to digest and manage it. Now, the way I would handle that is I would put more resources into speeding up our ability to understand and adapt, and we're not doing enough of that. And that means, for instance, instead of cutting the budget for economic statistics, I would be massively boosting it so we get more visibility.
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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly poised to change the workplace—the question is, by how much? Key voices in Silicon Valley warn that white-collar jobs will soon be a thing of the past, while others predict more modest economic gains as firms struggle to reorganize workflows. When it comes to the future of work and American business, contradictory forecasts can be difficult to interpret and reconcile.
Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, Daniel Rock and I attempt to sift through the often-confusing current AI conversation. We cover the distinction between “AI-exposed” fields and those destined for automation, explore the bottlenecks that could slow adoption among businesses, and offer a more realistic outlook for growth.
Rock is an assistant professor of operations, information, and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. There, his research dives into the economics of AI and digital technologies, as well as the future of work. His paper,The Productivity J-Curve: How Intangibles Complement General Purpose Technologies, is worth a read.
In This Episode
* The trouble with forecasting (1:40)
* The economist’s evaluation (8:09)
* The productivity J-curve (11:49)
* Exposure vs. automation (18:53)
* Growth projection (23:04)
(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
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My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
As a college sophomore, Josh Farahzad assembled a group of students from around the country in an attempt to launch a homemade rocket into space. From there, he ditched the traditional route and scoured the country for the perfect place to build a uniquely American mega-project.
Disillusioned with the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the Bay Area, he has since broken ground in central Texas. Caldwell County is now home to Proto-Town—a place Farahzad hopes businesses will have the space to engineer and build world-changing hardware.
Today on Faster, Please—The Podcast, I chat with Farahzad about his quest to build America’s premier manufacturing town from scratch.
In This Episode
* Welcome to Proto-Town (1:20)
* The Limits of California (5:18)
* From the Ground Up (10:46)
* The Vision (17:35)
(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe