Sam Lyman Puts 70% Odds on Clarity Passing Before Recess

**Austin Campbell** (0:00)
Well, I was gonna say first, before we get to solutions, let's draw a parallel to one that we didn't have an effective solution for, which is what you're describing to me sounds a lot like why we got blocked on nuclear power in the United States of America, which is to say, if you're really an environmentalist and you understand durability for climate change plus preservation of the environment, you are pro nuclear power. That is basically the punchline. It is much cleaner than the other forms, modern nuclear reactors are very safe. Ironically, most of the problems we've had, things like Fukushima, are because we couldn't build the new stuff and continued operating the old stuff that doesn't work the way it should. Because let me tell you right now, we've made a lot of technological advancements from the 1950s to the present.
On nuclear power in the United States, we really lost the plot. I think only recently have we started to figure out, actually, wait a minute, we should be building a hell of a lot more of this stuff. Mike, I live in New York City. It was clearly an own goal to shut down Indian Point. If you look at what's happening with the power grid in the United States, and all of the people who advocated for that on environmental grounds shot themselves in the foot, and then reloaded and continued firing. I would ask you, what is the potential solution here to avoid the mistakes that we made around nuclear power?

**Sam Lyman** (1:20)
Yeah, Austin, that's the perfect parallel. They say that we solved climate change about 80 years ago, and then we banned that solution, and that was nuclear power. I think nuclear power is an ideal analogy for what we're facing right now, because AI has the potential to spread so many benefits across society in a way that progressives should support. I think the difficulty here, in large part, comes from the messaging from AI executives themselves. On one hand, you hear that we need to build AI infrastructure and data centers to beat China. Then on the other hand, you have the same executives saying that this same artificial intelligence is going to eliminate up to 50% of white collar jobs in the next five years. Who's going to support that?
I feel like in large part, a lot of the opposition to data centers not only comes from foreign influence, but the call at a certain point is coming from inside the house. You have AI executives who are doing more to spread fear about the technology than they're building than the foreign actors are themselves. That's something that has to stop immediately. I think those AI executives for years have been messaging to Wall Street about their technology being the end-all be-all. They've done so at the expense of messaging to Main Street about how this technology will actually materially benefit them in their lives. There's many ways that we can lay that out right now. For example, we're seeing a blue-collar boom with the AI build-out as we speak. You have about half a million temporary construction jobs that can be directly linked to the AI build-out. In addition to that, you have tens of thousands of permanent data center jobs that will be associated with these data centers being built across the country.
You have a huge struggle or a huge race to find electricians. There's electricians who have jumped jobs three times over the last 18 months because rates are so high for good electricians right now, getting these data centers online. People look at only one layer of the AI stack, which is the interface with ChatGBT and with Cloud without looking at the whole stack and all the jobs associated with it. Beyond that, we need to help the American people understand that in an economy where knowledge becomes to a certain extent, democratized and automated, what carries a premium? It's the human being themselves that need to always have a human being in the loop will only increase as AI becomes more integrated into our economy. What we're looking at, as with every other technological trend before this one, are jobs that are different than the jobs of today, but materially better and easier and more human than the jobs of yesterday. I think we saw that with industrialization in the 1800s to the present day.
People working a desk job have much easier, better lives than people plowing the fields, for example. I think you're about to see that with AI. It's going to automate a lot of the drudgery that we usually associate with office work to make the work nature itself a lot more human, a lot more interpersonal in nature.