Writers Keep Trashing Sanders’s Data Center Bill. They Don’t Seem to Have Read It.
Sanders Buried the Lede, So the Ledes Buried Sanders
In March, Bernie Sanders formally proposed a pause on the development and expansion of AI data centers. He publicly announced his bill alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, though she hasn’t proposed any companion bill in the House. That was probably a smart move: Sanders’s legislation reached the public stillborn, with The Washington Post’s Editorial Board immediately calling it Sanders’s “dumbest idea.”
But the bill still haunts the press—probably because it’s brimful of good ideas.
In a Jacobin article last month, S. 4214 was dismissed as domestically pointless and internationally pernicious. And in a New York Times guest essay last week, it was skewered as unrealistic, uninformed, and pro-industry. That’s five distinct accusations, and because all are false—they seem written in ignorance of the bill’s text—debunking those claims reveals five principles in S. 4214 worth embracing in future legislation.
I’mma try to keep this post tight, because the bill itself is short and without much fat (except at the beginning, where Sanders wastes four scroll-past-able pages dissing billionaires).
Actionability: In Higgins’s mind—Higgins is the guy who wrote the NYT piece—Sanders wants to nix all data center construction until lawmakers “ensure the technology doesn’t threaten what’s vaguely defined as ‘the future of humanity.’” Higgins is right that this would be an “outlandish” demand, but in reality, the bill makes no such demand. S. 4214 proposes a moratorium on “construction or upgrading” of AI data centers until at least one of eight realistic kinds of law is enacted to govern AI. These include:
Prohibiting the use of taxpayer dollars to build private AI data centers
Requiring that residents be consulted before data centers are built in their communities
Instating policies to prevent worker displacement
Assuring that utilities don’t raise consumer prices in response to data center demand
These proposals may explain why all the hit pieces on the bill don’t actually engage with it: No one wants to come out and say, “I support spending tax dollars on displacing and gouging workers in their own neighborhoods.”
And Higgins couldn’t be more wrong in calling the bill “outlandish”: All legislation should be this concise, concrete, and clear. If anything here is “vaguely defined,” it’s Higgins’s use of the phrase “vaguely defined.”
Climate change cosmopolitanism: Buck ‘objects’ to Sanders’s bill on the grounds that it would just push pollution overseas. But that’s hardly an objection to the bill: Sanders anticipated the possibility of merely internationalizing AI’s harms, so S. 4214 would prohibit shipping data center hardware to any country without regulations “comparable to the laws described in section 3(b)(1).”
To Buck’s credit, at least her straw man has a small carbon footprint.
Breaking the seal: Higgins claims that Sanders “doesn’t appear interested in having a rational conversation about AI.” But the bill was written with a disarming degree of compromise in mind: Passing one (just one!) piece of legislation, according to S. 4214, “expressly terminates the moratorium.”
Buck mischaracterizes the bill as pointless, charging that “a pause is not a substitute for actual AI governance.” But S. 4214 is clearly a proposal for AI governance, any governance, and includes eight suggestions to make that job easier.
As it happens, reading a Jacobin commentary on a bill is no substitute for reading the (actually shorter) bill.
Open data: Higgins accuses Sanders of being insufficiently informed about AI. Sanders would agree—which is why S. 4214 would require the Secretary of Energy to submit quarterly reports to Congress about AI data centers’ activities. These reports would cover water and energy usage, greenhouse gas and wastewater emissions, and details about cooling chemicals, noise levels, wages and benefits, job creation, and land acquisition. The bill doesn’t set limits on any of these; it just mandates the kind of transparency already required by the EU, UK, Russia, and China. You don’t want to get beat out by China, do you?
Like the bill’s prohibition on offshoring AI’s energy harms, this part of S. 4214 is independent of any moratorium. A compromise version of the bill, if Congress were actually interested in transparency, might mandate reporting while forgoing the pause or the regulations.
I don’t see why Congress or the press should object to this—such a bill wouldn’t require them to actually read those reports.
Incentive-aligned evidence: Finally, Higgins claims that Sanders’s “bill buoys industry-serving messaging by including commentary” from Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison. That’s either the most tone-deaf or least charitable interpretation of a string of quotes I’ve ever seen. It’s also ironic, given that Higgins works for something called Morning Brew, which brags that 65% of its readers have household incomes over $100,000.
The bill quotes Bill Gates predicting that humans “won’t be needed for most things.’’’ It quotes Larry Ellison saying that “‘citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.’’ None of this is “industry-serving messaging.” In fact, if you Google “$826,600,000,000,” you will find the full text of the bill, because Sanders prefaced each of these quotes with its source’s net worth.
Seriously, Google that, it’s funny.
Sanders’s point was clearly that even the people set to profit most from AI think it’s insane that the government isn’t regulating it. In fact, one of the Musk quotes in S. 4214—a quote from 2018—says just that:
“Mark my words. AI is far more dangerous than nukes. So why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane.’’
Eight years later, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Jacobin are actively ridiculing a reasonable request for literally any regulatory oversight.
And that is insane.