Build Nothing

Monday 20 April 2026

Scientific discoveries tend to cluster, arising roughly at the same time from teams or individuals working separately from each other. The phenomenon has a name— multiple discovery or simultaneous invention—and there are many examples: natural selection, calculus, the telephone. Contemporaneously, it’s been observed that more Nobel Prizes have been going to multiple persons—who, again, were working independently of each other.

Of course, the concept has great relevance to the progress of artificial intelligence. And especially to the understandable unease around AI, and even to call a stop to the development of AI. Unfortunately for those with that view, it’s simply not going to be possible to halt or even slow the forward march of this technology. Yes, an individual country or domain could undertake such action, but it would only serve to establish their isolation from the rest of the world. Indeed, in a very compelling example, historians have speculated that the Ming Dynasty successfully suppressed the growth of maritime technology and withdrew its society from engaging in any seafaring exploration. Effectively, this ceded all venturing to the rest of the world. So yes, you can stop progress for yourself, but that won’t stop others.

When we consider the intuitions of those who habitually want to halt technological progress, we can further speculate that some portion of society has probably always taken such a position: against seafaring, against railroads, against cars, against telephones, against stem-cell research… and now this same layer of society is back again in full swing, against AI.

A good proxy for these inclinations can currently be found in the anti-data center movement, which unfortunately is arising most strongly on the left side of the political spectrum. No surprise there. Led by plodding, linear, zero-sum thinkers like Bernie Sanders, groups that have successfully stopped transmission projects and even lots of wind and solar projects now look to do the same with data centers. Mr. Sanders—who apparently has never seen a complex-contingent system, and doesn’t care to know how they work—represents a puritanical New England tradition that is eager to jump into the fray and take the side of those who abhor building and construction and development of any kind. Sure, ratepayers are justifiably concerned about the impact of future electricity prices as power demand grows, but news flash: Global power-sector growth is already on a strong upward march, because energy transition itself makes that inevitable. If you are against data center growth because it will place upward pressure on grid demand, then you should also be against electric cars and buses and trucks, electric heating, and the entire effort to swing as many industrial processes as possible from the realm of fossil fuels over to the power sector.

Now, if the federal government were not currently in the hands of a kakistocracy, we would likely be engaging in constructive approaches to these challenges in everything from grid management and transmission access to AI safety policy more generally. We’d have professionals like Jigar Shah (former director of the DOE Loan Programs Office) back at the helm working on approaches that welcome the spectacular power sector-growth necessary for transition with a solution set that actually addresses those needs. Shah currently has a post up at LinkedIn, The Data Center Reckoning: Why Communities Are Saying No — And What Has to Change, that’s right on point.

In the current government, however, we have a far more serious and widespread case of derangement, where the impulses to control everything are fully authoritarian. This has given way to some of the most awful outcomes of all, in which natural gas turbine growth, to take just one example, is now flourishing “behind the meter,” thus adding further lock-in to what is already a very problematic path dependency forming on natural gas. Worse, the clowns and sociopaths sprinkled across this administration demonstrated in the Anthropic dustup last month that they would, in the face of what they perceived as intransigence on the part of the company, blacklist them—effectively imposing a corporate death penalty on the AI startup. And we actually witnessed “Department of War” officials going full-blast on social media, accusing the Anthropic CEO of being a liar.

Political reality suggests, however, that the real threat of AI—job losses, possibly on a large if not very large scale—is going to animate the AI discourse once those career-ending effects start to come into play. You may have noticed that Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei frequently steps to the microphone these days to warn that AI could smash both existing white collar jobs and their future growth. While not everyone agrees, we already have signals from the market that the prospects for computer science majors—probably the hottest undergraduate major of the past decade or so—have suddenly turned downward.

In recent decades the U.S. has developed into a country with a special talent for stagnation, and an inability to solve problems or to get anything done. We can’t build high-speed rail, we’re way behind on EV adoption, we can’t repair or replace our tunnels and bridges, and we have infrastructure projects, especially in the power sector, that have been bottlenecked for years. Governance, meanwhile, has lapsed into such an inefficient state that the new mayor of New York is getting rave reviews for fixing a series of small things that have long since been resolved in the rest of the developed world.

As people age, they become more risk-averse and increasingly opposed to change of any kind. The U.S. currently has an aging population, with the replacement rate falling to very low levels through a combination of lower fertility rates and lower immigration. This is a recipe not for a correction in our ways but for a deepening of our current course, in which there’s strong bipartisan sentiment to build nothing, change nothing. A favorite example: the long-delayed L.A. bike path project which, according to reporting last year, should have been completed by now. Your faithful correspondent actually did some reporting on this effort seven years ago, in 2019, and it should be said that the portions of this project that have been completed are amazing. However, the hard part—connecting the southern portion to the northern portion near downtown—remains fully stuck in the mud. Notably, in an example of how America’s neglected problems can stack on top of one another, one of the concerns about the formation of the center-city portion of the bike path was that it would negatively impact the homeless population. But this was just one of myriad hurdles that transformed the project into what the linked SFGate article called a “bureaucratic hell.”

One public figure who’s currently sending the message that the task of the next administration cannot be restricted to “simply putting back things to the way they were” is Pete Buttigieg, currently on a speaking tour in states like Kansas and Oklahoma. While oratory and public persuasion are not the only deciding factors in making a presidential run, Mayor Pete has shown again and again that he can marshal words against our current Empire of B.S. with consistent success—and to the distress of his interlocutors!

More specifically, as the former DOT secretary, Buttigieg got a full dose of the regulatory miasma that has built up over a half century in this country, and described it this way: “We got so good at stopping all the bad things that we stopped all the good things from happening too.” Buttigieg hasn’t declared yet for 2028, but he seems to have a “theory of the case,” and so his decision to run seems inevitable.