“There are no solutions, only tradeoffs,” the economist Thomas Sowell observed. One of our roles at the Mackinac Center is to explain the tradeoffs in complex policy questions. Public anxiety over the rise of artificial intelligence and the data centers needed to back it gives us another opportunity to fulfill that role.
The Mackinac Center has participated in multiple events this year to assess AI policy and data center expansions. In April, we featured a discussion with representatives from industry, economics, journalism, and higher education. In August, we participated in a panel at the State Policy Network annual meeting to talk about state technology policy. More than 1,500 people attended that conference, and artificial intelligence was a hot topic.
Concerns often come from people who don’t believe they will benefit from artificial intelligence, are skeptical of the value of data centers, or worry about energy, water, and land usage. Our work has tried to look plainly at all these issues.
While new technologies often provoke fears about economic disruption, these concerns are often overblown. Logging was supposed to mean the end of trees; a growing population was going to mean we weren’t going to be able to feed ourselves; and “peak oil” was predicted decades ago.
It is too early to tell how significant artificial intelligence will be. American ingenuity, however, typically overcomes big problems — when the government lets it. So how should policymakers and citizens think about potential technology regulation?
Existing regulations can address many of the concerns people bring up. Protections are on the books for water, energy, and land. Current rules about fraud and child safety also already exist. Authorities should pursue scammers and other bad actors who use technology to turbocharge their activities. Any new regulations need to make sense, not respond to groundless fears.
The government should not try to punish or help any industry, including information technology. This means no special tax breaks or subsidies, but also no extra rules or bans enacted for arbitrary reasons. Environmental and zoning rules, for instance, should apply across the board to companies and industries.
And a state hoping to grow and become once again a national leader cannot just say “no.” Citizens should be open and optimistic about new industries; we never could have built the Michigan we love today without them.
