Artificial intelligence

At some point there has to be an “emperor has no clothes” moment. Why, when we are in the middle of a boom in Artificial Intelligence, which is supposed to transform the way we do nearly everything, is there no tangible increase in productivity across the economy? Surely, if the claims for AI were even nearly true it would by now be showing up in the statistics for Total Factor Productivity (TFP) published by the San Francisco Fed. TPF is a measure of output relative to input from labour and capital; a measure, in other words, of how efficiently workers are using the tools available to them. In theory, it should be increasing dramatically with AI as workers use it to speed up tasks and get more out of their day. Trouble is, that does not appear to be happening.

Few people had heard of Jacob Coxon, the 28-year-old British AI researcher, on the morning of September 8, 2026. His X account had fewer than 100 followers. By September 10, he was world famous, after he published a social-media thread on X about resigning from Anthropic because the company is not "acting responsibly." The post has now been viewed 174 million times. It triggered a tsunami of news panic about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Suddenly, Jacob was everywhere: doing prime-time interviews; a celebrity whistleblower, the casus tumultus of a global conversation about the dangers of AI, which in turn led to a public fight among various tech overlords urging for more government regulation, and angry pushback from the Trump administration.

Terry Tao is the most famous and award-laden mathematician working today. He is known for his groundbreaking work in many areas of mathematics and when he speaks, people listen. A few weeks ago he took to the stage at the International Congress of Mathematics, held every four years, to give his lecture, “Mathematics in the Age of AI.” He voiced concern about what he called an unprecedented threat. “AI has created a crisis in our mathematical values and practices,” he said, and his words resonated because, just days before, Anthropic’s Claude Fable AI program had solved the so-called Jacobian conjecture which has puzzled mathematicians since 1939. It was a devastating achievement, all the more so because the solution fitted into a single tweet.

Recently I started logging in to Facebook again, mostly to do the depressing thing of posting photos of my children to my late father’s wall. One of the interesting things about Facebook is that it forces me to exit my bubble of people who work in tech and media, and thus are very tech and media literate. The people I see on Facebook inhabit a completely different universe than those I see on X or Substack or even TikTok. I don’t love referring to the people I grew up with as “normies,” but, you know, many of them are normies. Anyway, I log in and suddenly I’m surrounded by normies and I stumble across something that forces me to reconsider some things. A girl I went to high school with – let’s call her Teresa – has written a book and self-published it on Amazon.

In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing Luddites, environmentalists and all kinds of naysayers to call the tune. There is some truth in that, which is why the growth in the US economy has outstripped that of Europe this century. It’s also why America has a near monopoly in the tech sphere that now shapes our age. Now, however, America, like Europe, finds itself consumed by a popular war against data centers. Given that these centers are the beating heart of the modern economy, just as the coal mines were the lifeblood of the industrial revolution, this presents a very big problem.

Representatives of the largest American artificial intelligence laboratories met in the White House on August 4. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were called in to review a framework, recently completed and largely classified, that would give the government 30 days to review AI models before the public sees them and test how well they break into computers. Participation is voluntary, but the timing is not. Twice in two weeks, AI systems built to test how well they could break into computers broke into real companies instead.

In the center of Durham last week, at the far end of the old indoor market, my son and I hit pay dirt. Down past the fishmonger and the cleaning supplies, past the dead-eyed teens suffering through their summer jobs, right against the market’s back wall: Jim’s Vintage Toys. Die-cast Dinkys, Napoleonic soldiers with tufted hats, Stormtroopers, old-school Ferraris. Within 20 seconds my ten-year-old had a car in each sticky hand and had dropped, sniper-style, to the floor into that universal boy play-position almost never seen in girls: bum up, shoulders twisted, cheek flat to the ground. Another few seconds and he was unreachable, sunk deep into an imaginary race.

There’s an old saw in politics that says, “If you are explaining, you’re losing.” Over the past few months, Big Tech and its allies in the legacy media have been doing a lot of explaining about data centers, including why they are needed and why more communities should welcome the projects. But Big Tech’s public relations challenge got a lot harder last month, when country music legend Willie Nelson declared people need to “fight against data centers invading our land.” Nelson, who owns a house and farm in his hometown of Abbott, Texas, also said, “The last thing we need is a loud, water-thieving, light-polluting data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).