The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 21, 2026


Why Libertarians Fall for the AI Trap ｜ 5⧸21⧸26


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

161.63498

Word count

1,533

Sentence count

67

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.680 It's the family and friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart.
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00:00:16.880 The artificial intelligence boom has become one of the biggest drivers of the American economy.
00:00:21.920 It's also triggered a growing backlash against the data centers that make the boom possible.
00:00:27.280 Tech moguls have rushed to build giant warehouses packed with the computing power needed to run
00:00:31.860 AI systems, but they've done almost nothing to explain to ordinary Americans why those facilities
00:00:37.940 deserve so much land, water, electricity, and political favoritism. You would think that that
00:00:44.540 failure would have created an obvious opening for libertarians. Governments shower data center 0.93
00:00:50.060 projects with subsidies, wield eminent domain to seize land, and help politically connected
00:00:55.400 corporations reshape local communities in the name of technological progress. A coherent
00:01:01.120 libertarian response would attack the merger of state power and corporate power. Instead,
00:01:07.000 many libertarians have chosen to cheer the expansion without asking what the technology
00:01:11.280 will be used for or whom it will serve. Their quasi-religious loyalty to capital has pushed
00:01:16.780 them into another foolish position and exposed the danger of turning an economic theory into 0.94
00:01:22.380 a full worldview. The tech elite insists that AI will revolutionize the world, but they've done 0.83
00:01:29.380 almost nothing to tell average people how their own lives will be improved. Silicon Valley
00:01:34.860 entrepreneurs spin wild stories about superhuman intelligence and the automation of tens of
00:01:40.800 millions of jobs. That doesn't sound like a sales pitch. That sounds like the setup for a science
00:01:46.320 fiction dystopian movie. The one concrete justification they do offer is strategic.
00:01:52.760 AI will supposedly define the future of warfare, and America must stay ahead of China. This is 0.79
00:01:58.580 their strongest argument, and it is legitimately one worth listening to. That argument would carry
00:02:04.460 more weight if the same people pushing AI weren't also committed to building the kind of technology
00:02:10.760 most likely to be used against Americans.
00:02:14.440 They're not preparing some noble shield for the republic.
00:02:17.920 They're building tools that can make the United States
00:02:20.460 look a lot more like the techno-authoritarian China that they claim to fear.
00:02:25.760 Libertarians can understand this principle when it comes to handing the government power,
00:02:29.580 but they don't seem to grasp it when they're handing technology to corporations
00:02:33.600 that will then hand it to the government, which will then use it to gain power.
00:02:38.520 Data centers consume a staggering amount of electricity,
00:02:42.360 sometimes drawing as much power as a moderately sized city.
00:02:46.160 They also use a large volume of water, create nonstop noise, and disfigure the landscape.
00:02:52.220 Developers have found ways to soften some of these costs by building new power infrastructure
00:02:57.140 and improving cooling efficiency, but none of these problems have been solved.
00:03:01.020 In the meantime, local communities absorb the burden.
00:03:05.040 The economic case is weak as well.
00:03:06.880 Data centers create construction jobs while they're being built, but once the construction
00:03:11.340 ends, they employ surprisingly few people. Governments usually justify subsidies by
00:03:16.300 promising long-term economic activity and job growth. In the case of data centers,
00:03:22.080 corporations collect the incentives while communities get very little in return.
00:03:27.860 A sane political movement would notice that, but many libertarians haven't. Instead of
00:03:32.860 challenging subsidies and land seizures, they have fought to champion the projects.
00:03:37.980 Nick Lespy of Reason recently posted a chart showing that almond farmers use far more water
00:03:43.460 than AI data centers. Now, almonds are notoriously inefficient in water usage, so it's kind of a
00:03:50.260 cherry-picked case, but whatever, we'll give the libertarian his due. I'll agree that agriculture
00:03:55.440 probably does consume more water overall, and in fact, I'm sure it does. But the comparison gives
00:04:01.160 away the problem. You see, people eat food. AI, at least so far, mostly offers job displacement
00:04:08.120 and government surveillance. Libertarianism grew, in part, out of the Austrian school of economics,
00:04:14.780 which is very useful for understanding markets, but it was never meant to serve as a complete
00:04:20.200 theory of human life. Like Marxists, however, many libertarians have turned an economic framework
00:04:26.080 into a totalizing ideology. Free markets, contract law, and voluntary exchange become
00:04:32.400 all-encompassing lenses through which everything must be judged. Once that happens, it becomes
00:04:38.600 difficult to see anything that doesn't show up in the GDP. The real question is not just how much
00:04:45.100 of a resource gets spent, but for what purpose. Most people wouldn't give up a hand to save a
00:04:50.960 cockroach. Most people would give up their lives to save a child. On paper, preserving the cockroach
00:04:57.520 may look like a more efficient transaction, but only a lunatic would fail to understand why no
00:05:02.880 sane person would ever choose it over the child. The raw numbers, the raw accounting, that doesn't
00:05:09.300 actually tell you what decision to make. You need a human context, a framework of values to actually
00:05:16.040 apply the data. And this is where libertarianism and its desire to turn everything into an
00:05:20.880 economic equation fails. Economics helps explain financial exchange, but in its hunger for
00:05:28.400 abstraction, it often strips away the human element that drives actual decisions. Treat
00:05:34.080 almonds and AI as interchangeable economic activity, and you erase the context that gives
00:05:40.400 moral meaning to both. That's the error every ideology makes. Grand unified theories comfort
00:05:47.280 the rational mind because they promise predictable clarity. Then they collide with actual human
00:05:53.240 beings living in actual places. The Canadian developer Kevin O'Leary recently went on Tucker
00:06:00.980 Carlson's podcast to praise the record-setting data center he wants to build in Utah. Carlson
00:06:07.940 pressed him repeatedly to name a job AI would create for ordinary Americans. O'Leary couldn't
00:06:14.680 identify a single one. He fell back on a vague assurance that new technology, it'll just always
00:06:21.280 create some jobs somewhere in the future. The one benefit he did seem sure about was that AI
00:06:27.600 might help America defend Taiwan in a future war with China. That's a revealing answer to citizens
00:06:34.640 who were asking about how this technology would help their own country. Many libertarians now
00:06:41.800 seem to support data centers out of sheer loyalty to capital itself, which means economic activity
00:06:47.520 becomes an end unto itself. Progress, no matter the cost, is presumed to produce more liberty,
00:06:54.180 but that's delusional. The first great use of AI is not going to be liberation. It'll be
00:06:59.800 surveillance and control. The same corporate and political class that backed vaccine mandates,
00:07:05.820 digital surveillance censorship and biometric passes during covid they're now the ones who
00:07:12.320 are demanding trust on ai look i guess it's great that mark zuckerberg wants to like sit next to
00:07:17.920 trump at some meeting somewhere but i'm sorry i don't think this signals an actual change of heart
00:07:23.320 i don't think this person has suddenly become human and is really interested in making america
00:07:27.340 great and the most competitive in the world i'm pretty sure he's still the lizard man who wanted
00:07:31.620 to censor me on facebook our tech oligarchs lined up with democrats outsourced american jobs
00:07:38.300 embraced censorship and showed enormous appetite for monitoring the population they're just not
00:07:44.640 trustworthy allies look i truly appreciate the libertarian mind i understand what that level of 0.98
00:07:50.680 autism does to somebody you want to correct people who are saying something stupid you want to make 0.94
00:07:55.140 sure that you're the smartest guy in the room if you see a little detail it's easy to say oh well 0.96
00:07:59.320 i'm not siding with that person because they're just swallowing whatever lie they've been told
00:08:02.960 and so i get it the backlash against data centers in many cases it might lack intellectual polish
00:08:08.220 but you have to understand listen to my real argument the instinct is sound yes sometimes
00:08:14.360 they get the facts wrong but you have to understand that they are directionally correct
00:08:18.380 because they understand who hates them and who is working for them the elites driving ai are not
00:08:25.000 on our side and americans have no reason to sacrifice their communities resources and liberty
00:08:31.620 on behalf of people who plainly intend to use this technology against them in the near future
00:08:39.040 thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video go ahead and click like and if you haven't
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00:09:26.160 Thanks for watching and as always, I'll talk to you next time.