In a rare moment of unity, Americans are fighting Big Tech together

Ah, marvellous. The one issue that can finally drag Americans across the partisan abyss is... the data centre humming behind the strip mall and a Flock Safety camera photographing your car as you pop out for milk. USA Today reports a 'rare moment of unity,' with the citizenry united in being 'more concerned than excited' about an AI-dominated future. Terrific. We have discovered the only bipartisan position left in America is 'please stop building the robot panopticon next to my kid's school.'

The rage has found concrete targets. Data centres have become the new coal plants, except instead of poisoning the air they simply hum and consume enough electricity to power a small moon base, while producing the intelligence that will eventually replace the people complaining about them. And Flock Safety — a name that sounds like a nursery rhyme for authoritarianism — is selling AI-powered surveillance cameras to police, so that every number plate, face and loiterer can be scanned, logged and cross-referenced by a helpful algorithm. One imagines the pitch: 'For a low monthly fee, we will photograph every car, person and dog in your town and present the local constabulary with an AI summary of whose garden they lingered in.' The locals, tragically, are not buying the yarn.

The usual response to public concern about AI is a soothing white paper about 'responsible innovation' and a congressional hearing where no one asks a question the lobbyists haven't pre-answered. But the glorious, corrosive irony is that the American public has become the safety researcher we never hired — flagging runaway deployment, unaccountable vendors and surveillance systems with no visible kill switch. This is the 'rare moment of unity' that four years of patriotic exhortation couldn't achieve: it took a plate-reading camera in every cul-de-sac to bring the country together. One almost wants to cheer. Almost. Ask again when the data centre's backup generators kick on at 3 a.m.