Alex Bores
New York State Assembly member and former software engineer who is behind the RAISE Act, New York's AI safety law for frontier model developers (from memory).
“Data centers are the first time that AI is meeting democracy. Let's say you're fine with a data center, but you're really upset about the way AI is being forced into schools, or you're worried about AI automating your job. You haven't gotten a vote on any of those changes. Polling that our organization did found that over 70% of Americans agreed that AI has been forced into their workplace, their kids' school, or some other part of their daily life without them being consulted.”
Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · November 2026
Context
The host asked whether voters are irrationally anti-AI. Bores answers that local data center votes are one of the few places people get a direct say on AI, which explains why so many restrictions passed.
Transcript
…was tied to AI made a big difference. And so you saw OpenAI saying that they are going to try to rebrand data centers as AI compute campuses. I mean, campus sounds fun, but they're still tying the AI into it in a way that I think won't alleviate the very real concerns and fears that Americans have.
…being sort of mischaracterized, caricatured in some way as AI equals bad, so we hate this thing. Am I wrong in thinking that? Is there a little bit of, I don't know, sort of an anti-AI cult that is causing people to maybe irrationally dislike these things, or is it all rational and warranted?
Well, I think it was Camus who said humans aren't rational. They're rationalizing. So the philosophy of the mind and of the voters we can put off there. But there is a, you know, if a data center, I like to point out there are plenty of data centers that exist in my hometown of New York City. They're just in buildings. They're not these big campuses that impose on land use in lots of ways. So there are legitimate concerns about land use, about power, about noise in some of these places, and all of that's reasonable to talk about. And then there's this separate fact that data centers are the first time that AI is meeting democracy. And so let's say you're fine with a data center, but you're really upset about the way AI is being forced into schools, as we saw news with Google this week. Or you're worried about the impact of AI on chatbots or even AI automating your job. You haven't gotten a vote on any of those changes. Polling that Who Decides did, that our organization did, found that over 70% of Americans agreed that AI has been forced into their workplace, their kids' school, or some other part of their daily life without them being consulted. And so they just feel alienated from being able to make any choice with this technology. And if the first choice you…
it's a great point. Just looking at the market's reaction. So it seems as though investors basically believe that this blue wave, this blue tsunami, essentially means that we're going to have very stringent regulation on data centers, or at least data center construction is going to be…
think your characterization is spot on, and I find it fascinating, right? It expresses a bet that there will be stringent regulation on building new data centers, that that capacity will be. Curtailed, but that there won't be regulations that impact the profits of the tech companies and the AI…
Based on the investors' reaction here, it seems as though they believe, investors believe Wall Street believes that data centers are essentially going to be gutted. I mean, it's a pretty strong reaction that we're seeing. And I imagine they, I mean, you are kind of the face of this movement in a…
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