Three-quarters of Americans said in a recent poll that they oppose datacenters being built next to their homes

Donald Trump has criticized communities pushing back against datacenter projects across the US amid a growing backlash, warning those that reject them risk becoming “backwards and poor”.

As controversy surrounding local datacenter plans continues to swirl around election campaigns nationwide ahead of November’s midterm elections, the US president declared Americans “will only have yourselves to blame” if they are canceled.

The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters, as examples from Japan and Scotland show

There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda.

Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in US politics, but groups in Japan, Scotland and the US’s own academic and private institutions show how that could change.

With traditional goals such as stability and home ownership feeling out of reach, young people are focused on the present

By now, we all know the shape of financial nihilism: the throw-your-money-at-anything reaction to the dissolution of the slow, linear path to wealth; the prediction markets, meme stocks, cryptocurrencies and microluxuries growing in its place. We’re left in an economic no man’s land. But financial nihilism only describes where we put our money. What about how we earn it in the first place?

The modern economy has long relied on our need for stable employment – to pay the mortgage, to keep our kids fed, or, for some, to chase prestige and power – to generate the work ethic that keeps the wheel of production turning. None of this is going well for young people. Our jobs are insecure, we can’t afford houses, we’re deferring having kids (if we have them at all), and only 6% of us say a leadership position is our primary career goal. Hope is one of the economy’s most productive inputs, powering our willingness to endure long hours. When the production function of income – the mechanism that turns hard work into a stable salary, then a mortgage, then a pension – breaks down, so does our relationship with the input. I call this production nihilism: my generation’s growing indifference to the kinds of work we’re willing to participate in, and where we’re willing to earn.