During Saturday’s broadcast of FNC’s “Life, Liberty & Levin,” host Mark Levin weighed in on concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers, some of which bordered on hysteria.
Levin urged his audience not to feel threatened and offered historical comparisons to other scares throughout American history.
LEVIN: Relax, America! Relax. It’s going to be fine.
Don’t let these experts and these surrogates and these members of Congress get you all worked up. It’s going to be OK. Artificial intelligence and data centers — they’re not going to kill you. They’re not going to destroy you. I want you to stick with me.
AI is not a threat to the water supply. We debunked that the other week, but they threw it out there. AI is not driving up energy costs. No, Democrats drive up energy costs.
AI will create net increase in jobs, millions of jobs, blue collar, white collar, whatever you are, no collar. AI has noise abatement measures in place.
Local and state governments retain control over zoning and taxing issues. Antitrust laws and anti-competitive laws apply to AI as they do with every other industry. Criminal and civil laws apply to AI as they do with every other industry. So relax!
You know, in my book “Liberty and Tyranny” some decades ago, I pointed out exactly what’s taking place today, but in the context of the environment. I said, with the assistance of a pliant or sympathetic media, the statist uses junk science, misrepresentations, and fearmongering to promote public health and environmental scares, because he realizes that in a true widespread health emergency, the public expects the government to act aggressively to address the crisis, despite traditional limitations on governmental authority. We call it the Constitution.
The more dire the threat, the more liberty people are usually willing to surrender. You remember COVID?
This scenario is tailor-made for the statists, the leftists, big government types. The government’s authority becomes part of the societal frame of reference, only be built upon during the next crisis. The pathology of the statist health scare works this way: An event occurs, cases of food contamination are discovered, or instances of a new disease arise, or AI in data centers, or as is increasingly the case, government agencies such as the FDA, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the EPA, or a nonprofit organization such as the Center for Science and the Public Interest or the Sierra Club, they release a new study identifying a frightening new risk.
Urgent predictions are made by cherry-picked experts that the media accept without skepticism or independent investigation, and turn into a cacophony of fear. Public officials next clamor to demonstrate that they are taking steps to ameliorate the dangers. New laws are enacted or regulations promulgated that are said to limit the public’s exposure to the new risk. You hear it right now.
The example of this pathology, well, they’re numerous and include such scares as alar, sweeteners, bird flu, swine flu, dioxins, E. coli, listeria, the Ebola virus, MTBE. Let’s see, formaldehyde. I go on and on and on. These phony scares, and yet they continue.
I want to talk to you about DDT. I want to tell you a little bit story about DDT. That’s scary, isn’t it? It’s a poisonous pesticide. I’m so glad the government banned it, aren’t you?
Here’s the story: DDT’s usefulness in combating malaria and other insect- borne diseases was unprecedented. San Jose State University Professor, Jay Gordon Edwards, who was a longtime opponent of banning DDT, wrote in 2004: Hundreds of millions have died from malaria, yellow fever, typhus, dengue, plague, cephalitis — all of these diseases. In the 14th century, the bubonic plague, transmitted by fleas, killed a fourth of the people of Europe, and two-thirds of those in British Isles. Yellow fever killed millions before it was found to be transmitted by mosquitoes.
More than 100 epidemics of typhus-ravaged civilizations in Europe and Asia, with mortality rates as high as 70 percent. But by far, the greatest killer has been malaria transmitted by mosquitoes.
In 1945, the goal of eradicating the scourge appeared to be achievable thanks to DDT. DDT!
In 1959, the U.S., Europe, portions of the Soviet Union, Chile, several Caribbean islands were nearly malaria-free, thanks to DDT.
Journalist and best-selling author, Malcolm Gladwell recounted the successful eradication campaigns waged in Italy, Taiwan, the Caribbean, the Balkans, parts of the Northern Africa, the South Pacific, Australia and India. This is important. Stick with me, he said, in India, where malaria infected an estimated 75 million and killed 800,000 every year, every year fatalities had dropped to zero by the early 60s.
Between 1945 and 1965, DDT saved millions, even tens of millions of lives around the world, perhaps more than any other man-made drug or chemical before or since. DDT!
A few years ago, “New York Times” editorial page, this would be decades now, writer Tina Rosenberg explained that today Westerners with no memory of malaria often assume it has been only a tropical disease, but malaria was once found as far north as Boston and Montreal.
Oliver Cromwell died of malaria, and Shakespeare alludes to it as “egg” in eight plays.
Malaria no longer afflicts the United States, Canada, and Northern Europe, in part because of changes in living habits, the shift to cities, better sanitation, window screens. But another reason was DDT — listen to this — sprayed from airplanes over American cities and towns while children played outside.
So effective was DDT that in 1970, the National Academy of Sciences announced that to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In a little more than two decades, DDT, they said, has prevented 500 million human deaths due to malaria that would have otherwise been inevitable.
But in 1962, Rachel Carson, the opponent of pesticides, succeeded in spreading widespread hysteria about DDT’s effects on wildlife and especially children. In her book “Silent Spring,” Carson decried the broad use of DDT. As reasoned science correspondent at the time, Ron Bailey wrote, “Carson was an effective popularizer of the idea that children were especially vulnerable to the carcinogenic effects of synthetic chemicals.”
The situation with respect to children is even more deeply disturbing, she wrote, a quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, she said, 1962, more American schoolchildren die of cancer than from any other disease. Support of this claim, Carson reported that 12 percent of all deaths in children between the ages of one and 14 are caused by cancer.
Although it sounds alarming, Carson’s statistic is essentially meaningless unless it’s given some context, which she failed to supply, because it turns out that the percentage of children dying of cancer was rising because the other causes of death, such as infectious diseases, were drastically declining.
It is a sickening irony that Carson’s focus on children helped kill the use of DDT when malaria is the cause of death of millions and millions of children living in undeveloped countries. In fact, nowhere in “Silent Spring” did Carson mention that DDT had saved tens of millions of lives, a widely known fact by 1962, but of no apparent import to her or her growing legion of adherents.
Probably the greatest, the greatest healthcare farce ever, and I’m explaining to you how it happened, how it came to be, because the parallels are amazing to what’s going on today.
The media gobbled up Carson’s alarmism. President John Kennedy formed an advisory committee to investigate her claims. Congress held hearings. Oh boy, do they hold hearings!
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club brought litigation to pressure the government to ban DDT. Although DDT has never been directly linked to even one human death, Gladwell recounts incidents of test subjects literally lathering themselves with DDT, and this happened during World War II in the jungles in Far East Asia, the Pacific, where my grandfather and my great uncle fought, they would literally lather DDT on their bodies to protect them from malaria and other mosquito diseases.
The EPA, which had been established in 1970, banned DDT in 1972. Its use worldwide soon plummeted because the United States and the United Nations World Health Organization would no longer provide financial support for the life-saving chemical’s use.
In 2006, the World Health Organization announced that it would reverse years of policy and back the use of DDT as a way to control malaria outbreaks and so forth and so on.
But tens of millions of children, especially, died in the third world because of the ban of DDT.
Fearmongering! Fearmongering! It’s not the only case.
Over at the MacIver Institute, Dan O’Donnell wrote in 1967, researcher, Paul Ehrlich said, “The time of famines is upon us, and we will be most disastrous by 1975.” There were no famines, but that didn’t stop Ehrlich from predicting in 1970, the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.
The DDT in our fatty tissues has reached levels high enough to cause brain damage and cirrhosis of the liver, and America will be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. We hear this stuff all the time.
Then we have the coming Ice Age. “Newsweek” Magazine infamously predicted in an article entitled “The Cooling World.” There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically, the piece gravely began, and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth.
Members of the public throughout the 70s were hard pressed to keep up with all the global cooling predictions. The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively, they said, that meteorologists are hard pressed to keep up with it.
A headline in “The Washington Post” screamed colder winters — “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.”
“Science” Magazine predicted another Ice Age.
“The New York Times” ran a story titled, “Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing. Major Cooling May Be Ahead.” In another called “A Major Cooling Widely Considered To Be Inevitable.”
Even America’s most trusted news anchor, Walter Cronkite, told viewers in 1972 that British professor Hubert Lamb, well, he says that new Ice Age is creeping over the northern hemisphere, of course, no ice age ever came, and just eight years later, Cronkite was predicting devastation from global warming.
Increased reliance on coal is a crucial part of the Carter administration’s energy program, he said during a newscast in 1980. But the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee heard warning today that a coal-burning society may be making things hot for itself. He then tossed to reporter, Nelson Benton on the Capitol Hill for a dire prediction.
“One scientist put the urgency of the greenhouse potential in biblical terms, citing the warning given to Noah in the Old Testament. Noah knew trouble was coming, he said, and he prepared for it.”
In the 1980s saw doomsday predictions preparing the public for untold dangers from warming and acid rain. Acid rain! Remember that?
Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the U.N.’s environmental program, said in 1982 that within 20 years there would be an environmental catastrophe, which will witness devastation as complete as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust. By 2002, it was pretty clear that no such environmental holocaust was imminent.
Still, in 1988, the AFP predicted the destruction of the Maldives as a gradual rise in average sea level would flood the islands, but noted that the end of the Maldives and its 200,000 people could come sooner if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992, as they predicted. Drinking water supplies didn’t dry up by 1992.
The late 1980s also saw landmark testimony before Congress by James Hansen, who sparked fears of the greenhouse effect dramatically warming the Earth. He predicted that by 2009, the West Side Highway, which runs along the Hudson River in New York City will be underwater. It wasn’t. It was fine, and so too were the entire nations that the AP predicted in 1989 would be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. There was not a single nation wiped off the face of the earth because of the rising sea levels in the 1990s.
In February 1993, Thomas Lovejoy, the Smithsonian Institution’s Assistant Secretary for Environmental and External Affairs, said he was utterly convinced that most of the great environmental struggles will be either won or lost in the 1990s, and by the next century it will be too late.
In 2000, the U.K. “Independent” cited Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and reporting that within a few years, winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know that snow is. He goes on and on and on and on and on.
In 1972, a group of researchers at MIT, a great school, tackled a far- reaching question: How long can humanity keep growing and consuming at its current rate? Using computer modeling, they came up with an ominous answer: “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline of both population and industrial capacity.”
The report, “The Limits to Growth,” generated widespread controversy when it was published.
Folks, do you remember? Do you remember the Y2K in December of 1999? The world prepared for the impending global meltdown. Y2K never happened.
Now, we have the experts: Why the AI apocalypse won’t play out like the “Terminator,” how everybody could die from super intelligence, according to a panel of AI doomers by Matt Steib.
The concern over a superintelligent apocalypse has been around longer than today’s frontier AI labs see The Matrix or Nick Bostrom’s paper-clip scenario, in which AI tasked with making paperclips becomes so efficient that it snuffs out life and its pursuit.
The conversation changed when 27-year-old, Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon resigned and gave up his equity to warn the world about the existential threat of AI superintelligence. He said, the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade, he wrote on X.
Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman all appear to be taking the idea seriously, at least in public, and politicians of both parties have seized the moment to call for regulation. Two themes arise when speaking with the doomers. Pretty much everyone has a superintelligence analogy comparing humans to ants, and a talking point about how we don’t really know how AI would kill us.
Wow! How much of this stuff have you believed in the past? You know what it is, ladies and gentlemen, a fear of the future, a fear of the unknown. Look at these big buildings, these data centers. Most of us don’t know what the heck is going on in these businesses, so they fill our minds with all the apocalyptic fears and predictions, and then they have experts here and there, maybe a whistleblower, maybe developers or CEOs.
We better watch out as they continue to produce these things and demand regulations to kill competition.
Don’t be sucked in by this, America. Don’t be sucked in by this. This is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We should celebrate it. Look what we’ve done. Look what we’re creating. We’re in the lead. The communist Chinese want to be where we are, and they will leapfrog us if communists like Bernie Sanders and AOC and populist nationalists on the woke right have their way.
These are politicians. Politicians seem to think if they get elected to office, they can run anything and everything, and they’re smarter than everybody. Is that your take on your local politician? It’s certainly not my take. Or bureaucrats, the faceless bureaucrats, they know what to do. No, they don’t. We have a government that’s run a $40 trillion debt, heading to $50 trillion in just a few years.
We have a government that’s bankrupt Social Security and Medicare, and now they want to take this over. We have a government that lied about Obamacare and has driven the cost of insurance through the roof. We have a government that wastes a quarter of a trillion dollars a year — all the waste and fraud, whether it’s Minnesota, whether it’s L.A., they can’t even control what they’re supposed to control.
But they want to control you. They’re trying to scare you. They want more of your liberty, and they want power. That’s the bottom line. Don’t fall for it.