Robert Guest
speaker
122 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 25 Jun
Robert Guest’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Any even small risk of that is something you might be troubled by.
The thing that's different is that you hear a lot more people on the left being opposed to billionaires, being concerned about inequality, and particularly being hostile to billionaires who suck up to Trump, or the trillionaire who pals around with Trump and wants to put data centers in space.
But at the same time, on the right as well, you've got quite a lot of people who are.
Suspicious of the Californian tech elite and don't like the idea of a country where they're the most powerful people.
So you do hear a lot of the same concerns there.
And then if you get to things like people's children, I mean I talked to really quite far-left people at a progressive conference in America, and we've talked to socially conservative Senator Josh Hawley, and they both say pretty much the same thing about their children.
They say
Say you have children in this country who are growing up thinking that it's much easier to form a relationship with an AI chatbot than it is with a human being because they never reject you, they never tell you that anything wrong with you, you're not getting any of the normal social cues that you get from the rough and tumble of growing up.
So what's interesting about the data center backlash, part of it is just straightforward NIMBYism.
People don't like the idea of a hulking big shed in their community that's noisy, that uses electricity, and there's this untrue rumor going around that it will use masses and masses of water.
Actually they tend to recycle their water, so that's not really an issue.
But what's striking is
that when people are asked about their opposition to these things, they're not just opposed to ones in their backyard.
A lot of them are pretty much just as opposed to them anywhere.
They don't want them built anywhere.
That includes even Elon Musk's idea of building them in space.
And so I think what we're seeing here is a sense that the data centers are a visible manifestation of
Very rapid potential technological change and a lot of people want to block it for all the reasons why they're frightened of this change.
That's a very difficult question.
There's one area where the government can definitely make a difference, but which is quite speculative at the moment.
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