Democracy blindsides Silicon Valley’s power players looking to transform the world with AI
The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”.When Reich asked whether this state would be a democracy, he got a cool no. “Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back,” he was told. “To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.”The technos were onto something.
- ▪The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot it”.When Reich asked whether this state would be a
- ▪“Democracy is too slow, and it holds science back,” he was told.
- ▪“To optimize for science, we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.”The technos were onto something.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Tech |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/sep/27/democracy-ai-datacenters-power |
| Publication time | Sun, 27 Sep 2026 11:00:03 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-27T11:10:41.047Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-27T11:10:41.047Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | GE4QLVplpc9I · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Guardian Design / Getty ImagesAI (artificial intelligence)Democracy blindsides Silicon Valley’s power players looking to transform the world with AI‘The push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives’Eduardo PorterSun 27 Sep 2026 07.00 EDTShare@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format("woff2"),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format("woff"),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf)…
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