The Vermont senator co-sponsored a bill that calls for a moratorium on building data centers. He discusses the environmental and economic concerns, and what the government can do. Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox. The data centers that power artificial intelligence are being built at a rampant pace, and are spurring resistance all over the country. Apart from public concerns about A.I.'s impact on jobs, privacy, and other aspects of life, data centers consume vast amounts of electricity and water.

A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue As Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan's newly elected Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, put it, "People really effing hate data centers." This summer, as the ideologically fractious Democratic primaries begin to recede and the politically pivotal midterm elections edge nearer, candidates and voters alike have had their attention drawn by vast, humming edifices newly constructed on the outskirts of towns. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public-health official who finished a deft insurgent campaign by becoming Michigan's Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, sounded a theme that helped decide primaries in his state and in Kansas last week. "People really effing hate data centers," he said. That kind of consensus is rare in politics right now.

Like many of his bits, it became a viral phenomenon, clocking in at nearly six million views on YouTube. At around the ten-minute mark, Oliver took his verbal bat to the knees of Tronc, the new name for Tribune Publishing Company, and its parody-worthy promotional video, in which a robotic spokeswoman describes the journalistic benefits of artificial intelligence, as a string section swells underneath. Tronc is not the only company to enthusiastically embrace the term "artificial intelligence." A.I. is hot, and every company worth its stock price is talking about how this magical potion will change everything. Even Macy's recently announced that it was testing an I.B.M. artificial-intelligence tool in ten of its department stores, in order to bring back customers who are abandoning traditional retail in favor of online shopping. Much like "the cloud," "big data," and "machine learning" before it, the term "artificial intelligence" has been hijacked by marketers and advertising copywriters.

Besides Pokémon reclaiming its place in the zeitgeist, bots are the buzzing tech trend of 2016 so far. The big five -- Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft -- have all unveiled or featured bots in their annual product conferences. Consumer startup decks have hurriedly affixed bots to their pitches, for better or for worse. The New Yorker covered conversational bots in June. Bot has quickly become as common as the word app has been in startup chatter about what people are building: its a bot for'X' (in this case X usually stands for a mundane, predictable task currently carried out by humans).