Human-Powered Compute
If the data center wants power, it can ask a person.
New data centers may draw their electricity from exactly one source: human beings, running, on wheels. Every watt. No exceptions.
The policy is as written. A data center may be built anywhere in the United States, at any scale, by anyone — provided every watt it consumes is generated on site by people running on wheels.
I want to be clear that this is not a protest. This is the single most comprehensive piece of domestic policy anybody has put in front of the American people in forty years, and it solves four separate national crises at once. Let me take them in order.
Jobs. Everyone agrees artificial intelligence is going to eliminate millions of American jobs, and nobody has said what replaces them. This does. It creates two entirely new sectors: somebody has to build the wheels, and somebody has to run on the wheels. The machine that takes your job now requires you to power it. The symmetry here is, frankly, beautiful.
Childhood obesity. We have a generation of children who do not move, and we have tens of millions of wheels that need turning. I am not going to insult anyone by pretending I do not see the overlap. Realizing the full public-health benefit will require revisiting some of this country’s more draconian child labor restrictions, and my administration is prepared to have that conversation.
Electricity. A data center that cannot draw power from the grid does not draw power from the grid. The savings are total. Your bill goes down the day this passes.
Community. We used to have bowling leagues. We used to know the people on our street. Under this policy you will spend eight hours a day on a wheel directly beside your neighbor, and you will talk, because there is nothing else to do. We are not just powering a server farm. We are rebuilding civic life in this country, one shift at a time.
The wheels will be union.
Asked and answered
- A person generates about a hundred watts. This is not physically possible.
- That’s for the nerds to figure out. Or maybe AI.
- No, seriously — a mid-sized facility would need millions of people running continuously, forever.
- Millions of jobs. I appreciate you doing the math on that, because that is a much stronger number than the one I came in with.
- Is this a jobs program?
- Enthusiastically, yes. Two sectors, built from nothing: wheel fabrication and wheel operation. No degree required for either. These are the kind of jobs people say they want brought back, and I notice the people who say that have gone quiet since I started bringing them back.
- You are proposing that children run on wheels.
- I am proposing that children be permitted to participate. There is a difference, and I would ask people to stop collapsing it. We have an epidemic of inactivity on one side and an enormous unmet demand for sustained low-intensity motion on the other, and the only thing standing between them is paperwork from 1938.
- What about the data centers already operating?
- Ten years to convert. The conversion is straightforward: remove the connection to the grid, install the wheels, hire the neighborhood.
- What is the campaign’s position on AI?
- Warm. Genuinely warm. We support our future overlords in every way possible.