“I know what it’s like to lose. To feel so desperately that you’re right, yet to fail nonetheless. It’s frightening. Turns the legs to jelly. I ask you, to what end? Dread it. Run from it. Destiny arrives all the same. And now it’s here. Or should I say… I am.”

— Thanos

(I know I started with a Marvel quote, but from here on out it’s all Star Wars)

I’ve been turning that quote over in my mind a bit recently. I think it describes the process I’m going through with AI: the process of making peace with what seems to be inevitable. It’s not like I haven’t been using it a lot over the last few years. This is where revealed preference, a nice theory for MBAs, falls apart on contact with reality. It’s not a preference so much as a burden that must be carried to remain “economically viable”. Two things can be true at the same time: you can choose to use a tool of your own free will (even get good at using it) and still deeply resent it. At this point, though, I think I’m past emotion; the resentment has burnt out. It’s just a fact that has to be dealt with.

The Phantom Menace

Resentment is an ugly emotion, and burnt-out resentment doesn’t sound much better. So I think the fair thing to do is lay out the biggest issues I have with AI. This way, as a reader, you can decide whether the rest is worth reading. For what it’s worth, my objections are more socioeconomic than technological.

It’s been interesting to watch a wave of antipathy toward AI build over the last several months, just as I’ve been trying to make my peace with it. The politicians who were so eager to court the data center frenzy last year have turned on a dime, now claiming they had their doubts all along. So it goes. As much as venture capitalists, CEOs, and the current administration would like to pin the backlash on a Chinese psyop, it is a rational reaction from large segments of the country to something that carries more peril than it does promise.

What has been surprising is just how potent the backlash is politically. It doesn’t follow the traditional lines of polarization that most political issues hew to. It’s a coalition broad enough to have Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon take the same stage at an anti-AI rally and preach for the same cause. A truly mind-boggling development in a country with a partisan divide as calcified as ours. And it didn’t come out of nowhere: Bannon was warning that entry-level jobs for people under 30 were about to be eviscerated back in May 2025, in the same Axios column where an AI lab CEO predicted half of them would disappear.

But most tellingly, the enormous potential is revealed by the panicky, light-speed turnarounds we’re seeing from governors and local politicians. These politicians are closer to their constituents than Congress, which spends a good chunk of its year in Washington, DC, far away from the home districts of the senators and representatives. The speed at which the blue-state governor of New York and the red-state governor of Texas rolled out what amounted to bans on data center construction within weeks of each other shows that the pressure is broad-based.

“When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”

— Mon Mothma

AI has created a crisis of agency for people. The constant messages of inevitability that its backers blare out are an attempt to paper over its fragility. But the effect is that AI is something being done to us rather than a choice we made. And that’s triggering both a feeling of apathy and drift, as your future gets written without you, and profound anger.

There’s something sinister, cynical, and faintly ridiculous in the amount of effort that has gone into forcing a sense of inevitability onto the “AI boom.” Just to state the obvious, something that is truly inevitable does not need to loudly insist that it is inevitable. Its inevitability is self-evident. The obvious objection is that plenty of real things get insisted on loudly. Nobody thinks the Big One is fake because Oregon won’t stop running drills. But notice who’s doing the insisting. The earthquake warnings come from people who get nothing out of being believed except a slightly less catastrophic catastrophe. The AI inevitability campaign comes from the people who get rich if you believe it. If you have to insist on it, and you get paid when people buy it, you’re just faking it until you make it.

Take the Big One, since I brought it up. There are two major faults on the West Coast of the US that sit there (mostly) silently, barely making a rumble. It is inevitable that eventually the Cascadia subduction zone and the San Andreas fault will rupture (probably within minutes of each other) and unleash one of the most cataclysmic natural disasters in US history. Local and state governments are in an unending yet agonizingly slow process of trying to prepare for that day. The constant preparation is not because of loud, ominous rumbling coming from these faults. It’s because their eventual arrival is a mathematical certainty (the actual definition of inevitable).

Nor do I believe that Silicon Valley is sincere when it points to a national security imperative as the reason large sections of the American public must bear the cost of the AI boom. The Meta that now invokes the China threat is the same company whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, kept Xi Jinping’s book on his desk and bought copies for his colleagues. The same Mark Zuckerberg who asked Xi Jinping to name his child. This is the same Silicon Valley that didn’t blink an eye as it helped build China’s technological capacity. Now that it stands to make unfathomable amounts of wealth, it suddenly becomes a cause worthy enough to impose suffering on a large percentage of Americans? This come-to-Jesus moment is a bit too convenient in its timing. The about-face is suspiciously aligned with what will make them wealthier.

In a more human sense, the runaway arrogance of the people who stand to gain unfathomable amounts of wealth is most clearly seen in the overweening contempt with which they treat the rest of the country. This isn’t so much about the affront of their behavior as what it suggests about how they will wield their newfound power going forward. It dulls the luster of the potential benefits of AI. Even if AI discovers some miracle cures to diseases, the attitude doesn’t really suggest that people outside of their wealth class will be able to access it. You can’t ask Americans to sacrifice their economic well-being for Peter Thiel’s miracle cures.

If people working on AI truly believe that what they are working on has a decent chance of wiping out all people, then they have gotten to the point of believing they are entitled to make that bet on everyone’s behalf. The rest of the species is just along for the ride (nobody bothered to check in with us). Memes like the permanent underclass paint the picture of a future where a group of people, flush with their economic windfall, view the rest of humanity as subjugated.

Given what Silicon Valley has on offer for our future, the economic caste system of the permanent underclass, they had better hope that no one weighs that offer against the thing they keep telling us to fear. Their mouths are writing checks that reality can’t cash. You can’t ask people to sacrifice to stop a future that, from where they sit, looks about as unfree as the one you’re selling them. The China threat only works as a threat if the alternative is worth defending. Silicon Valley and Wall Street have spent three years making sure it isn’t.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike AI, of course (not least of which is that the people making it keep telling us there’s a non-trivial chance it could cause the extinction of our entire species). But even if it doesn’t send us the way of the dinosaurs like some giant asteroid made out of linear algebra and probabilities, there are plenty of valid reasons to have, shall we say, mixed feelings about this particular technological revolution.

For one thing, the “AI boom” is almost certainly a massive (and surprisingly fragile) bubble, whose bursting will maim the economy. How could it end any other way? Believing it is a bubble doesn’t deny that it is a revolutionary technological change that will endure. The internet was a bubble before it became a revolution. The power and endurance of a technological change can’t negate the timing mismatch between when the astonishing amount of investment will begin to pay off and when investors expect to be paid back. After all, there’s only so much money in the economy and electricity on the grid, at least within Wall Street’s timeframe. And when that mismatch is realized, there will be hell to pay.

But fear not: there is likely to be insult added to financial injury. Downturns are when businesses tend to adopt automation to cut costs, so a crash will likely accelerate the “AI jobs apocalypse.” Until quite recently, the CEOs of AI labs have been telling anyone who would listen that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. On the short end, that’s plainly a fairy tale. But five to ten years from now? That time horizon is more ominous. Again, there is a timing mismatch. AI undoubtedly will create many new types of jobs in the economy eventually, but it’s not clear that it will be in time to employ the people who lose their jobs due to automation.

My number one issue with the current iteration of the AI boom is how it is warping the economy. It’s warping it in real time, as it has been since the release of ChatGPT.

“There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us.”

— Maarva Andor

The biggest way it warps the economy is by crowding out everything else. It’s a black hole for capital, endlessly ravenous, with an irresistible gravitational pull on money. The Wall Street Journal, not exactly a hotbed of AI skepticism, calls it the biggest economic bet in U.S. history. And that’s before you count the $1.65 trillion the hyperscalers keep off their balance sheets. For the first time, the country is spending more on the chips and servers that fill data centers than it spends on housing. Often you’ll hear that the AI boom is the only thing propping up US economic growth. But that’s a misreading of the situation. It is the biggest driver of economic growth because it is starving the rest of the economy of capital. There are more Americans in the parts of the economy that have been starved than Americans benefiting from the boom. AI is the leading reason companies have given for layoffs this year, cited in roughly one of every five cuts. Unemployment is 4.1%, which sounds fine until you remember it stops counting you once you give up, and a lot of people have given up: long-term unemployment is up 55% since 2023, and the Richmond Fed notes the way it’s rising is a pattern it has only ever seen in recessions. Recent college graduates are being welcomed into the workforce with the warmest hiring market since the Great Recession. And the consumer spending holding it all up is coming from the richest fifth of households, who account for 57% of it. It’s disproportionately enriching a small group of already wealthy people while immiserating a large number of Americans.

Another way it warps the economy is inflation. The Fed has missed its 2% target five years running, with a new excuse each year: supply chains, stimulus, tariffs, Iran. The excuses rotate. The data centers don’t. A fact that even the Fed has been forced to acknowledge: the buildout is already raising prices; the productivity payoff is still in the mail. Fed Chair Warsh insists AI will be disinflationary eventually. That’s a forecast. The inflation is a measurement. It’s another dose of pain for the parts of America that were already being starved of capital.

“We let it grow, and now it’s here. It’s here and it’s not visiting anymore, it wants to stay.”

— Maarva Andor

Fundamentally, AI is a technology that is going to deeply destabilize humanity in the short term. And I mean that in an objective sense. It will cause a tremendous amount of economic dislocation in a relatively short period of time. Its economic benefits will most likely take longer to reach us than we hope. It is going to be an agent of chaos in society purely in economic terms and I haven’t even touched deepfakes, crime and propaganda. Not to mention the social changes it will bring.

A New Hope

But I’ll admit that’s cartoonishly bleak, to the point of being a little disingenuous. I think it is a virtue to have strong opinions that are loosely held, in the sense that when new information conflicts with what you hold to be true, you are flexible enough to face and incorporate the new reality. It’s important to face the facts even if they conflict with what you think you know. That’s something that I’ve had to do in regard to AI especially in light of recent events. It would be fair to categorize me as more in the AI skeptic camp than the true believers.

I have been skeptical of some of the fantastic claims about the power of AI coming out of Silicon Valley last year. To be fair, recent history had conditioned me to be skeptical of their claims. Venture capitalists, start-ups, and tech giants had spent a lot of credibility on hyping crypto and the metaverse. It seemed like there was a bit of desperation for finding the next big thing to keep the valuations up.

On top of that there was a huge gulf between what they were claiming and my own real-world experience using AI tools. The first time I used Claude Code it bricked my Xcode project to the point I was unable to open it without crashing the IDE. Stacked on top of that were the ever-present AI hallucinations that made using these tools unreliable at best. The enormous claims of AGI and the eventual creation of “the God machine” seemed like insane hyperbole if not outright hucksterism. It didn’t add up.

In the last six months that has changed. The tools have become more reliable, and more capable at completing complex tasks particularly in coding. It’s not flawless, but there has been an enormous leap in its utility. The transformation of AI’s utility happened first for programmers and has now engulfed mathematicians. I expect it will ripple out to other sections of the knowledge work economy in due course. Suffice to say that this makes dismissing claims of AGI and super-intelligence coming in the not-too-distant future as out of hand harder to pull off.

I had largely bought into the notion that every fantastical claim or warning from people at the heart of the AI economy was a twisted marketing ploy to juice their funding rounds and inflate the bubble. But the disclosure of incidents with “rogue AI swarms” over the summer along with the public pronouncements of the potential for human extinction by researchers at the AI labs has made me reevaluate. If anything these were disclosures and claims that endangered these companies and the bubble rather than pump them up.

That’s not to say some of the claims weren’t made with an eye to pumping air and hype into the bubble. Some of the claims could be both a twisted hype campaign for investors as well as genuine warnings and beliefs. But regardless, it’s harder to take solace in the idea that it’s all a charade. It’s at the very least a mixed bag of motivations rather than outright desperation or a scam. What started as clear-cut ideology has morphed into a messier reality.

“There’s no fate but what we make.”

— Sarah Connor

(This Terminator quote is surprisingly un-Star Wars like.)

So where does that leave me? Well, you could say that is also a mixed bag. If I accept that all the warnings of catastrophe are at least partially legitimate (not in the sense that they are going to come true, but that they come from a genuine belief rather than being purely constructed to serve an agenda) then I also have to do the same for the promised benefits. And if that is true, then it’s not all doom and gloom. There are revolutionary changes to look forward to. Moderna’s AI-designed cancer vaccine just passed a Phase 3 trial, so the miracle cures are real (whether you can afford one is a separate question). AI holds the promise of unlocking economic and scientific advancements capable of helping us overcome problems we’ve been mired in for decades, paving the way for a future I would actually want to live in.

In terms of AI being a crisis of human agency, I think in a way the potency of the backlash as a political force gives hope that this too will heal. Americans overwhelmingly feel that their government doesn’t really represent their interests; it represents the interests of a moneyed elite. Nothing ever changes, nothing ever gets solved, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But that doesn’t seem to hold true in regard to the AI backlash. This unlikely coalition is making what was politically impossible possible. It’s the political equivalent of pigs flying. And that’s something hopeful.

“Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this: Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”

— Nemik

The American public largely seems to be turning on AI, with widespread loathing and fear of its attempt to blitz us with speed and a manufactured sense of inevitability. It’s not inevitable. Or rather, the technology is. The earthquake is coming whether anyone likes it or not. But the arrangement that’s being built around it, who pays, who profits, and who ends up in the permanent underclass, is not geology. It’s a set of decisions, and decisions can be unmade. It didn’t take a revolution to prove that. It took two governors and a few weeks. The people, when we act as a majority, are undoubtedly the most powerful force in the country. The campaign to make the average American feel disempowered has been largely successful, but it is nonetheless a lie.

There is also hope for us in a more human sense. As our digital world becomes overrun by artificial content and bots, the value of genuine human connection will become clearer. Its value will increase as it becomes scarcer relative to all the other content out there. This is something I can feel hopeful about. The story of technology in the 21st century has largely been one of gradual isolation from other people, as digital communication put up barriers where real-world contact once thrived. But in a world where people can’t tell whether there is another person at the other end typing or a bot, the value derived from virtual connection will plummet. Internet friends may become a thing of the past (for most people). To reach a threshold level of trust that any virtual connection is actually real, you’ll have to meet the other person face to face.

That’s the struggle: you have to hold competing views at once to get the full picture. AI is here, and it’s not going anywhere (even when the bubble pops). The dread and the promise are both real. But the technology being here is the only inevitable part. Who pays for it, who profits from it, and how fast it gets shoved onto the rest of us are decisions, and they’re being made right now by people who get rich if you believe it was never up to you. Making peace with the first part is just realism. Making peace with the second is what they’re counting on. Thanos had the better line. Sarah Connor had the better point, and she was the one still standing at the end.