You may have heard about how former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and others giving graduation speeches referencing the upside potential of AI were booed by students. These boos reflect the growing anxieties about AI that are rapidly gaining ground in our society.
I had the pleasure of joining Fox & Friends this morning to discuss why.
A recent poll found that 71% of Americans believe AI development is moving too fast, 77% fear AI could be used to create political chaos, and over two-thirds were concerned that AI would undermine human relationships. 70% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their communities, and most would rather have a nuclear plant built in their community than a data center. Americans are more two times more negative than positive about AI.
Clearly, people are not feeling that the positive side of the AI story will benefit them enough to outweigh the costs.
I always say that if you aren’t incredibly excited about what the AI and associated revolutions can bring, you are missing the story. But if you aren’t also terrified about what can happen if we get all of this wrong, you are also missing the story. These technologies do not come with their own value systems, so it’s up to us to ensure that our most cherished values, including very ancient ones, can guide the applications of our most powerful technologies. (For more on this, see my new book, The AI Ten Commandments.)
In my book Superconvergence, I explore how the intersection of AI, genetics, and biotechnology will help drive massive improvements in our healthcare, make our agriculture more productive with fewer inputs of land, water, fertilizer, and energy, store data efficiently and reliably for millions of years, and help us grown the industrial materials we need rather than cutting them down or digging them up. A series of important papers released this week in Nature, show how AI can automate and accelerate scientific discovery. If used wisely and well, our AI capabilities will help us generate miraculous treatments and cures and mind-boggling inventions, repair damaged ecosystems, and peer more deeply into both the vastness of space and the atomic interiors of cells.
At the same time, people’s fears of AI are also fully justified and worthy of serious consideration. Like with past technological revolutions, AI will eliminate some jobs even as it creates and reshapes others. Like earlier tools from the book to the movie reel, it will diminish some forms of human creativity while expanding new ones. And like with every powerful technology before it, AI will be used to both harm and help people. Autonomous killer robots, algorithmic biases, AI-driven disinformation and psychological manipulation at industrial scales, the concentration of power in unaccountable systems, and the erosion of human agency and trust are among the many dangers AI poses.
Americans are not anti-technology or anti-competitive. Instead, they are worried because they see enormous change coming and don’t feel confident anyone is steering wisely or looking out for them. This is less about AI itself and more about social trust. A recent Stanford study found that only 31% of Americans trust our government to regulate AI responsibly (compared to an Average of 54% globally), the lowest level of public trust measured anywhere in the world. Little wonder Americans are more worried about AI than people in any other country polled.
Americans are worrying about jobs, kids growing up mediated by screens and algorithms, loneliness, and giant data centers reshaping rural communities while the benefits seem to flow elsewhere. The AI future feels to many people like it’s happening to them instead of for them. When they hear AI execs claiming that AI will massively boost productivity, what they hear is that they will lose their jobs. When they see political leaders becoming billionaires through shady crypto scams, they increasingly realize that, just like the losers at the casino are subsidizing the winners, the crypto losses of regular people are fueling these gains.
Americans have been massively willing to make sacrifices for the common good when there was a promise that the benefits of that sacrifice would be (at least somewhat) distributed. People of all backgrounds fought in World War II because they believed they would benefit, personally and societally, from victory. Through the GI Bill, civil rights legislation, trade unions, and the expansion of opportunity in post-War America, this generally turned out to be the case.
But while the AI revolution is creating some of the greatest new opportunities in history for innovation and wealth creation at all levels, many Americans are increasingly fearing that they will be left out of the upside story. They see a few spectacularly wealthy companies and executives privatizing most of the benefits of AI while the disruptions and costs are being socialized.
The AI revolution will be tremendously beneficial for those with capital and equities, but it will not on its own benefit the many people whose jobs will be impacted and who may not have the ability to reinvent themselves at the requisite speed and scale. I am not an AI doomer and believe we will create entire new industries that most of us can’t even imagine today. I am also a humanist who believes that we humans are capable of incredible feats of innovation and imagination that no machines will ever be able to fully replicate.
I have said many times that I believe “AGI is BS” and that the idea that Artificial General (human) Intelligence (when AI systems will do everything humans can do better than we can) is coming soon is preposterous. Human intelligence is the result of nearly four billion years of embodied evolution. AI will never replicate that, but our machines will be spectacularly intelligent and extremely creative in their own ways, which we will deeply come to appreciate on the most personal levels. (My next book, Virtuosa, is a novel exploring what this will mean in the context of classical music.)
The answer is not to stop AI but to build an AI future centered on human flourishing, where the benefits are broadly shared, innovation is matched by responsibility, and people feel they still have agency, dignity, and voice. That means ensuring ordinary citizens have a stake in the upside of the AI economy rather than allowing all the gains to concentrate in a handful of companies and investors. It means exploring ways for the general public to own small equity stakes in frontier AI companies and infrastructure, ensuring AI-driven breakthroughs in healthcare lower costs and expand access for everyone, not just the wealthy, and creating large-scale worker transition and retraining systems that help people adapt without freezing the dynamism of our labor market. It means investing in universal basic services including healthcare, education, childcare, digital access, and lifelong learning so people feel secure enough to navigate change with confidence rather than fear. It means building democratic guardrails, transparency, and meaningful public participation into the development of these technologies so people feel the future is being shaped with them, not simply imposed upon them.
If we allow AI companies to abuse, exploit, and victimize people like we’ve allowed social media companies, the consequences of ungoverned AI will be even greater than the catastrophe of social media.
Make no mistake, we are in an extremely competitive environment and America must win the AI race with China. If we don’t, we could find ourselves in a world where authoritarian systems shape the norms, infrastructure, and values of the AI age, where surveillance is pervasive, dissent is constrained, human rights are subordinated to state power, and the most transformative technology in human history is optimized more for control than for human flourishing. Our military could be significantly neutralized and our allies and the broader international system could be even more deeply undermined than is already (unfortunately) the case.
Our challenge is not simply to build more advanced AI systems than China, but to demonstrate that democratic societies can innovate faster and govern more wisely, ensuring that technological progress strengthens freedom, dignity, shared prosperity, and human agency rather than undermining them. We cannot win our AI race with China with better models alone. The AI race will need to be won on the societal level.
Doing this at home and abroad is about building a future people actually want to live in. That is not just about technology but also about how our best values can be realized across the board.
Those who articulate a positive vision for how the incredible opportunities before us can be harnessed for the common good will be cheered at graduations. If we demand it, they will also lead our governments and organizations at all levels.