Big Tech Is Not Why AI Will Stay

AI resisters should understand one basic fact: the main obstacle to a broad retreat from AI is not the Big Tech. It is people like me. Even if access to the most capable systems became much harder, I would look for alternatives. If they became substantially more expensive, I would probably pay more. If you block all the data center construction, I will switch to a Chinese model. I do not say this because I dismiss the risks. I take many of them seriously. AI can mislead, weaken privacy, concentrate power, flatten judgment, and encourage intellectual laziness. But those concerns exist alongside another fact that is just as real: AI has made my life better.

The usual defense of AI emphasizes usefulness. It saves time. It drafts, summarizes, searches, reformats, checks, compares, and organizes. AI is also enjoyable and liberating. Much of adult life consists of maintenance, repetition, obligation, and administrative friction. We spend large portions of our days on tasks that are necessary but not meaningful. Life is boring. AI removes some of that weight, and what it returns is not simply time. It returns attention.

I can move more quickly from an idea to an experiment. I can follow questions that I once would have abandoned because answering them required too much effort for too little immediate payoff. I can test an argument, compare possibilities, work through a difficult passage, or pursue a half-formed thought without first turning curiosity into a project. The pleasure lies partly in this lowered threshold between wondering and doing.

This is why I have come to think of AI as essential. Human life is constrained not only by mortality but by the smaller limits that make mortality concrete: limited energy, limited attention, limited patience, limited hours in a day. We routinely abandon things we care about because they lose a competition with errands, paperwork, logistics, and fatigue. A tool that gives back even a small portion of that lost capacity changes more than workflow. It alters what seems possible within an ordinary day.

For me, that exchange has been favorable. I spend less time on routine production and more time brainstorming, thinking, designing, and talking with people. AI does not eliminate intellectual work. It changes where I place my effort. I can spend less time getting a document into shape and more time deciding whether the idea inside it is worth pursuing.

The same is true in teaching, though not because students need some generic preparation for an AI future. I value AI because it can already do things that are educationally useful. A student can ask for another explanation without embarrassment. A concept can be approached from three directions instead of one. A weak first attempt can become material for analysis rather than merely evidence of failure.  None of this removes the risks. Students can use AI to avoid thinking, produce empty prose, or mistake fluency for knowledge. But these are problems of use, not proof of worthlessness.

The deeper disagreement begins with experience. Some people use AI and feel diminished by it. They sense that something human is being removed from writing, teaching, art, or thought. Others use the same technology and feel expanded by it. They find that it creates room for curiosity, experimentation, and work they could not otherwise sustain. Neither side can command the other to experience the technology differently. 

This is why the dispute cannot be settled by listing benefits and harms, as if everyone were working from the same scale. Evidence about cheating, labor, energy use, productivity, or learning matters. But beneath those disputes is a harder question about what kinds of effort we consider worth preserving. One person sees the removal of effort as a loss because the effort itself carried meaning. Another sees the same removal as relief because the effort was merely an obstacle between intention and action.

I have no objection to people choosing not to use AI. There are many technologies I do not use because they do not add enough to my life. I do not assume that everyone should make the calculation I make. My concern begins when personal refusal becomes an attempt to deny others access to something they have found genuinely valuable. 

Any serious discussion has to begin with the recognition that AI is not merely something being imposed on reluctant users by powerful companies. Many of us actively want it. Democratic politics is what is going to keep it going, not the arms race with China.

The Road Monster Arrives: The Forgotten Backlash Against a Machine

When the automobile first appeared on public roads, many people hated it. Not mildly disliked it. Hated it. Newspapers called cars “road monsters” and “public nuisances.” Villages tried to ban them. Farmers threw stones at drivers. Entire regions voted to keep automobiles out. The resistance was not irrational panic about the future. In many cases, the critics were describing real harms with remarkable accuracy.

It is difficult for us to imagine streets before cars. We think of roads as places designed for vehicles. But nineteenth century streets were social spaces. Children played there. Vendors stood there. Horses, carts, bicycles, and pedestrians mixed together in a slow choreography that had evolved over centuries. The automobile entered this environment like an invasive species. It was loud, fast, dirty, and dangerous. Horses panicked at the sound of engines. Dust clouds covered villages. Accidents multiplied. In Britain, the government responded with the famous “Red Flag Act,” requiring someone to walk ahead of motor vehicles carrying a warning flag. Today this law is remembered as comic overreaction. At the time, it seemed prudent.

The first fatalities intensified public anger. In 1896, Bridget Driscoll became the first pedestrian killed by an automobile in Britain. Witnesses described confusion and terror. A few years later, newspapers in the United States were already using phrases like “the automobile nuisance.” In France, the catastrophic Paris to Madrid race of 1903 ended with multiple deaths and was halted by authorities before reaching Madrid. Early automobiles did not arrive wrapped in the language of safety or environmental progress. They arrived trailing smoke, blood, noise, and class resentment.

The class issue mattered enormously. Early motorists were mostly wealthy people. To many ordinary citizens, the automobile looked less like transportation and more like aristocratic arrogance mechanized. Woodrow Wilson once remarked that cars generated “socialistic feeling” among rural populations because they symbolized the “arrogance of wealth.” Popular literature absorbed this resentment. In The Wind in the Willows, Mr. Toad becomes intoxicated by motorcars, turning into a ridiculous and dangerous fanatic. In The Magnificent Ambersons, one character dismisses automobiles as “a useless nuisance,” a line that sounded perfectly reasonable to many readers in 1918.

Some places resisted for decades. Mackinac Island banned automobiles in 1898 after carriage operators complained that cars endangered horses and pedestrians. The island remains largely car free today. In the Swiss canton of Graubünden, automobiles were prohibited after residents protested the “speed, noise, and smell” of motor traffic. The ban survived repeated referenda before finally collapsing in 1925. What is striking in retrospect is not that these societies resisted technology. It is that they negotiated with it. They imposed limits, argued about costs, defended existing ways of life, and demanded compensation for disruption.

That is the real lesson of the automobile. The story is not that society always loses when it resists technology. Nor is it a simple morality tale about fearful humans standing against inevitable machines. Many early objections to automobiles were correct. Cars did kill people. They did destroy older industries and reshape cities around themselves. They did transfer public space toward private mobility. What changed over time was the balance of interests. The benefits of automobiles gradually became large enough that more people were willing to tolerate the costs. New industries emerged. Rural isolation diminished. Trade accelerated. Personal mobility expanded. The conflict was never humans versus machines. It was always humans versus other humans, each group attaching different values to speed, safety, convenience, labor, status, and ways of living. Or, in many cases, the same humans against themselves.