David Wallace-Wells, A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. NYTimes, May 8, 2026.
Americans still worry about the local impacts of data centers, storming to town halls en masse to protest them. They still worry about job loss and economic turmoil too, as do a growing number of politicians with their fingers lifted to the wind. But to many, the biggest A.I. labs now loom like the new faces of American oligarchy, as well — a fearsome concentration of economic and social power producing a self-compounding pattern of extreme inequality of the kind that has lacerated American life for decades. If the future lies with A.I., as we are so often told, it is unsettling to many and outrageous to some that so few people seem to stand in such absolute control of it.
In one sense, the vision peddled by A.I. companies is remarkably depersonalized: We hand more and more responsibility and judgment off to superintelligent black boxes, which rapidly begin shaping the course of the human future with decisions that remain illegible to the rest of us, including their designers. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own A.I. creations work,” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote last year. “They are right to be concerned: This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”
In another sense, and in the meantime, A.I. represents perhaps the most personalized sales pitch ever foisted on the passive American consumer — a vision of a near-total takeover of the country’s economic, social and cognitive lives by tools engineered by just five companies, run by five particular people, several of whom are widely described as sociopaths. The list is so short that you may know most of them by first name: Sam, Dario, Elon and Mark. (Demis Hassabis, who runs Google’s DeepMind, is perhaps less famous.)
We're building AI faster than homes:
Today, the United States is in the middle of a notorious cost-of-living crisis fueled in large part by a housing shortage of perhaps 10 million units, and last year, the country spent more money building A.I. infrastructure than single-family homes. We built 10 times as many data centers as the next biggest builder (Germany). We invested more than 20 times as much money into A.I. as the world’s next biggest investor (China). Among other things, artificial intelligence is an enormously big bet for the American economy to have made.
The White House is getting nervous:
This week, the White House signaled that it may make a sudden and dramatic U-turn on A.I. policy — once inclined toward hands-off support industry growth, the administration is now floating a proposal to force federal review of all new proprietary models before release. And Americans are drawing lines in the sand where they can, too. In September 2025, Americans seemed roughly ambivalent about the construction of new data centers in their communities, according to Heatmap polling, with voters 2 points more likely to support new construction than to oppose it. Four months later, in February of 2026, they were 24 points more likely to oppose it. That is a shockingly large swing in public opinion.
Diffusion?
And maybe we’re still on track for that. In the meantime, you’re more likely to hear pragmatic conversations about the thorny problem of what is called “diffusion”: the speed and shape of public uptake as new models spread out into the world beyond the lab, finding users and uses, hitting human bottlenecks and real-world obstacles and requiring new strategies or more narrowly trained models to navigate through or around them.
This is a pretty different vision, in which A.I. may continue to rapidly progress, even transform much of our lives, but without all the power necessarily accruing to the leading labs or the five individuals in charge of them.
There's more at the link.
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