The populist backlash against A.I. is accelerating

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.

The coming AI-driven workplace apocalypse [We aren't ready]

Jasmine Sun, The A.I. Fear Keeping Silicon Valley Up at Night, NYTimes, April 30, 2026. Sampled from the article:

The opening paragraph:

Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I live in San Francisco, among the young researchers earning million-dollar salaries and the start-up founders competing to build the next unicorn. While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away.

Silicon logic:

But even those who view the idea of a permanent underclass as overblown tell me that the meme contains a kernel of truth. [...]

Most economists and A.I. experts do not expect this scenario, but the persistence of the permanent underclass idea should concern all of us. First, because it signals how much collateral damage the A.I. companies will tolerate en route to A.G.I. And second, because the production of a social underclass is a policy choice. Instead of waiting for impact, we need to think seriously — now — about how we plan to support workers through A.I. disruption.

If left to its own devices, Silicon Valley may summon a permanent underclass through its own market logic. If you believe that human-substituting A.I. is inevitable, then every company should race to be the one to build it — and claim a market valuation the size of the economy and then some.

Unimaginative techno-determinism:

Tech workers, for their part, are scrambling for lucrative A.I. jobs in hopes of securing financial freedom — even when they harbor ethical hangups. [...]

This apparent dissonance can be justified if you believe that the arc of technological progress is fixed. For instance, the founders of Mechanize, a once buzzy start-up with a mission to “enable the full automation of the economy,” argued in a blog post that “the only real choice is whether to hasten this technological revolution ourselves, or to wait for others to initiate it in our absence.”

Many A.I. employees are ultimately motivated by visions of a beautiful future: a promised land where goods are cheap, diseases are cured, and abundant machine labor liberates humans to enjoy lives of infinite leisure. But increasingly, they also worry about triggering a jobs apocalypse along the way. “There are some people who care about jobs and inequality because they really care about people. There are others who think this is going to lead to instability, insurrection and revolution, and that’s bad for business,” said a researcher who has worked at two frontier A.I. labs...

And, I would add, if and when that future arrives, we'll not be ready. Why? Because we train adults to become addicted to work mode (Homo economicus). As a result, they won't know what to do with the leisure (Homo ludens).

An emerging techno-federal oligarchy (a successor to Eisenhower's "industrial military-complex"?):

At the same time as A.I. erodes ordinary workers’ leverage, it may concentrate power and wealth in large companies and the U.S. government — two entities whose interests are increasingly linked. A.I.-related investments such as software and data centers accounted for 39 percent of U.S. economic growth in the first three-quarters of 2025, per an analysis by the St. Louis Fed. That gives the federal government a vested interest in sustaining the A.I. boom. Mr. Amodei acknowledges that this concentration can lead to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.”

In March, the company started the Anthropic Institute to house its teams working on economics, societal impact and frontier safety. The institute is led by Jack Clark, the affable British journalist turned A.I. billionaire and Anthropic co-founder, who seems to be replacing Mr. Amodei on the media tour of late. When we spoke, I asked Mr. Clark if he, too, expects A.I. to create a permanent underclass.

“This is basically a societal choice,” he replied. Like Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei, Mr. Clark sees the default path for A.I. as dire: one where we “let technology rip, and don’t think about the social effects until later.” But he also feels optimistic that sufficiently conscientious A.I. builders and policymakers can steer the ship away from the storm.

I have little faith in those (mythical) A.I. builders and policymakers. Meanwhile:

On the evening of Feb. 25, several dozen A.I. employees and civil society advocates gathered in a converted warehouse in San Francisco’s sleepy Dogpatch neighborhood to hear the Democratic pollster and strategist David Shor. The event was titled How to Prepare Our Politics for A.G.I., and doubled as a fund-raiser for a new “six-to-nine-month sprint” to rally Democratic politicians around the campaign issue of A.I. job displacement. [...]

While the American public ordinarily hesitates to support left-wing policies like a jobs guarantee or single-payer health care, A.I. seems to expand the political Overton window. “Right now, the argument is, ‘You’re all about to lose your jobs, and the choice is either you get nothing and starve, or we do something fair,’” Mr. Shor said. “People don’t want to be members of the permanent underclass.”

Not all policies are created equal, however. A universal basic income is unpopular, but a federal jobs guarantee has legs, Mr. Shor found. American voters don’t care about beating China, but they are excited about A.I. curing diseases. And, crucially, populism sells. In one of the top-performing political ads that Mr. Shor’s data firm tested, the nameless narrator declares: “We make the corporations and billionaires who profit from A.I. pay their fair share.” The ad concludes: “They work for the bots. We work for you.”

The near term:

If current trends continue, A.I. models and agents will be capable of performing a wider range of knowledge-work tasks at higher levels of complexity. At that point, A.I. shifts from automating single tasks to taking over entire roles. Hiring may slow in accounting, marketing, design, administrative work and other white-collar professions.

The work force will shift toward less automatable jobs where humans retain a comparative advantage — such as entrepreneurship, care work, the skilled trades and entertainment like sports and the performing arts. We will also see new jobs we haven’t imagined yet, in numbers we cannot predict. Many displaced workers will struggle to retrain, as they have in past automation waves. Education, health care and tax systems will require an overhaul if white-collar employment is no longer a reliable path to middle-class stability. [...]

But the debate over the most extreme scenarios conceals a more immediate threat: Even in the most limited case, A.I. will break the career ladder for millions of current and future workers, a prospect often waved away with euphemisms like “transitional friction.” The Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey puts it plainly: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”

Class solidarity?

In this sense, A.I.’s broad capabilities foster a rare class solidarity between white-collar and blue-collar workers. When 20-something software engineers in San Francisco talk about escaping the permanent underclass, I hear them projecting concerns about their own precarity: What happens if the invisible hand of the market decides that my skills are no longer valuable? Who will catch me if I fall? For once, a rarefied class of employees — those used to being the automaters, not the automated — is reckoning with their potential obsolescence.

The final paragraphs:

Society’s ability to cushion A.I.’s disruption may determine whether we get to reap its gains at all. Without a safety net and a transition plan, blunt protectionism is workers’ rational response to automation. If you hear that A.I. will entrench a permanent underclass, you’ll do anything to stop it. [...]

And what if we don’t act? [...] In March, the Palantir chief executive, Alex Karp, spoke on a panel with the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien. “The biggest challenge to A.I. in this country is political unrest,” Mr. Karp said. “If I were sitting here in private with my peers, I’d be telling them the country could blow up politically and none of us are going to make any money when the country blows up.”

People are beginning to sour on AI (and how!)

Ezra Klein, produced by Annie Galvin, Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores? NYTimes, April 21, 2026.

From the introduction:

If you are living in New York’s 12th Congressional District, you may have seen these endless attacks on Alex Bores, one of the Democrats running there.

Yikes. Bores did work for Palantir. The rest of that attack is not what you might call true, but what interests me is who is paying for it: the super PAC Leading the Future and its subsidiary Think Big.

Who funds the super PAC Leading the Future? Well, among their largest donors are the co-founders of OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and — wait for it — Palantir.

So why is a co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, in this case, funding a super PAC to try to destroy a candidate on the grounds that he once worked for Palantir? The reason is that Leading the Future is a super PAC dedicated to destroying anyone who might regulate the tech industry, in general, or A.I., specifically, in a way these funders don’t like.

And Bores is a member of the New York State Assembly. He co-wrote and passed the RAISE Act, one of the first pieces of A.I. regulation passed in any major state.

From deep in the discussion:

Klein: Have you thought about the change in public opinion? Because it looks to me like we’re seeing a pretty powerful A.I. backlash rising.

You have polls showing now that more Americans are worried about A.I. than are enthusiastic about it. There’s a lot of counter-data center energy playing out throughout the country.

What have you made of how quickly the politics have shifted beneath A.I.?

Bores: That surprised me. Both how many people have focused on it, but also how bipartisan it has remained.

You, of all people, know about polarization — and most issues end up polarized. This one hasn’t so far. It has resisted that longer than I thought it would.

If you talk to voters, across Republicans, Democrats and independents, you see pretty similar attitudes; across state legislators, pretty similar attitudes; even in Congress, there’s more bipartisanship than you would think.

Surveys regularly show that about 10 percent of people want to put the A.I. genie back in the bottle, to pretend it never existed. I empathize, but I don’t think that’s the way forward. Ten percent of people represented by the super PAC Leading the Future want to just let it rip.

That is the super PAC that’s attacking you.

Yes. They want to just let it rip. They don’t care how many people it hurts, just how fast it moves.

Eighty percent of Americans see some benefits. But they also see a lot of risk and think it’s moving too fast and want to have some say in its development. The fact that it has stayed so bipartisan has surprised me, and also the fact that it has risen up in people’s minds so much has surprised me.

Has the pessimism around it surprised you? We were talking earlier about the period when there was a lot of optimism about tech, about software, about the internet.

I think you can really look from early computers, the early internet, all the way pretty late into the social media era.

Probably around Trump things begin to turn — Cambridge Analytica, algorithmic feeds. But that’s a long time when these systems and technologies are present for people, and there’s a fundamental optimism about them.

A.I. — ChatGPT, I think, is when this really burst into public consciousness. It’s 2023. We’re here in 2026, and the polling has already turned negative. The week before we recorded this, Sam Altman was targeted in two separate violent attacks. There was a Molotov cocktail thrown at his home.

Awful.

Two other people shot at his door.

I was a little shocked to see people celebrating these attacks online, saying: Where can we support the bail fund?

Yes.

This has moved into fury and fear and pessimism really, really quickly. Why do you think that is?

Well, there was a separate split in A.I. around capabilities. The debate used to be: Is this real or is it stochastic parrots? But usually, even before that: Is it just slop that is never going to actually replace a human?

Fancy autocomplete.

Exactly. Exactly. We had these debates on one dimension, which was: Is it good for people? Is it bad for people?

And then there was this other dimension: How big of an impact is it going to have? And I think that debate has collapsed. People are not skeptical of its power anymore — or some are, but fewer and fewer each day.

The intensity with which we’re having that first debate has really ramped up. But I think it has also been that we saw what happened with social media.

We saw what happened with these previous revolutions that were supposed to change everything for the better. We’ve seen platforms established with great promise, and then over time, once they get power, really turn on their users.

People are no longer willing to believe the story that is told about a technology or a platform always benefiting people. You see this argument from some of the A.I. founders. They say: Well, it will create material abundance for everyone. There will be no more poverty. Everyone will have everything.

And everyone is looking around saying: Of course, that’s not what’s going to happen. You’re a private company — you’re going to profit, you’re going to keep it all for yourself.

Sam Altman recently said it will be like a utility. But utilities are really highly regulated.

People are just not willing to believe that spin anymore, and yet they’re seeing changes in their lives really quickly.

How long can democracy withstand the assault of AI?

Jennifer M. Harris, We Are Witnessing the Rise of a New Aristocracy, NYTimes, Apr. 8, 2026.

Inequality is such a fact of American life that it’s easy to shrug off. But we are in uncharted terrain. The amassed wealth of today’s tech titans makes the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts look quaint. Over the past two years, 19 households have added $1.8 trillion to their coffers, the economist Gabriel Zucman told me — roughly the size of the economy of Australia.

Into this fragile state enters artificial intelligence. It threatens to make a bad situation much worse.

Left on its current course, A.I. could deliver a bleak picture: lower- and middle-income jobs automated away, with top earners remaining unscathed. Income shifting from middle-wage workers doing the bulk of the labor toward those wealthy enough to bankroll the technology. Growth headwinds. Worsening affordability. So, too, a federal government less able to respond, thanks to a shrinking tax base.

For any society in which this much wealth gets concentrated in so few hands, and is then so easily parlayed into political clout, the question becomes one not just of economics but of basic civic standing. At some point soon, we are no longer sharing in self-government. [...]

Those losses on the lower half of the scale are underway. One-quarter of computer programming jobs disappeared in 2023 and 2024. IBM’s chief executive said in 2023 he could “easily see” 30 percent of the company’s back office roles getting replaced by A.I. in the next five years. [...] A Stanford study found that early-career employees in A.I.-exposed fields like customer service have seen a 13 percent drop in employment since 2022 — unlike more experienced workers and those in other sectors.

At the same time, premiums for elite graduates with hefty Rolodexes full of powerful people, and tacit knowledge (like how to generate a laugh at a cocktail party on Park Avenue), aren’t going anywhere. Chatbots are no substitute for people who can call the right people when high-stakes deals go awry.

Meanwhile the investor class, which is very small, is making out like bandits:

What’s worse, much of the trillion-plus-dollar investment in the A.I. boom isn’t happening in the stock market at all — it’s happening in private funds out of reach to all but the wealthiest, most connected among us. In earlier technology-fueled booms, companies like Amazon sold their shares in the public markets. As the value of its shares soared, they enriched Amazon’s early investors, yes, but thousands of employees also benefited, as did millions of other Americans, through pension funds and retirement accounts.

That isn’t the case with A.I. Anthropic and OpenAI, the two best-known A.I. companies, raised over $150 billion, mostly from venture capitalists, private equity firms and foreign sovereign wealth funds — funds mostly inaccessible to the vast majority of investors (let alone ordinary Americans).

With ownership of these firms concentrated in so few hands, any wealth they produce widens the gap between the richest households and everyone else. Also consider the fact that today’s A.I. firms employ far fewer people than established tech companies. OpenAI and Anthropic, which are already operating globally, employ only a few thousand people. Microsoft employs more than 200,000, and Amazon employs 1.5 million. The picture that emerges isn’t of just a deepening of the current divide. The A.I. story is one of more extreme concentration of wealth — at most likely not more than 3 percent of households, the very few who hold ownership in these A.I. companies or in the mostly private firms financing them.

And the inequality just keeps trickling outward:

Well-meaning policymakers often turn to federal spending to prop up our labor markets or address the affordability crisis. But they don’t factor in the tremendous debt load our government is currently servicing nor the negative impact A.I. is poised to have on the government’s coffers.

Because investment income is taxed at lower rates than wages — and because the wealthiest often find ways to defer or avoid those taxes altogether — A.I. will significantly shrink the tax base. Economists estimate that as $1 of value creation shifts from workers to owners, total tax revenue falls on the order of 10 to 15 cents. You don’t need to squint to see the resulting cuts to safety net programs like work-force training and Head Start that low- and middle-income families rely on — cuts that will, in turn, also worsen inequality.

What to do? How about public equity in AI?

Another idea, so far still confined to think tank circles, proposes innovative tax structures to create public equity stakes in large A.I. firms; these stakes could then fund a better safety net or simply put money in workers’ pockets. After all, the “intelligence” in A.I. was ours to begin with. One especially promising fix is to incentivize more firms to convert into worker-owned cooperatives, building on modest federal support passed in 2022. If we put more workers in charge of the firms deciding how to use A.I., the odds climb that they will figure out how to use A.I. so as to increase their own value.

All of these fixes are made harder as the wealthiest parlay their economic clout into political sway.

There's more at the link.