Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Silicon Valley Is Losing Control w/ Brian Merchant

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

What’s really driving the growing backlash against AI and Silicon Valley?Support my independent journalism: 🙏 Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz           ⁠ 🗞️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: ⁠https://www.usermag.co    From burning data centers to celebrating an attack on Sam Altman’s house, the anti‑tech backlash has escalated. In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with journalist and author Brian Merchant to unpack the rise of anti AI sentiment, the growing anger toward Big Tech, and why public hostility toward companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google keeps escalating.We discuss:Why the AI backlash exploded so quicklyThe connection between AI fear and distrust in capitalismWhy people are protesting data centersThe rise of anti tech politicsAI doomers and effective altruismSam Altman and Silicon Valley PR failuresWhether AI companies created their own crisisHow automation fears are shaping public opinionWhy people feel powerless against Big TechThe future of AI regulation and resistanceBrian Merchant is the author of Blood in the Machine, a book about the original Luddites and the history of anti technology movements.If you’re interested in AI, ChatGPT, Silicon Valley, automation, tech criticism, labor politics, or the future of the internet, we break down the cultural and political forces shaping the AI era.Subscribe for more interviews and deep dives on AI, internet culture, media, tech, and politics.

The structure of how AI has been developed is inseparable from the products to a lot of people. And so the anger kind of ricochets around even if you're using chat GPT. From the masses of people protesting data centers to the overwhelming support shown for the man who firebombs Sam Waltman's house, it seems like animosity towards big tech and the billionaires who control it is growing and growing by the day. Now, obviously, in a lot of ways, this is a really good thing. We need to hold these tech companies and the billionaires that run them accountable. But what's ultimately driving this anti-tech backlash and what does it ultimately reveal about our evolving relationship with technology? To discuss this, I have Brian Merchant here.

He's the author of a fantastic book called Blood in the Machine about the Luddites, the original anti-tech activists. And today we're going to talk about the anti-tech backlash, what's driving it, why it matters, and how we can keep this movement from going off the rails. Hi, Brian. Welcome. Hi, Taylor. Thanks for having me here. So you are an expert on tech backlash. I don't even know how to put it, but basically like people kind of, you know, sort of trying to resist technology, for lack of a better word. So I want to kind of trace the beginnings of this anti-AI sentiment. When would you say that it really started?

We've been in this era where there has been a backlash towards Silicon Valley and towards big tech and towards the tech industry more generally. Going on, you know, maybe 10 years since at least the first Trump. term, right, when we had Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and there was kind of a, the so-called tech lash. So we've been kind of primed towards somewhat new sort of critical stance towards technology. And so it's been in the air, so to speak. And one of the things that's really different about the AI boom is that unlike kind of, you know, big, buzzy technologies of the last 20 years, if you think about the iPhone or Google or even sort of Uber and the Uber for X kind of phenomenon, there was really no sort of extended honeymoon period. People were kind of critical

about AI right out the gate. And part of that, again, is because of that tech lash. Part of that is the context because the last three major kind of technologies or sort of tech trends that came out of Silicon Valley were like crypto and NFTs and the metaverse stuff that just kind of didn't work or that people weren't excited about or rub people the wrong way. And then so AI comes out and it gets a user base pretty quick. But it also emerges with an attendant skepticism that's like sort of baked right in from the beginning. Yeah.

The tech lash really began in a meaningful way in 2017. We saw people getting really angry about Facebook and social media, blaming them. for Trump's election. I think basically tech had just received extremely positive coverage for years and things kind of like flipped where suddenly people like, hey, let's, you know, cover these companies kind of critically. They've gotten to a scale that, you know, they weren't maybe even five years before. Open AI doesn't launch chat GPT until several years later in 2022. And as you mentioned, pretty quickly, there was like a lot of criticism towards it. At the same time, there was a lot of widespread adoption. And I think that actually because there was such quick widespread adoption that almost

drove the criticism more because people started to feel like wait a minute this thing is all over the place almost overnight I mean chatu pt is the fastest growing consumer tech product of all time and I feel like people started to resent that it kind of seemed so ubiquitous so quickly with that like fast growth whereas I feel like with maybe some earlier tech products people had a little bit more time to adjust yeah I mean if you think back to even something like Facebook right it was like gated like you had to it have a college email address like however many billions of years of years ago that that happened. And it was really kind of, you know, deliberate in the way that things amped up. And so even though it did seem like social media, for example, kind of exploded and it became ubiquitous, it actually took a lot longer. So I think you're absolutely right that the speed by which, you know, that adoption happened and the speed by which, you know, people, I guess, like, bought into the story of AI pretty quick. Because we went from, there's a big consumer boom in late 2022 to just months later when, you know, the New York Times, Kevin Ruse writes this story about how the AI tried to get him to leave his wife. And then so suddenly we have like,

we've kind of speed run, you know, the whole like the, the excitement of a new tech toy to like, what are the implications here? And, you know, it's been all kind of struggling to keep up ever since. I think also like when AI launched, as you mentioned in 2020, was this kind of like, I don't want to say boy who cried wolf, but the Silicon Valley tech industry had kind of been seeking to replicate the success of social media multiple times over to no success. So, you know, they tried crypto, they tried NFTs. Mark Zuckerberg was in the midst of pushing the metaverse, you know,

when all of this happened. And none of those projects were panning out. And I think when chat GPT, especially first launch, it simultaneously like seemed amazing like a paradigm shift. But also I think you had a lot of people that were just like, okay, here's more Silicon Valley vaporware. Like, here is another stupid product that's probably going to break. And at that time, especially, was giving lots of misinformation.

You know, like the chat chit of 2022 is not even the chat chupit that we have today. No, it was like, I remember it was like a sport to you. Everybody would sort of find out the different ways to prompt it into saying ridiculous things. And, you know, everybody remembers the six fingers phenomenon where, you know, it couldn't get the right number of fingers and the image generators. And so there were a lot of really obfingers. kind of mistakes and errors and quote hallucinations that it was making all the time. And I think, yeah, for that reason, I think a lot of people were primed to be critical of it and

just assume that it would be another grifty vaporware flash in the pan just because that's what the last five to 10 years had been. I mean, I guess there's still some people somehow I don't understand it that still believe it is that. I mean, I think open AI is inflated in terms of its valuation, but like, I don't know how you can kind of use these products and think that they're not, you know, useful for things. I don't understand it. But I actually talked to a leader of a big pro-AI group that has millions of dollars to kind of push AI today. And he was lamenting that, you know, the social media

companies actually had time to get, like get on square footing. Like they, you know, had time to develop their products. Like there wasn't this like overt scrutiny, which I think was applied to, you know, chat products kind of overnight. I feel like almost an unfair way. Like, you know, yes, Kevin Ruse, you know, did that experiment, but it reminds you of that tweet where somebody tweeted, like, typing I'm evil, you know, devil emoji into a Google Doc and getting scared. Like, I think part of it was also just that, like, this new technology was so transformative and it kind of like seemed so human as well. It kind of terrified people. Well, I think it was a perfect vector for a story. And a lot of times that's like a story that the Silicon Valley, you know, AI companies wanted to tell, right?

Like it was, this thing has become so powerful, so quickly. And it was, you know, it obviously represented a major fundraising opportunity, an opportunity for partnerships, for, you know, for to expand a user base. And so like, I think they, you know, really leaned into that that turned into a real double edge sword, right? And at the same time, we're getting a lot of really critical media coverage. Like the media coverage, I feel like, especially for the first several years of AI technology has been overwhelmingly tough, you know, which which is good, right?

Like we want to cover these tech companies critically, but I feel like, I mean, for a while, I remember when I was working in more mainstream media, it was just like chatu-P-T psychosis, chat-GPT psychosis. Like, what's the craziest chat-u-t psychosis story we can find? Like, let's run that. It seems like that has sort of like fed this like growing concern about this technology. And I mean, to be fair to the media, I think a lot of that is just journalists, taking at face value what the AI companies are saying. So if you have a CEO of a company that has

gotten tens of billions of dollars of investment and is like on the way to becoming the largest startup of all time and he's out there saying, you know, this is going to take everyone's jobs. Like this is the, this is bigger than electricity. This is like all, you know, then it's like, okay. Then keeping in mind the ways that we kind of fumbled tech coverage passed, you know, maybe 15 years ago and we weren't as critical of some of these companies as maybe we should have been. And then with the facts that the CEOs themselves are kind of presenting this, this saying, hey, you need to like pay attention. And so I do some of that criticality was just feeding off of the narrative and the sort of the

presentation that the AI companies themselves were making. And so I feel like it's actually quite warranted that we saw this level of criticality, especially with all like the sort of strange things going on in the boardrooms and, you know, open AI is notoriously filled with drama and Sam Altman is a dubiously ethical actor by most counts. And, you know, obviously his compatriots in Elon Musk and Dario Amade are not on and on. Right. So we're talking about people that deserve to be scrutinized and in some ways are asking to be scrutinized just by dint. of the declarations that they're making. And so, yeah, I think that if you say that you're going to usher in a scary new era,

then the least that journalists can do is, you know, try to rise to the occasion to interrogate that and document that. Yeah, although I do feel like another thing that has shaped this sort of reaction to AI is also the massive and massive amount of money that is funneled into this like effective altruist kind of like AI Dumer movement where there's a lot of, also this like, you know, huge faction of people that have been thinking about sort of like AI X risk or like basically the AI is like ending humanity for over decade. And when these big tech CEOs come out and say like, oh, AI is so powerful, like they're also feeding

that narrative because they're like, yes, it is. And by the way, it is going to turn us all into paper clips. And like that also seemed to be like this very compelling media narrative that there are billions of dollars, you know, aimed at pushing. So I feel like that like they're stoking the flames too. 100%. Yeah, they're absolutely. I mean, and it was, if not intentional, then it was something that they realized somewhat early on was useful, right? I wrote this report for AI now about sort of the way that the AI firm sort of deploy the language around super powerful AI or AGI. And it lines up pretty neatly with whenever they need to raise a funding round or there's a scandal that they want to distract from. And they can use this language. to sort of power through and do exactly what you're talking about. But, you know, there's even a term for it now called doom marketing that your, you know, audience has probably heard before because it's just the sort of like the willful weaponization of this idea that AI,

which may or may not become so powerful that it could kill us all, but it could also, as Sam Altman says, and I quote, like, create some great companies in the process, right? Like, he has that famous quote. I mean, I think we're at the end of that doom marketing. Then we start to see this like violence against Sam Altman, right? Like we see, you know, somebody tries to set his house on fire, maybe potentially shoot, you know, his house or something. Like certainly there's a lot more physical threats that they're dealing with.

All these tech CEOs are locking down. They're getting security. They're starting to fear for their physical safety. And you start to see a lot more people, like in response to those attempts on Sam Womondman's life, actually support, I think, that violence against him. And when you look at the comments, they're saying stuff like, well, this man is about to destroy humanity. Right. This man, like, and I think this.

shooter himself actually consumed a lot of that AI doomer, effective altruist type stuff. So it feels like they kind of like fed this monster that is now kind of backfiring on them. Absolutely. I mean, and that's that double-edged sword that we were talking about earlier, is that in order to get more and more in investment and public buy-in, you have to tell a bigger and bigger story. And, you know, in some ways, Silicon Valley and the AI companies in particular have been telling sort of like the biggest story, right? We're building the digital God. It's going to automate

everything. It's going to be able to replace all meaningful work that's in Open AI's charter. And so when you tell a story that is that loaded and you say not only that, you know, we're going to build something that can take everybody's jobs, but it's also may or may not like lead to the extinction of the human race. And you're saying this as part of sort of an earnest sort of pronouncement, then I think you react, people are going to take you seriously. especially when the AI tools themselves and the chatbots kind of do reinforce that sense, that psychological sense that you are dealing with something that's quite fluid and new and powerful in the actual product itself.

After there was the attack on Sam Altman's house, if you look at Reddit, you look at Instagram, you look online, social media, there's this outpouring of support for the attackers in a way that I think took a lot of Silicon Valley insiders kind of by surprise. And there was a lot of discussion about, well, we really need to change our messaging or we need to sort of address these concerns somehow. And they pointed to this new policy document that Open AI release that has some ideas for what an AI inflected world might look like if there was like a four-day working week. Like how to, in a sense, how do we sort of curb some of this, this.

anger at AI, how do we demonstrate that we're going to share the gains and it's not just going to be concentrated within this industry and the C-suits of these companies that are building it? If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging powers. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about.

These videos I make are entirely funded by you and I can't continue to make them without your support. So if you get any value out of the videos that I create and you want me to be able to create more, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the links below. On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams and post frequent updates about my work. My substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. Yeah, I think the backlash probably took some people by surprise.

Although I don't know how surprised they really are. I feel like they were actually more angry than surprised. Like they were more frustrated and trying to blame the doomers and saying like this is the natural endpoint of inflammatory media coverage. I would argue that media coverage was not that inflammatory, but arguably some articles have been. And this Dumer Effective Altruist movement where, you know, they're like it's these people like Eliyzer like Yudkowski, whose name I always mispronounce, you know,

who wrote that book if anyone builds it, everyone dies. So that movement and this like pause AI movement seems to have been what like radicalized the actual guy that attacks Sam. But it seemed like there was a lot of anger. In response to that, you know, these tech companies have tried to mitigate the damage. Open AI released this policy document. They tried to make a bunch of suggestions that were effectively like, yeah, maybe we need a four-day work week. Maybe we need nationalized social services, etc. Now, ironically, as people pointed out, as they put out that policy document, they're also

funding campaigns of a bunch of political candidates that actually do not support any of those policies and kind of actually support the opposite of those policies. So it's a little bit meaningless. But do you think that this is a problem that the AI companies can even fix? Because it seems like AI, whether the critics want to acknowledge it or not, is a transformative technology that is disrupting our information ecosystem and our world in a way that's similar to the internet. And I know that tech has like, they've cried Wolf so many times. They said NFTs were the new internet.

But like, it does seem so disruptive at such a scale that I wonder if like these companies can fix it at all. Like it feels like the genie is a little bit out of the bottle almost. I feel like there's a few things they can do that are some like. more immediate conciliatory gestures. Like, as you just pointed out, they are in the trenches right now not only sort of pushing back on some of those efforts to regulate AI, but they're bankrolling lobbying campaigns that's for tens of millions of dollars to fight sort of any candidate that they think might go hard on AI. They've been allying closely with the Trump administration to try to push a moratorium on AI. laws at the state level in general. Like they are being profoundly anti-democratic and just about

everything that they're doing. So I agree with you. I thought that that policy document was a joke, honestly, because they have not even made the tiniest gesture towards putting their money where their mouth is. So stopping that sort of hostility towards the democratic process that folks like Sam Altman say is so important, even in his manifesto the day after the attack on his house, you have to actually live those values. You actually have to allow democracy to happen. One thing that I'm curious, your thoughts on, Brian, is like, how much of this is really driven by the companies and how much of this is just driven by the fact that this technology exists and, like, has such a disruptive power? Because I agree, the companies have been the worst stewards,

like, they're terrible. They're doing all these evil things. They're not good actors. But also, it does feel like a lot of the sort of, like, sentiment. that people are feeling towards AI is like very emotional and also just not based in facts and reality. And so I'm sympathetic to not really the AI companies because they are terrible, but like I'm sympathetic to like technologists that are trying to like explain this stuff and feeling this like overwhelming hostility. I mean, the fact that we have people trying to like burn down data centers or like whatever, you know what I mean? That they, they, there's this vibe right now in America that feels very like sort of anti-technological progress. And I'm curious

kind of like what got us here. Because I don't think it was just, the AI company's marketing or just backlash to social media. Like it feels like this like deeper anger towards technology. Where do you think this is coming from? Ultimately, the shared route of just about every major backlash or rebellion against technology or a class of people using technology comes from the fact that that said technology, whether it's AI or the mechanized loom 200 years ago that the Luddites fought against, was being introduced in a way that is anti-democratic and often profoundly anti-democratic.

When you have a situation where a populace feels like they have no means of addressing the way a technology is being thrust into their lives or into their workplaces, especially, and affecting the way that they go about their day, their routine, the way that they can earn a living or their identity, if you don't have recourse for that, and back in the day of the Luddites, who were cloth workers who took up hammers and smashed the automated looms at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, they had no say at all. They had a completely unresponsive government. They were laughed out of parliament. They were living in towns where this was pretty, much the only job, right? And they had factory owners who are willing to do anything to just sort of consolidate and profit at their expense. And so you have this very anti-democratic formation, and then you have anger bubbling up. And how do people express that? Sometimes it's through

violence. The letter, it was an organized campaign of violence. And in my book, The Blood of the Machine, I argue that it's quite, you know, they were quite justified in their grievances. And similarly today, I think that's the common thread. through all of this, you could call it anti-tech violence because people are smashing flock cameras. People are protesting data centers. People feel like they have not been given an opportunity to have a say or a vote in how this technology is changing their lives. And sometimes it's amorphous. Sometimes it's not a clean value proposition. And the way that that protest is registered might not always make a ton of sense to us. But I think it does come down to the fact that, yeah, there are these immensely profitable and powerful companies that are dictating the terms of how this stuff is going to be developed and used and that people feel like they don't have any say about the way that their world or their workplace or their lives are being changed.

And I do think that the AI companies have absolutely poured fuel onto the fire by advancing AI with the narrative that they have. and selling the products in the way that they have. I totally agree with you that, like, they probably leaned into that marketing too hard for a few years. But they've also created these, like, incredibly useful products that are very popular. And that's kind of what I'm really struggling to, like, square and, like, sort of explain that nuance,

because I think you have a lot of people that don't engage with these tools at all, that are, frankly, increasingly the minority of people. And then you have consumers. I mean, the chat Chobit app, for instance, I mean, it's been, like, number one in the app store for multiple years now, it has over six million reviews. It's a 4.8 app rating. These are very popular consumer tools.

So there seems to be like this like anger and resentment. But at the same time, people are proactively integrating this stuff into their lives and seemingly liking it. And I say seemingly liking it. We hate when the bosses like make people use co-work and stuff. Like I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people that like genuinely like these products and use them. And there are millions of people like that and they seem to be growing.

How do you kind of like explain? that juxtaposition. Yeah. Well, I think our attitudes towards technology are always really complex. And it's rarely just like a yes vote or a downvote, right? Like, I want to throw my phone in a river is like one of the most common sentiments that people have because, you know, it's like we need it. We use it all the day long. And yet, like, a lot of us daydream about what it would be like to be finally free of it. Right. And so there are a number of different ways that technologies and And products, technological products, get integrated into our daily lives. And that doesn't always necessarily mean, you know, we love that that is happening or that we even like the particular product.

I know there are millions of people who love ChatGPT, who love Claude, who love Claude. It may still well be that those people who love that product are in the distinct minority, that there are millions of more who use it because they're feeling some social compulsion, or even, even curiosity or maybe they like a few things that it does. I think that social compulsion goes in the opposite way. It's interesting because, again, for work, we have every single voice, you know, kind of in the business world telling us you got to use AI or you fall behind and have for three years. But yeah, there's like, there's almost like social stigma against, you know, using AI if you're in like Gen Z, right? Gen Z hates, hates AI. per sentiment polling, right?

Again, it's a really complicated sort of relationship that we have. But again, I think it does all sort of boil down to the fact that the firms making these companies are, we cannot consider the products without considering them too, right? Open AI is for better or worse, sort of the leading light in this firm. They have led the way they have set the standards, the pace, the story, the narrative. and people have a lot of misgivings about a lot of things that they've done and the way they've shaped this and sold this to the public. And so the sense that AI is popular or is everywhere is also something you have to interrogate alongside the fact that it is owned and operated by these companies that I think even AI folks are pretty suspicious of Sam Altman and his motives. I mean, it's also complex.

But all of the decisions that are sort of being made about how to develop and design these tools, tools by and large are being made by the same four or five firms that have sort of controlled the technological infrastructure for the last 10 years. And I think that just chafes with a lot of people. The structure of how AI has been developed is inseparable from the products to a lot of people. And so the anger kind of ricochets around even if you're using chat GPT. Yeah, totally.

And how do you think that those products could have been developed better? Like, I'm curious, because I do wonder, is a lot of this inevitable? Like, yes, if it had rolled out more slowly, I think the backlash would be mitigated. We wouldn't see these effects as quickly. But, I mean, look at what happened with social media companies, which were overwhelmingly, I would argue better. Like, we're talking about connecting human beings, like, which is, I think, like, a lot more noble and better than than whatever we're doing with AI, mass surveillance. I don't know, evil things. I mean, and not to say that the, you know, social media companies are so great.

But, like, you know, you look at that sort of shift and how, negative that ultimately became perceived. So yeah, I'm curious kind of like, is this technology just so transformative that it would have led to a lot of these disruptions? Like, is this something that happens every time there's a paradigm shift, whether the actors behave incredibly irresponsibly or maybe even slightly irresponsibly? No, I think it's a little unique because the way that AI was developed is quite unlike a lot of other technologies.

So we've had, you know, a lot of our core technologies, things that, you know, like the internet was by and large developed by by the state and then and then commercialized right so there was there was this negotiation of which parts of of the internet are going to be public you know the the the worldwide web famously but with AI you know we it came sort of at the tail end of of this period where it was like really easy to raise a lot of money and so people kind of got used to just not thinking about the business end of things and thinking about like how do I sell the grandest idea possible. And, you know, Uber famously didn't make any money, make any profit for nearly 10 years. So I think that attitude kind of got ingrained into Silicon Valley. And then when you pair that

attitude with a big narrative, part of the problem is what I'm saying is that you had a bunch of money that these companies raised before they had to find a product. But that's true. I don't think people are mad about that. Do you think that's led to the backlash? No, what I think happened is that I think it sort of set off this arms race of developing as much. as possible. And so, you know, Anthropic looked over at what Open AI was doing and said, we've got to build, you know, out as fast as we can. We have to train models that are just as big, get as many data centers. And then, and then Open AI is partnering with Microsoft and then Google's in the game. And then we have this huge buildout that does feel like it's out

of control. Before we really have a good idea of what ultimately, you know, people really want to use it for. Like, is it mostly a chatbot? Is it like a workplace automation tool? Is it all of the above? We don't really even know when the dust is going to sell. Is it going to be impossibly expensive to do all of these things all at once? And it's all being done very privately, right? So there is no public input until this backlash started in earnest about questions like, well, how many data centers like, do you think we should put to this general broader project of building out AI?

Instead, it's being left up to, you know, private equity, VCs, tech companies. And I think it just contributes to this very anti-democratic sort of model of development, where it's kind of funny to say, I think, of you, there's two, I think, other ways that AI could have been developed in a much more, you know, healthy or robust way. And one is like you could kind of imagine a more like public-facing model if public institutions, research orgs are developing AI and saying, okay, what works and what doesn't and really getting public buy in before we hit this crazy moment of, you know, runaway acceleration or if AI was actually forced to compete as like a business in a market and didn't have like sort of what's essentially limitless venture capital money to sort of just kind of do whatever it wanted with until people got mad. But that is what happened. And now I think

we're seeing the fall out of that. Yeah. I mean, I think if it had developed more slowly like you said, maybe in a more profit-driven way. Although, who knows if, yeah, it's so hard to think of that sort of development happening in our economic system because our economic system is so poisoned. But I agree with you. I mean, where do you think that these tech companies go? Like, do you think that it is ultimately just a messaging and PR problem? Or do you think that there is this sort of like fundamental resentment?

Another thing that we haven't talked about is also just the way that these models were trained, the vast amount of content that they stole. I think that has led to a lot of resentment as well. like authors were not compensated. You know, the developers that ChatGPT harvested all that data from from GitHub were not ever compensated, you know, that contributed for years to the open source community, like illustrators, YouTubers. So that, you know, that seemed, I don't know, it seems like we've gone so far.

They're never going to make amends for all of it. Is it too late? Like, have they lost the PR battle before they've even begun? And now they're always going to be on the back foot. Yeah, I think you're 100% right. I mean, they, it was yet another example of. the way that this sort of rush to develop all of this technology really sort of forsook those kinds of ethics or considerations. It really does chafe, at least me personally, to hear, especially

Sam Altman, I think, is most famous for saying, we want this to benefit all of humanity. When there were clear sort of ethical violations that we know now, tons of pirated books, tons of sort of just not listening to people's concerns. And yeah, this, I think in many ways that you could consider that decision to sort of vacuum up all of the IP of the internet and kind of repurpose it into, you know, for-profit AI tools as kind of the original sin of the Silicon Valley AI drive. One thing that's interesting to me is how Anthropic has been evolving their marketing, like they're targeting.

I mean, I just did an episode with Kattenbarge about like a lot of how these companies are targeting women, moms. like they seem to be going for this like lifestyle marketing like targeting like non-technical people and kind of trying to make the case to them why this tech is good but I don't know if it's too little too late because as you said you know they did spend years saying it would destroy jobs and you know it's clearly that message that it is going to be a sort of a major you know shock to employment has been absorbed by employers right who have been laying off tens of thousands of people and then blaming it on AI. So they've kind of set in motion this cycle that's likely to continue.

I do think Anthropic is currently the much smarter AI company and having recognized kind of the way the winds were blowing before Open AI did and positioning itself as a more ethical or cuddlier AI service that's not going to jam ads into, you know, into the chat and surveil you in all these ways. They're not going to do mass surveillance of Americans and do autonomous weapons with the military. Well, they are. They're just not ready yet. That's what they're saying, right?

That's the message they say. They're going to, I mean, they made that this big thing where they gave up a military contract. And it was, that was also good PR for Anthropic in a lot of ways, even though that they, you know, previously partnered with Palantir and all that. But I digress. The point is, I do think that this is going to be a nearly insurmountable challenge for the AI companies is that they, I mean, they can't have it both ways. You can't say we've built the perfect.

job automating tool. But they're not saying that anymore. The past three or four months, they've recognized that the vibe has changed. And I think that they're pretty much scrambling. I mean, every time Dario Amade gives another forecast about how many jobs that AI is going to wipe out, it just reminds everybody that that's what it's for. And again, I think these lessons have been internalized by managers around the world that this is what AI is for. So yeah, I think, I think that tension is unlikely to go away. I mean, now, if they were capable of doing something truly radical and, like, socializing AI in a meaningful way and saying, you know what, we actually believe what we're saying that this should benefit all of humanity. And the purpose of chat GPT isn't to allow Sam Altman to buy a second, you know, McLaren.

It's to help everybody. Then, like, think there are ways that if they were serious about, like, sort of the loftier promises of AI as a social. good, then there are certainly things that are interesting. And there's been some people on the left, like Leif Weatherby, who have made some interesting interventions and argue that, like, automate the C-suite. Like, automate, like, oh, AI can automate all these jobs. Start with automating executives and sort of truly leveling these organizations and playing field. There shouldn't be just, we have AI now. We don't need one person to be making $10 billion a year. Why? AI can do it all. Everybody should be making the same amount of money. Like, I think there are some truly radical interventions that

would be interesting. Again, if you took the statements of the AI companies at face value and said, like, well, then what? I know there's some, there's also some work being done to try to get the AI companies to sign on to universal basic income and say, hey, well, if you're serious about automating all these jobs, then are you going to help, you know, provide the social safety net necessary for this brave new world that you're engendering? And so far, none have signed on. So that's what I mean that if for the AI companies to start looking better or to be received better by the Americans who are still angry, I think there would have to be some interventions. It's not a PR problem.

And in fact, this is a point made by a cognitive scientist named Hagenblicks, but people's fear of AI maps pretty neatly to their fears about capitalism in general. I think, you know, Ted Chang made a similar point as well. So if you're on the lower rungs of the ladder and people keep telling you how great AI is going to be like you probably don't care if you can like code an app with Claude code right if you can't pay your rent then AI becomes another vector for you to be angry at and in some cases rightfully so. Yeah.

It's interesting to think of like what they could do and how kind of radical that would be. I don't think, I don't see Sam Altman doing anything like that or Google or any of them I guess. But as you said, you know, like they could. It kind of reminds me of like the way that people talk about like the situation, the Democrats are in where, you know, the Democrats continue to say that, like, we have a messaging problem. I was just in D.C. this past week. And everyone's like, we have a messaging problem. We have messaging problem. And everyone's like, no, you have a policy problem. Like, fix your policies. And it seems

to me, like, it's a similar situation with AI where people are like, no, like, fix your policies, fix what you're actually doing. You can have all these like Claude Code influencer dinners, which they continue to have in New York with like, you know, these girlies. But like, that's not going to make us like you. Like, you're still, as you said, like, you're displaces. these workers and doing all this evil stuff, stop doing the evil stuff. And then people might like you. I think that's what it boils down to. And unfortunately, like, again, in our socioeconomic system, you have a company with a board. And the minute that a board gets wind of anything resembling that, an executive knows that they're going to be in trouble. So you have these real tensions between,

you know, any sort of drive or will to use AI as an actual social good and just maximizing profits at all times. And that's why you have Sam Altman saying AI should benefit all of humanity, but then subpoenaing the attendee list at the funeral or the memorial service of Adam Raines. That to me I don't have a problem with, I guess. And maybe because I'm like, well, they wanted to make the argument that it killed him. So of course the company is going to respond to that, not to defend that company at all. Well, I mean, that seemed to me like a bridge too far.

That's another example, at least where I'm sitting. They could have dealt with that whole thing a lot better. Reading that deposition is some pretty, some pretty dark stuff. Which is to say they've, again, it's just a matter of when the rubber hits the road. Like, what are they actually doing? You know, AI is going to benefit humanity. AI is democratizing this or that. Great, great, great, great, great.

What are you using your revenues to do? Oh, lobby in favor of banning any state passing any AI laws at all. A period. Okay, well, what are we supposed to believe what you're saying or what you're doing? Yeah, actions speak louder than words. So it'll be interesting to see kind of what policies, I don't know, people push to force their hand in terms of actions. It will be interesting. I just last week, I was at a hearing, a city council hearing in Monterey Park where they were debating instituting a permanent data center ban because a data center had been proposed in Monterey Park, which is a small city like three or four miles east of downtown L.A. And I sat there and listened for hours. And aside from the building trade that had sent a few people that said, hey, build this data center, it'll give us some jobs. It was unanimous.

Every single person that showed up that lived in that community was just spewing vitriol, was angry at the data sent, angry about the process and angry at the prospect of having to sort of countenance these data centers in their backyard. And they voted it down. They passed the first data center ban in California. by a unanimous ordinance. And so, like, the politics are, are changing. And that I think it is going to be one of the biggest issues in the midterms. And it's, you know, it's on the right. It's on the left.

Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They proposed a data center ban, you know, Steve Bannon and Josh Hawley and these guys on the other side. That's not good, though. Like, that makes me nervous because this is the same thing that we heard with, you know, the one thing that the right and the left politicians and anybody in power, or can agree on is like those are usually bad policies. Those are usually reactive policies. Those are usually policies that don't ultimately help working Americans.

Like it's just some sort of like slop that they're like, look it. We can agree with even the fascist on this. And it's like, well, that makes me think that you probably could be doing better. Not that I don't love like Bernie and AOC and a lot of what they're doing. And I understand the argument for the moratoriums. Like it's really to get sort of leverage and negotiate. I just think like then you've gotten a lot of people on board with the bad policy. and we've seen how that's gone previously where it's really backfired.

Yeah. The only point that I'm trying to make is that like this is a big political football that is currently kind of up for grabs. You know, the Trump administration is all in on on AI. They've made up their mind. That's like the gas is down. You know, they have David Sachs. The AI czar. He's buddies with, you know, Andresen and a bunch of sort of the Silicon Valley AI cohort. And Sam Altman has been in and out of the White House, you know.

So they're all in. there is a MAGA contingent that's very anti-AI. And then there is sort of, you know, the left that is registering some of these critiques about AI and the, the end, recognizing that there is potential political power. So Democrats don't really want to touch it by and large, I think to a point that you kind of raised earlier. And so there is this vacuum. And, and I would agree, like, it's not necessarily the best conditions to get good policy out of. And as a result, I think you're going to see. more anger as it's not addressed in a meaningful ways, more tension, more people animated about this. Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining and chatting with me about all this today.

It was my pleasure, Taylor, anytime. All right, that's it for this episode. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the links below. I currently have zero. That's zero long-term brand advertisers. This show is entirely supported by people like you. You can buy a paid subscription to my Substack newsletter, again, linked below, where I send a weekly roundup of everything that I'm reading and following online,

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