AI phobia is America’s new consensus

“Stop us before we end humanity,” the AI titans keep telling us. Also, “trust me and me alone, not my competitors”. Whether it is Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, xAI’s Elon Musk or even Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, America’s tech broligarchs are their own worst alarmists. In the same breath as warning that humans are heading for the evolutionary dustbin, they vow to end disease, abolish work and fix global warming. Call it death cult utopianism. Americans are now increasingly focused on the death cult part.

Little the tech chieftains say should be taken at face value. Every utterance must be filtered through the lens of market rivalry. Put simply, the AI companies that are performing best — notably Anthropic, which is preparing for AI’s largest ever initial public offering — are in favour of regulation and closed-weight models, or those with private parameters. They want a Food and Drug Administration for AI.

The laggards, on the other hand, have found religion in open-weight models. Having spent his life striving for Facebook monopoly, Zuckerberg is now warning about the dangers of market concentration. But he suffers from low public trust even by Silicon Valley’s plummeting standards. Young American women refer to Meta’s AI Ray-Bans as “pervert glasses”.

Barely a week passes without one of the broligarchs publishing an AI manifesto that dresses their corporate imperative in humanity’s larger interests. Telling people that your company’s technology is particularly dangerous is another way of saying that your stock will outperform the others. Plus, “I am more far-sighted than my rivals about the risks”. It is little wonder that Americans no longer trust their tech champions.

No society on earth has historically been more pro-technology than America. The world should thus take note of its distinctly Luddite turn. Almost three quarters of Americans do not trust businesses to use AI responsibly, according to Gallup. More than 70 per cent oppose having data centres built in their area because of fears about water and electricity inflation. Eighty per cent or more distrust AI for driving, medical advice and corporate hiring decisions. As The New York Times recently put it, fear of AI is the “most bipartisan issue since beer”.

That feeling is as strong in the centre as it is on the Maga right and the democratic socialist left. That such fears are often conspiratorial should be no surprise. Paranoia is a natural response to the unknown. Maga’s Steve Bannon calls data centres “weapons labs”. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former pro-Trump lawmaker, refers to Big Tech as “Skynet” after the self-aware computer system that triggers nuclear holocaust in the Terminator movies. Progressives talk of AI killing US democracy and ushering in a Blade Runner-style dystopia.

Since the AI titans are almost to a man addicts of science fiction, they can hardly complain that its tropes are being used against them. Larry Page, Google’s former chief executive, reportedly called Musk a “speciesist” for worrying that AI superintelligence would leave humanity in the dust. Every AI figure, at one time or another, has speculated about immortality or multiplied life expectancy. I, for one, do not relish the idea of having to listen to them after I turn 150.

A key to marketing is to persuade consumers that they need something of which they were previously ignorant. Politics, on the other hand, is about giving voters what they say they want. Both rules of thumb have been thrown off kilter by AI. Consumers are being enlightened about something they dread — loss of human autonomy. As voters, however, their fears are being ignored. US politics is therefore entering a radically unpredictable phase.

President Donald Trump is uncharacteristically deaf to voter fears on this. Much of his hostility to AI regulation is about money. Musk spent hundreds of millions on Trump’s 2024 campaign and is promising another $100mn or so for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. Most of the AI companies have contributed to various Trump boondoggles, including his White House ballroom and his Freedom 250 celebrations of America’s anniversary.

Trump is meanwhile warning the world that you are with the US or against it. For countries such as Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and, increasingly, Europe as a whole, such ultimatums are unwelcome. They want the freedom to benefit from both China and America’s competing and varied technological platforms. Each of the superpowers is building its own global AI alliance. Any attempt to regulate AI in America is dismissed as helping China.

Here are three things a decent US administration of either party would do. First, it would respond to society’s legitimate fears by setting up a public-private partnership on AI safety. It would take a leaf from the Pope’s recent encyclical on putting human dignity first. Second, it would shift the US tax burden from labour to capital. Current US fiscal incentives strongly favour the automation of jobs. Third, it would try to negotiate AI principles with China to stop the world from a binary death spiral.

These are bare minimum steps. Our species still has scope to shape its own future, this fictional US president would say — but that window is closing fast.

Does this sound unrealistic? Alas, at the moment it does. Now, on the other hand, is a golden moment for US political entrepreneurs.

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