Why are progressives who'd never dodge a hard fight the ones opting out of the most useful tool to meet the moment?
The progressive movement doesn't have an AI problem. It has virtue confusion. Before you lash me, hear me out.
Shunning AI feels like integrity, but in actuality it is surrender. Boycotting the tool doesn't touch the billionaire; it just leaves the tool in the hands of the people who don't share your values.
The love that is central to progressive values is genuine. Currently, progressives have the moral core without the mechanics required to turn their values into durable change. The right has the mechanics of creating durable change without the moral core.
These are generalities, and I do not agree with every position taken by whoever it is that represents "the left."
But meanwhile, President Trump's administration is running AI-powered behavioral modification at the government level. They are using behavioral technology developed through QAnon, which has now escaped its origin and is operating as official government communication. The population is being conditioned right now, today, through content that is being produced and targeted with AI tools.
Progressive voices countering that narrative are doing it manually, exhausted and burning out on outrage cycles that spike and crash. While they can say they did it the right way by respecting the environment, the intellectual property issues and the labor issues, they have traded away all leverage at a time when asymmetric leverage is the most important commodity a movement could gather if it wants to achieve the Green New Deal, the end of billionaire capitalism and improvements to the democratic process.
Refusing the tool never once slows the people using it against you.
I would not have voted for this. I would not have voted for AI to be designed and then deployed in such a way that it is threatening. Someone literally decided to create it in that fashion. It was not inevitable.
If someone decided tomorrow, at the global level, that we are not doing AI, I'd be fine with that and go right back to the other timeline. Unfortunately, it has been decided that that will not happen.
The gap between the right's AI-powered messaging operation and the left's manual outrage machine is becoming so wide that catching up will be a multi-year project. While that gap widens, we have to think about the enormous number of human brains being affected by the tactics the right is using.
And just to be really clear about what I am saying, to the conservative readers who may have gotten this far: I support you. I support you because I understand that you and I have way more in common than the people making these decisions. I do not support the president you picked doing the things I described, but I support you.
And here's where it gets really crazy: I don't need you to agree with me. I don't even want you to agree with me.
I recognize the benefit that conservative thinking brings to society: the restraint. Unchecked anything is not ideal for our society. I personally think an ideal mix of progressivism to conservatism might be something like two-thirds progressive, one-third conservative.
But again, I don't need or want you to agree with me, because I need you to be that one-third. All I ask is that we all conduct ourselves with integrity, to the best of our ability, in a world where it suddenly seems like, no matter what you believe, you feel you have been pushed too far. We all have to hold it together.
Back to my progressive peeps: the longer we sit out the AI game, the harder it gets to move, not easier.
I have been thinking a lot about how early humans reacted to fire when they first began trying to tame it. The early humans who waited to get the fire didn't get more comfortable over time. The ones who moved in early got the advantage. The ones who waited got pushed to worse territory.
Every week we don't engage, nurture, teach, or lead publicly, we leak trust in progressive values, and that translates into lost democratic capacity. Doing all of that manually sounds virtuous, but many of the actual tasks involved require little to no thinking and waste the time of capable leaders.
There is also an enormous number of regular progressive people with phenomenal ideas who could be contributing to this conversation, but because they are working two jobs and worrying that the future is about to slap us all upside the head, they don't have the time, energy or resources to participate. AI could really help them focus and externalize the solutions they envision.
But the concrete is wet, and it's hardening fast.
We watched this exact arc with social media. It started open and accessible. A decade later the platforms had consolidated, and by the time the regulatory conversations got serious, the damage was "just the way it has to be." That's happening again, right now, with AI.
People didn't "discover" fire and immediately start cooking. They spent over a million years being near fire, watching it change landscapes, eating food that happened to be cooked by wildfires and slowly losing their fear. They learned to read the fire, predict its path and keep foraging while it burned around them.
Unfortunately, I don't believe we have a million years to complete this learning process with AI. We need to leverage AI to create a world where never again will these kinds of species-level decisions be made without the consent of the world.
Fire without purpose is just destruction. A wildfire burns everything, so the breakthrough wasn't fire itself. It was fire harnessed, directed and maintained in service of something. Why would we not direct our AI fire in service of progressive values?
The people who eventually mastered fire weren't the ones who felt the strongest feelings about it. They were the ones who combined care for their group, willingness to approach the flames, sustained attention to keeping the coal alive and a clear-eyed read on what the moment required.
Swearing off AI would be like being a prehistoric human who swore off fire once it was discovered.