A lot of what you are saying here can be put in two buckets. 1) The tech products aren’t very good and should be better. 2) Companies aren’t good to their workforce.
On 1, I want them to be better, too. I think the best way to do this is market competition so that people can choose the best product.
On 2, this is a good place for government to set and enforce standards. Additionally, a strong economy and lower cost of living makes gives labor power to get better jobs and forces employers to make jobs better. (Cost of living is what The Rebuild is all about.)
Nobody you know being optimistic about AI might be a symptom of the bubble I am writing about. I have concerns about the future of AI, but I am very optimistic. The research and reasoning power that we can bring to bear on humanity’s greatest challenges is massively increasing. Our great political challenge is employing that effectively for the benefit of America and mankind.
I like the idea of number-and-data crunching machine learning systems that seek to help with our greatest challenges like climate change and curing sophisticated diseases/chronic conditions.
When I see various externalities being produced via all the hype and investment and website-scraping, mainly geared toward consumer AI tech & systems, that’s where my optimism fades.
Apple, among others are raising prices because hyperscalers are snatching up nearly all the chips they can get:
Yes, the CHIPS Act can help alleviate this if hyperscalers keep up this rate of gobbling up the chips. But it’s still going to take a long time to get those factories making the stuff.
And in the meantime, it’s not just people buying brand new high-end consumer electronics that’ll feel the pain. People who need to repair or replace their broken or really *really* old phones will see the costs of AI passed onto them. Same as new college students who need a computer to do their classwork. Same as small businesses/startups who want to build computers to suit their needs. Or heck, enterprise-level businesses who need laptops and workstations…
Cory Doctorow did a podcast on The Atlantic about his new book regarding AI and I do think that it’s well worth a listen.
Regarding AI models scraping websites, it increases the server and hosting costs for people running their sites and can render some of them slow or inoperable with all the traffic.
People outside of the bubble you talk about are indeed seeing prices on things go up and products and services becoming tangibly worse than they used to because of AI. People are feeling the price point pain and inconvenience and indignities of having chatbots shoved in their faces and not being able to reach a real human, or their companies forcing them to put AI into their workflow when they don’t need it while also being monitored not just by telemetry software but AI systems too.
We are going to need to come up with democratic solutions to these issues, including regulations & controls on AI and AI companies.
And apologies, but I am very worried that, even though you say you would be fine with the government setting and enforcing workplace standards, organizations like Chamber Of Progress and the Blue Horizon Project and The Rebuild will wind up pushing back against laws that would set and enforce standards for workers and their rights when they actually become tangible bills to be voted on and debated, talking about how it would harm “innovation”, etc.
“ They like Amazon because packages arrive quickly, prices are often low, returns are easy, and small businesses can reach customers.”
They overwork and underpay and surveil to an Orwellian level their warehouse workers and drivers, attempt to bust unionization attempts, and those “small businesses” are quite often foreign vendors selling the same product the other 50 people are selling with a different label slapped on it. Foreign vendors that more often than not become impossible to contact if a product is defective and hurts someone. All of that is how they keep prices low and deliver quickly. It’s not right.
“They like Google because it helps them find things.“
Google has increasingly become a garbage search engine that people hate because it wants to shove AI overviews and AI results in their faces rather than actual links. Nobody I know was excited about Google’s idea to turn search into a conversation with a chatbot.
“They like Microsoft because it helps them work.”
People have been genuinely furious at Microsoft for shoving CoPilot into Microsoft Office and everything and Windows 11 being really terrible and an actual liability at times.
“They are optimistic about AI because they use the technology and see it provide them useful information for their work and personal lives.”
Nobody I know online or offline is optimistic about AI. Like I said, people are tired of it being shoved everywhere in the most annoying ways. While apartment hunting, I have been accosted by AI chatbots on nearly every apartment complex’s website. Just as bad as the early Internet’s popups and noisy scam banner ads. There are workers who are forced to use it by their bosses or else their job is at risk. Chip companies are selling so much to AI companies and their data centers that it’s causing the cost of other electronics to skyrocket and become unaffordable for a lot of consumers.
I would love to see Blue Horizon Project & The Rebuild talk to Amazon’s workers on the ground in the vans and warehouses. Talk to people who just want to look up things related to the actual text they search. Talk to office workers up to their eyeballs in AI tools they don’t need or never needed to do their job, or regular Windows users who just want a lean OS without slop. Talk to people who are tired of getting AI bots instead of real humans on the phone or on a website, artists who would like to get paid to make things like actual header art for articles. Talk to companies like Valve and more who are constrained by AI companies slurping up all the chips & components and thus forced to raise prices on consumers.
I’m pretty sure you’d find people less interested in “innovation” and more interested in making sure that disgustingly rich companies are required to treat people like actual people rather than numbers on a spreadsheet.
A lot of what you are saying here can be put in two buckets. 1) The tech products aren’t very good and should be better. 2) Companies aren’t good to their workforce.
On 1, I want them to be better, too. I think the best way to do this is market competition so that people can choose the best product.
On 2, this is a good place for government to set and enforce standards. Additionally, a strong economy and lower cost of living makes gives labor power to get better jobs and forces employers to make jobs better. (Cost of living is what The Rebuild is all about.)
Nobody you know being optimistic about AI might be a symptom of the bubble I am writing about. I have concerns about the future of AI, but I am very optimistic. The research and reasoning power that we can bring to bear on humanity’s greatest challenges is massively increasing. Our great political challenge is employing that effectively for the benefit of America and mankind.
I like the idea of number-and-data crunching machine learning systems that seek to help with our greatest challenges like climate change and curing sophisticated diseases/chronic conditions.
When I see various externalities being produced via all the hype and investment and website-scraping, mainly geared toward consumer AI tech & systems, that’s where my optimism fades.
Apple, among others are raising prices because hyperscalers are snatching up nearly all the chips they can get:
https://fortune.com/2026/06/26/apple-ai-memory-chip-inflation-price-hikes-macs-ipads/
Yes, the CHIPS Act can help alleviate this if hyperscalers keep up this rate of gobbling up the chips. But it’s still going to take a long time to get those factories making the stuff.
And in the meantime, it’s not just people buying brand new high-end consumer electronics that’ll feel the pain. People who need to repair or replace their broken or really *really* old phones will see the costs of AI passed onto them. Same as new college students who need a computer to do their classwork. Same as small businesses/startups who want to build computers to suit their needs. Or heck, enterprise-level businesses who need laptops and workstations…
Cory Doctorow did a podcast on The Atlantic about his new book regarding AI and I do think that it’s well worth a listen.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/06/how-to-think-about-ai-before-its-too-late/687644/
Regarding AI models scraping websites, it increases the server and hosting costs for people running their sites and can render some of them slow or inoperable with all the traffic.
People outside of the bubble you talk about are indeed seeing prices on things go up and products and services becoming tangibly worse than they used to because of AI. People are feeling the price point pain and inconvenience and indignities of having chatbots shoved in their faces and not being able to reach a real human, or their companies forcing them to put AI into their workflow when they don’t need it while also being monitored not just by telemetry software but AI systems too.
We are going to need to come up with democratic solutions to these issues, including regulations & controls on AI and AI companies.
And apologies, but I am very worried that, even though you say you would be fine with the government setting and enforcing workplace standards, organizations like Chamber Of Progress and the Blue Horizon Project and The Rebuild will wind up pushing back against laws that would set and enforce standards for workers and their rights when they actually become tangible bills to be voted on and debated, talking about how it would harm “innovation”, etc.
“ They like Amazon because packages arrive quickly, prices are often low, returns are easy, and small businesses can reach customers.”
They overwork and underpay and surveil to an Orwellian level their warehouse workers and drivers, attempt to bust unionization attempts, and those “small businesses” are quite often foreign vendors selling the same product the other 50 people are selling with a different label slapped on it. Foreign vendors that more often than not become impossible to contact if a product is defective and hurts someone. All of that is how they keep prices low and deliver quickly. It’s not right.
“They like Google because it helps them find things.“
Google has increasingly become a garbage search engine that people hate because it wants to shove AI overviews and AI results in their faces rather than actual links. Nobody I know was excited about Google’s idea to turn search into a conversation with a chatbot.
“They like Microsoft because it helps them work.”
People have been genuinely furious at Microsoft for shoving CoPilot into Microsoft Office and everything and Windows 11 being really terrible and an actual liability at times.
“They are optimistic about AI because they use the technology and see it provide them useful information for their work and personal lives.”
Nobody I know online or offline is optimistic about AI. Like I said, people are tired of it being shoved everywhere in the most annoying ways. While apartment hunting, I have been accosted by AI chatbots on nearly every apartment complex’s website. Just as bad as the early Internet’s popups and noisy scam banner ads. There are workers who are forced to use it by their bosses or else their job is at risk. Chip companies are selling so much to AI companies and their data centers that it’s causing the cost of other electronics to skyrocket and become unaffordable for a lot of consumers.
I would love to see Blue Horizon Project & The Rebuild talk to Amazon’s workers on the ground in the vans and warehouses. Talk to people who just want to look up things related to the actual text they search. Talk to office workers up to their eyeballs in AI tools they don’t need or never needed to do their job, or regular Windows users who just want a lean OS without slop. Talk to people who are tired of getting AI bots instead of real humans on the phone or on a website, artists who would like to get paid to make things like actual header art for articles. Talk to companies like Valve and more who are constrained by AI companies slurping up all the chips & components and thus forced to raise prices on consumers.
I’m pretty sure you’d find people less interested in “innovation” and more interested in making sure that disgustingly rich companies are required to treat people like actual people rather than numbers on a spreadsheet.