The villains are building our future
He took the stage in his signature black turtleneck as the world watched with bated breath. From the podium, he produced a yellow manila envelope. Holding it up with one hand, he grinned, and the crowd laughed and cheered. “This is it,” he said.
The floor-to-ceiling LED screen behind him showed a close-cut live video feed as he gingerly unwound the string that fastened the envelope. He slid a thin rectangular object smoothly out of the packet and into his hand.
“This is the new Macbook Air,” he pronounced, proudly.
He balanced it on splayed fingers, asking the audience to note how thin it was. Scattered “woo!“s punctuated the applause. He smiled again, opening the laptop’s lid. “Isn’t that amazing?”
The audience was captivated. The Macbook Air became a cult favorite. Years later, millions mourned Steve Jobs’ passing.
Can you imagine Sam Altman, smiling on a stage in a black turtleneck, cooly captivating millions, armed only with a laptop in a manila envelope? What about Dario Amodei?
Why not?
The technologies that AI labs are developing today are no less impressive than what Apple was doing in 2008. So why is it that our leaders are now being targeted with molotov cocktails instead of being celebrated for ushering in a new, exciting era of technology?
The answer is: we have the wrong leaders.
The tech industry finds itself in the midst of a public relations emergency. There is a massive chasm between how we, the software engineers, view AI and how the rest of the world does. The only remedy to this emergency is to raise up a New Steve Jobs.
Not a carbon copy. This new age calls for someone distinct.
What went wrong
The CEOs of the biggest AI labs are impressive, highly-qualified people. But even with all their pedigree, and the backing of some of the brightest minds in tech, they’ve failed to break through the Silicon Valley tech bubble and win over the masses.
The reason?
AI leaders are out of touch nerds who don’t understand:
- What normal people believe about AI
- What normal people want from AI
If you’re reading this post, you’re probably a software engineer. There’s a sizeable gap between how you’re using AI and how your mom is using it. You keep up on all the latest models. You’ve got a subscription (or two or three). You may have written an Agent Skill. You have a favorite harness.
You have a complicated relationship with AI. Maybe it’ll make your job redundant by next year. It’s already made it weirder and less satisfying. But it’s also exciting, and deeply cool. Have you seen what the latest models can do?!
Because you’re a tech nerd, you have a major blind spot. You don’t naturally understand how non-nerds perceive AI.
It’s okay. I’m here to tell you.
The state of the union
Here’s what AI feels like to the average nontechnical consumer.
AI is frustrating and hollow. When you contact Customer Support, you’re stuck in a loop, talking to a vapid robot. It’s not able to help you, and it lacks the only thing that can sometimes serve as a consolation: real human empathy.
AI is invasive. Every app that you use on a regular basis has added AI features that nobody asked for. Oftentimes, it seems like the AI is shoved in there just to say it’s there. You can chat with an AI profile of Kim Kardashian on Instagram now, for some reason? Did any real user ever ask for that? Or did some nerd implement it, just because they could?
AI is wrong. When you search Google, instead of showing you the most relevant links, it shows an AI summary. At times, its summaries are laughably wrong, like that time when it suggested adding glue to pizza to keep the cheese stuck.
AI is blinding. You can no longer trust your own eyes. The videos you see on social media look more and more realistic. It’s not Will Smith eating spaghetti anymore. It’s plausible videos and photos. When you start to lose track of what’s real and what’s fake, you can’t trust any media anymore.
AI is ruining the environment. You can’t quantify how much, but you’ve heard horror stories about data centers buying up all the cheap real estate, only to release toxins into nearby rivers, or guzzle gallons of water per chat message.
AI is taking my job. This is already a reality for some. The aforementioned Customer Support bots, for example, replaced real people’s jobs. There have been many AI-induced layoffs (or, that’s the official excuse anyway).
AI can produce all manner of evil. With a photo of you and a 10-second clip of your voice, it can generate extortion video clips that would fool nearly anyone. There are dystopian facial recognition tools in the hands of government agencies. A powerful technology like AI can be horrifying when misapplied.
AI feels all-powerful. Silicon Valley loves to talk about AGI’s imminent arrival with awed fascination. To everyone else, though, AGI is reminiscent of those sci-fi movies where the robot gains consciousness and immediately decides to “DESTROY-ALL-HUMANS.”
AI is replacing the wrong things. It’s coming for the things that humans want to do most: do rewarding work, make art, think, communicate with each other.
All of these negative perceptions exist, and nobody has delighted normal consumers with AI yet. Nobody has shown the public how to use AI to make their lives easier and better. Unlike the developer, who sees the magic in AI’s speed, power, and approachability, non-nerds experience AI as a net negative. A massive, scary, unsolicited, fast-moving loss.
The state of our leaders
How do our leaders contribute to all this?
- They’re the ones sitting for interviews, gleefully remarking that AI will replace half of white-collar jobs: the sooner, the better.
- They’re the ones shoving useless or harmful AI features into every crevice of their products.
- They’re the ones firing staff in favor of the bottom line.
- They’re the ones investing billions building the toxic, leaky data centers.
- They’re the ones signing contracts with governments to provide undisclosed tooling.
- They’re the ones sharing dystopian use cases of their products like that’s the best work AI can do.
- They’re the ones at the helm, throwing up their hands, acting like destruction is inevitable.
They’re the supervillans of this story.
You’ve seen glimpses of this, too. These villanous visions of the future: every job replaced within 10 years; a permanent underclass; the end of literacy as we know it; colonies on Mars because we will have ruined the planet we love. These are the dreams of our supreme leaders, the CEOs of AI labs.
Are they our dreams? Is this really the best world we can envision? Is this what we want to build and consume?
We’re veering off-course, because we don’t have a leader that’s steering us where we want to go.
Now, as a fellow nerd, I don’t believe CEOs like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are actually malicious supervillans. But they’re still not the leaders we need. We need a leader who can help us move forward together, hand-in-hand with our friends who are trepidatious of AI.
The new Steve Jobs
In many ways, Steve Jobs made Apple what it is: one of the most successful and beloved consumer technology brands in the world.
Even though he wasn’t Apple’s lead engineer—Steve Wozniak was—Steve Jobs was the figurehead that people looked to. Only nerds know who Woz is. Your mom knows about Steve Jobs. He was charismatic, inspirational, and emblematic of wonderful advancements in technology that have become cemented in our daily lives.
We need a new Steve Jobs. But our new Steve Jobs can’t be a lazy carbon copy of him: some guy in a turtleneck. It’s different, this time around.
The Bridge
So what does our ideal leader look like?
She will be a bridge between the nerds and everyone else.
She should understand and serve the software nerds who can’t wait to play with the newest toys. She should strive to build the best models. She should geek out about benchmarks. She should expect the best from her team. She will be, after all, facilitating the advancement of a wonderful and strange technology—the stuff of Sci-Fi novels.
However, she should know her barista’s name, and have empathy for his tech trepidations. She should drive a vision of the future of AI that would excite your mother. She should put all her energy toward making that future come true. She should be able to communicate technical terms to a layman, capturing the magic that software engineers see in AI. Her focus shouldn’t be on what’s possible if we push technology to its limits. Instead, she should consider what’s right. What’s humane. What propels humanity forward toward a brighter future.
She needs to combat the public’s fear of loss with a visceral sense of settled peace and optimism. She needs to be deeply human, and she needs to love humanity.
She will:
- Help inspire your non-techy college friend to build their first app.
- Propose and fund projects like beautiful, city-enhancing data centers.
- Refuse to sign contracts that work against humanity’s best interests, even if it tanks her lab’s stock price.
- Help your mom learn one new AI workflow that can enhance her daily life.
- Share antipatterns and guide consumers away from applications of AI that will harm them.
This person exists, somewhere out there. We need to find them and put them in charge.
How to elevate our Bridge
This all sounds great, but isn’t it a bit of a fantasy?
If you’re reading this, you’re probably not a board member at one of the AI labs, or a partner at a VC firm. It feels like we don’t have agency to solve this problem.
I’m not sure if that’s entirely the case. We aren’t literally in charge of appointing Sam Altman’s successor. It’s not a democracy. But once we find our Bridge, we can do things to signal to decision-makers that this person has promise.
Things like:
- Inviting them to speak at your conference, join your podcast, etc.
- Introducing them to your other tech friends
- Hiring or promoting them, even if that means creating a job that didn’t exist before
- Mentoring them
- Sharing their work on social media
- Working for them
- Encouraging them to keep going
Your contributions will most certainly feel very tiny. Contributions add up.
It takes a village
The future of AI is too important to hinge on the disposition of one person. What a heavy burden.
A few months ago, Pope Leo XIV released his Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas: a sort of manifesto on the state of AI and where it’s heading. In it, he writes:
Building a world in which everyone can flourish requires shared responsibility and courage. No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing, just as no one is so weak that they cannot play their part…
Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time.
Even Steve Jobs stood on the shoulders of giants. He labored alongside a team of hardworking, everyday folks, who showed up to work every day and ended up forever altering the state of technology. The iPhone wasn’t singlehandedly developed by one man. Neither will the future of AI be constructed by one savior.
If we want our leader to embody humankindness, empathy, and optimism, shouldn’t we, too? When we have a choice between humanity and villany, let’s choose humanity. Let’s each become like the leader that we need.
Together, let’s be the bridge.