With the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, enthused Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in early 2023, “We went from the bicycle to the steam engine.” Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla wrote in Time Magazine in 2024 that “AI amplifies and multiplies the human brain, much like steam engines once amplified muscle power.”
Why does this prospect scare so many people?
The polls show that, where once the promise of artificial intelligence was a cause for widespread support for the new technology, arguments against it by unions, scientists, futurists, and some businesspeople have now made AI decidedly unpopular.
Any technology that promises massive, even revolutionary change is going to frighten people. And AI is that and more.
Technology writer Tim Requarth compares the impact of AI to that of the shift from the bicycle to the steam engine. With a bicycle, “you are traveling,” wrote a cycling enthusiast in 1878, “not being traveled.”
I think about this distinction a lot: between traveling and being traveled. Bicycles and trains are both technologies that move us from place to place. In that sense, in the sense of their outward function, it’s fine to lump them together. But the comparison falls apart when you consider their effects on the traveler. In terms of effort, a steam engine doesn’t really “amplify an inherent ability.” It replaces it. You sit back and the coal does the work. You arrive, but you’ve been traveled. So one way to look at a technology is how powerful it is, what it can enable humans to do. But an equally important question is what happens to humans when they use the technology.
Many people fear the downsizing that AI might bring. They are afraid of being left behind in the current tech boom that is already moving at warp speed.
Three years ago, the share of Americans with a negative attitude toward AI was about one-third. Today, it’s over 50% and much more negative (70%) among those under 30.
There’s a genuine wave of “AI hate” that’s taken hold and threatens the future of artificial intelligence. Some of that hate is directed at the AI labs, which are either unaware or uncaring of the growing backlash against the technology.
In previous conversations with Axios, AI executives at multiple frontier AI labs were surprised by the negative opinions. They see AI as just as inevitable as the rise of the internet.
Asked about backlash to AI, Superhuman Mail CEO Rahul Vohra — whose company makes an AI-powered email assistant — seemed unfamiliar with the premise of the question. After hearing about poor polling around AI, he responded: “We don’t really see that.”
While the tech underlying AI is here to stay, “What is not inevitable is that these technologies will be embedded in every aspect of our lives, become indispensable, or replace humans,” Dr. Avriel Epps, assistant professor at University of California, Riverside, said in an email to Axios.
“Nothing in the future is inevitable and no single person, company, or group gets to decide what will happen in the future.”
Threat level: Negative AI sentiment could become a financial liability for AI labs if it continues to curb access to their most valuable resource: compute power.
The labs see AI as “inevitable.” They have, in some respects, been blinded by their own success to the potential disruptions AI could cause. And the speed at which AI is being developed has even led cheerleaders for AI to urge the industry to slow down.
The recent move by Anthropic to go with a limited release of their latest AI model, “Mythos,” (and a limited release of ChatGPT’s latest model) demonstrates that at least some companies are taking the idea of slowing down seriously. Washington believes that Mythos is an AI model capable of “not just identifying weaknesses in security systems, but exploiting them with autonomous, never-before-seen precision,” reported Axios.
The public pushback against AI is most pronounced in the numerous build-outs of data centers and in well-organized campaigns to stop them.
A record number of data centers, which provide the compute AI companies use to answer user queries, were canceled in the first quarter of 2026 amid resistance from communities, per Heatmap Pro data.
“Public pushback is emerging as a binding constraint, particularly around data center buildout,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note about market risks associated with the midterms.
These data center setbacks are “sapping confidence” among investors, according to a note investment bank Jefferies sent to clients.
Reality check: AI has been around for years and is bound to be a central part of American life, whatever form it ultimately takes.
“Some version of AI is inevitable … but we have choice,” said Arun Bahl, the CEO of Aloe, an AI company that builds models designed to be trustworthy. “Is it the dystopian plot? Or can we have tools that humans trust?”
Requarth relates how Inuit people adapted to snowmobiles and rifles to increase the chances of success for their hunts. But when it came to GPS, the elders saw a threat to their knowledge and identity. Not being able to teach the younger hunters about how to read the land and find the best path to the game took something important away from the Inuit people.
“For the first time in history, the navigator can completely rely on technology and travel successfully knowing nothing about navigation and very little about the environment,” said ethnographers studying the Inuits.
“The device didn’t amplify the Inuit’s famous wayfinding skills,” writes Requarth, “but bypassed them entirely.”
The Inuit elders and the Silicon Valley executives are looking at the same phenomenon and seeing different things because they’re asking different questions that come from different sets of values. The executives seem to be asking: what kind of output does this human produce? The elders seem to be asking: what kind of person does using this tool produce?
If output is your only metric, then the steam engine really is just a better bicycle. Both get you from A to B. One gets you there faster with less effort. Case closed. The fact that you arrive having done nothing, learned nothing, built nothing—that’s not a bug, that’s the point. Effort is a cost to be minimized, not a value to be preserved.
For AI, all that matters is reaching a destination. The journey is given short shrift. Isn’t it the journey that makes us human, that makes life worth living?
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I have been advocating a much slower advance of AI simply because no one is asking questions like this. What will it do to us as a species, and does it even matter?
I think it does, and I’d like to see a much broader discussion of AI and its impact on all of us.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is leading America into the “Golden Age” as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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