Americans Hate AI Because Our Tech Elites Aren’t Giving Us Any Reason to Like It

If they want us to embrace it, they need to come up with a better story about why

Mar 13, 2026

In recent weeks, The New York Times published a pair of articles about differing cultural responses to the ongoing AI explosion. The first, by long-time tech reporter David Streitfeld, examined the “indifference and hostility” of much of the US public to Silicon Valley’s latest creations, citing polls showing an otherwise polarized public broadly united in attitudes ranging from wariness to all-out Luddism. Even or especially in the industry’s backyard of Northern California, a supermajority now thinks tech companies have too much power. Streitfeld quotes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declaring it “extremely hurtful” that Americans aren’t more excited about the AI boom. (It always amuses me how sensitive these guys are.)

A second article showed roughly the opposite is true in China, America’s rival in the new AI Cold War. Polls consistently show around two-thirds or more of Chinese believe the benefits of AI outweigh the risks, roughly the inverse of the numbers in US surveys. Whereas not only public debates but intra-industry discussions of AI are permeated by “doomerism” in the United States, such visions are mostly absent from the discourse in China.

Neither question—why the US public is so skeptical of AI, why the Chinese public is more receptive—turns out to present much of a mystery, but the fact that they are being asked at all is revealing. The dominant US narratives about AI—doomer vs. accelerationist—tend to present themselves as entirely rational (indeed, they largely emerge from a movement that calls itself “Rationalism”), derived from probabilistic reasoning about future scenarios. In reality, these narratives are conditioned by culture, politics, and history. Given that, it shouldn’t be surprising that people in another large, advanced nation building LLMs think about them in a strikingly different way.

One might cite the role of state propaganda in promoting AI enthusiasm in China, but that only raises further questions. The question about Americans’ AI wariness isn’t why they feel it, but why well-resourced corporate leaders promoting the relevant technological advances have proven so astonishingly unsuccessful at changing their minds. In the mid-twentieth century, state and corporate elites in the United States did a masterful job of promoting techno-futurism through spectacles like the 1939 and 1964 World Fairs, massive publicity around NASA and the Apollo program, and so on. Later, in the ‘90s dotcom boom, as Streitfeld notes, the public was far more receptive to Silicon Valley’s narratives about the transformations it was bringing, and got reinforcement in that effort from DC allies like Newt Gingrich and Al Gore.

In 2024, Dario Amodei, the CEO of what is taken by many to be the most sophisticated AI company in business, Anthropic, published an essay about “how AI could transform the world for better.” He called it “Machines of Loving Grace.” The title comes from the title of a famous 1967 Richard Brautigan poem that imagined, among other things, “a cybernetic forest/ filled with pines and electronics/ where deer stroll peacefully/ past computers/ as if they were flowers/ with spinning blossoms.” As is recounted in books like Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture and John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, Brautigan’s neo-pastoral hi-tech apotheosis hovered over the vision of utopia promulgated by late twentieth-century Silicon Valley. (Later, Brautigan’s poem furnished the title of Adam Curtis’s 2011 documentary arguing the promised arcadia had collapsed into dystopia.)

I’ll leave others to decide whether Amodei’s essay succeeds in conjuring up as compelling a vision as Brautigan. What I will note is that he wrote this utopian essay explicitly to counter a widespread impression that he is a “doomer”; indeed, he prefaces it by remarking that he and his Anthropic colleagues “haven’t talked that much about powerful AI’s upsides, and … we’ll probably continue, overall, to talk a lot about risks.” That is, by his own estimation, despite the fact that he has created one of the most vaunted and highly valued AI companies in the world, most of the public has good reason to assume he’s very pessimistic about the tech he himself is building.

But maybe Amodei is a cringe, bluepilled safetyist—even a “gay race communist,” as some tech right and dissident right types have been claiming lately, after he got into a spat with the Trump administration. So let’s look instead at what the based and redpilled accelerationists of the AI world have to say. Surely they have a powerful vision of the future they’re creating that might fire up the imagination of the American public, if only the liberal media and woke mind virus wasn’t thwarting them at every turn. Well, not exactly:

Option 1 turns out to be identical to the “doomer”/safetyist scenario of gay race commies like Amodei, but we’re supposed to think it’s cool because it will have great cyberpunk aesthetics or something. Option 2 is basically WALL-E. WALL-E, notably, was made by Pixar and greenlighted by the last great figure of Brautiganian Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs. The anti-consumerist ethos the film expresses was widely shared in the early tech world. The great promise of the personal computer, and then the internet, was that, unlike TVs, they were participatory technologies that fostered creativity and collaboration. This promise was absolutely central to tech utopianism from Brautigan and Stewart Brand, through Wired magazine’s heyday, all the way up to Clay Shirky’s early celebratory accounts of the empowering effects of social media. WALL-E was a popular movie in part because it echoed the views about technology—disdain for passive consumerism and stultifying one-way media, the prospect of pro-human tech—successfully promoted by 1990s Silicon Valley. Today, a lotus-eating future of bovine passivity overseen by a benign “Singleton” is the best-case scenario presented by AI enthusiasts.

So when asking why Americans aren’t on board with AI the way they were with the dotcom boom, today’s oligarchs should first look in the mirror. Why are the stories they are trying to tell to the public about these technologies ones that the majority of us see as creepy and off-putting—and that contradict the values their own industry once promoted so effectively? The distinct Chinese reception of AI shows that this is not intrinsic to the technologies they are building. Chinese tech companies and the CCP are pointing consumers to specific ways the technologies can better their daily lives, making comparisons to previous concrete ways prior technological advances have done just that, and signaling that they will work to manage any harms and downsides. In contrast, American tech leaders, even the supposed accelerationists, are either openly declaring or pretty clearly implying that their technologies will make the future much worse for most people.

Why is such a wealthy and powerful industry so incapable of telling a remotely compelling story about what it is doing? I would read part of this as the result of elite unaccountability to the public. They can get lost in their own blinkered fantasy narratives because they don’t really feel any need to explain themselves to anyone other than their investors. China is an authoritarian state, but for decades, its elites have staked their legitimacy on constant, tangible improvements in standards of living for average people. As a Chinese tech writer tells the Times, technology in China “is still seen as a channel for upward mobility.” The need to sustain this belief informs how Chinese companies and Beijing are implementing and promoting AI.

For decades, tech sold Americans a post-material vision of its benefits. Its products offered experiential enhancement, ever-expanding “connection,” and (perhaps surprisingly) a more human-scale future. For various reasons, that vision ceased to inspire much credence in the 2010s and early 2020s. The attempts to articulate a new narrative are radically incoherent. There is an attempt to revive materialism as aspirational (from “consumer cornucopia” to “abundance”) but at the same time, the radicalized post-materialism of “digital superintelligence.” The only thing that brings these contradictory themes together is the fantasy of eliminating human political agency altogether—most fully evident in the new meaning of “agent” as “personalized robot slave.” These aren’t the machines of loving grace you’re looking for.

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