Daniel Jeffries@Dan_Jeffries1
Eric Schmidt should’ve stopped mid-speech and said:
“Fine. Boo AI.
But make your next Preply class Chinese, because the civilization cheering this stuff is not waiting for you to finish your campus struggle session.”
China’s grandmas are lining up to install AI tools. Chinese developers are shipping open-source models like their hair is on fire. Their public is overwhelmingly positive about AI (83% feel positive about the future while in the west we are circling the drain around 30%). Their companies are moving fast, copying fast, improving fast, innovating fast, deploying fast.
And in America?
Our most educated children boo the mere mention of the most important technology since electricity.
Why?
Because our AI leadership class has spent three years doing the dumbest possible PR campaign in the history of technology.
One half of them tells everyone AI will kill them.
The other half tells everyone AI will take every white-collar job in 18 months.
Then the closed-model cartel runs to DC whispering that ordinary people cannot be trusted with powerful open-source AI, that the future must be locked behind a handful of corporate APIs, safety boards, export controls, permission slips, and East India Company monopolies.
And everyone acts shocked when the kids hate it.
You told them AI means unemployment.
You told them AI means extinction.
You told them AI means no future.
Then you walk onto a graduation stage and say “AI” and wonder why they boo.
This is what strategic suicide looks like.
The country that taught the world to love computers, the internet, open source, startups, hackers, builders, weirdos, tinkerers, and permissionless innovation is now teaching its children to fear the next platform shift.
Meanwhile China looked at AI and said: deploy it, open it, copy it, improve it, integrate it, normalize it.
We looked at AI and said: regulate it, monopolize it, catastrophize it, litigate it, protest the datacenters, ban the open models, blame every layoff on it, then act mystified when the public thinks it’s a demon machine.
NIMYBs are moving from blocking housing to blocking datacenters. The same folks that stopped nuclear, the cleanest energy we have, are now joining hands with the NIMYBs. The hard right nationalists in Bannon and the hard left socialists in Bernie are joining hands in a new American party with mad Max Tegmark spending billions to terrify children about AI. Wonder what they'll call themselves? Maybe the National Socialists?
The West does not have an AI capability problem.
It has an AI civilizational-confidence problem.
And if we keep telling our kids that the future is something to boo, don’t be surprised when the future answers back in Mandarin.
