Action Required

Has there ever been an industry rollout, from a PR perspective, sort of worse than AI? Which has sort of been: “It’s coming, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, it might end the world, it could very well destroy your job. But you know, as a consolation, this chatbot will help you describe how to commit suicide.”
David French, The Opinions Podcast: “Trump's Political Instincts ‘Are Clearly Fading’.” 19 September, 2026

Some of this is that the companies have done a terrible job at messaging. They have effectively said, “We’re going to destroy all your jobs and potentially destroy humanity, but we’re going to IPO for a massive valuation and we’re going to set up camp in your local communities with data centers, which by the way, don’t employ people and drive up the cost of power. But, it’s okay. China.”
Jonathan Kanter, Decoder Podcast: “Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn’t kill everyone????” 19 September, 2026

While Dario Amodei may think that the messaging around generative automation is less important than prior failures of corporate America to live up to its promises to make people's lives better, if this is the impression that people have of the public messaging from Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI et cetera, the companies sure aren't doing themselves any favors.

Back when Mr. Amodei was backing up one of his engineers in a debate with an investor on X, he noted that earning the public's trust would require more than promises to cure cancer; the cure actually needed to be delivered. But when I read Messrs. French and Kanter characterizing the messaging from the industry, neither of them mention curing cancer. And perhaps that's the problem that industry players have; their lofty promises aren't actually making it into the public's consciousness. To be sure, I'm not convinced that many people take the idea that generative automation will be able to come up with a cure for cancer(s) in the short term, but the fact that the pledge isn't even part of the discussion is telling.

And maybe that's because cancer cures have been promised for decades now, yet have never materialized, but maybe it's because it's not anything that anyone expects immediately, and so it becomes a matter of giving companies a lot now, in the hope of some benefit later. And the breakthroughs that the frontier labs are actually announcing aren't immediately useful to the general public. In other words, while it's impressive that an OpenAI model disproved a conjecture concerning the planar unit distance problem, what does that disproof do for the many thousands of people who have lost their jobs because the C-suite of their company decided that agents could do the work more cheaply or simply to free up capital for data center construction? Perhaps the lofty promises are being ignored because there's no concrete indication that the generative automation labs are actual working to bring any of them to fruition. Rather they're the typical technology smokescreens that corporate executives seek to hind behind when they ask for public subsidies for their shareholders and their own salaries.

But as Mr. Amodei pointed out, this is not, fundamentally, an advertising problem; rather, it's an action problem. And while I think that yes, finding a way to do away with the scourge of cancer will show people that the industry is serious about doing something good for people, there are a myriad of much smaller problems that could use solutions in the near term. It occurs to me that the rapid pace of frontier model creation, to the point where the industry claims that they cannot be sure their products are safe, becomes a tacit admission that the current models aren't really useful for much of anything. Chatbots can, allegedly, completely wreck a person's mental health, but they can't reliably shave even one-half of one percent from people's cost of living. They produce little, if anything, that makes life better for the average person. Even people who are more productive as a result of using generative automation in their day-to-day work aren't necessarily seeing their wages rise from it.

While it's not true that the technology moguls are the only people benefiting from this new technology (the trades involved in data center construction are seeing dollar signs), for the average member of the public, this whole enterprise comes across as high-risk, low-reward, buttressed by justifications that seem flimsy on their face. This gives the impression that the technology companies believe that they don't actually need the public's support. Sooner or later, I suspect that the broader public will contest that with them.