Too fast, too risky, too disruptive. The AI "revolution" has become a juggernaut, a powerful, world-changing event that is frightening many Americans with its speed and technical wizardry while unsettling many more with its implied threat to people's livelihoods.
I am an artificial intelligence booster. Bring it on, I say, and let the chips fall where they may.
But what's happening now is beyond the scope of our ability to guide and control it.
"Many people think AI is either a science fiction movie or something that is going to take their jobs," Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D), vice chair of the National Governors Association (NGA), told Axios. "Government hasn't done a good job helping people separate fact from fiction. When people think about AI, they need to move beyond what they saw in a Will Smith movie."
It's moving far too fast for that. In the last six months (September 2025-February 2026), the AI landscape has shifted from chatting to acting. While 2024 was about making models smarter, this recent period has focused on "Agentic AI" — systems that can autonomously use software, browse the web, and manage physical hardware.
Major providers have moved beyond general chatbots to "agentic" models designed specifically for executing multi-step workflows.
Anthropic released its newest flagship, including Claude Sonnet 4.6, which achieves near-human performance on coding and terminal-based tasks while maintaining affordable pricing.
xAI introduced a unique parallel agent architecture. Instead of one "brain," Grok 4.20 uses four specialized agents (Fact-checking, Logic/Coding, Creative, and Coordination) to handle every complex query simultaneously.
Google regained the top spot on several benchmarks with Gemini 3.1 Pro, emphasizing deep reasoning for science and engineering.
To the ancients, a telephone or television would seem magical. To a broken-down, 72-year-old writer, what's happening with AI isn't far off.
58% of Americans don't trust AI much or at all. 63% say AI will decrease the number of jobs in the U.S., according to an Economist/YouGov poll out last week.
In a separate YouGov survey out in December, 77% of Americans were concerned AI could pose a threat to humanity. It's one thing to fear higher taxes. It's another thing to worry about the existence of your species!
79% of Americans don't trust companies to use AI responsibly, a Bentley-Gallup survey found.
"I've followed tech for 25 years and I've never felt a larger gap between the ~1 million people using Codex/Claude and the rest of humanity," tweeted James Wang, director of product marketing at Cerebras.
The AI haves and have-nots, or more accurately, the AI "enlightened" and the rest of us. Those who are going full throttle, 100%, pedal to the metal to incorporate AI into everything they do understand the potential of AI, but from my vantage point, don't care enough about what AI is doing to us, our economy, and the world.
Other Americans sense the same thing.
Just as a chess player aided by a computer could once beat any standalone machine, an engineer paired with an AI agent may now be the most powerful unit in tech.
Amodei argues that this hybrid phase may be "very brief" — perhaps only a few years before AI systems can independently outpace even the best human-led teams.
Major AI labs have spent the past year pitching "agentic workflows" as the industry's next frontier.
That vision snapped into focus last month with the explosive rise of OpenClaw, an open-source tool that lets developers spin up AI agents to plan, code and ship software end to end.
Unlike chatbots that live in a browser or an app, OpenClaw gives agents "hands" on a user's local machine — letting them autonomously manage files, run terminal commands and message teammates.
The popularity of the project was supercharged by Moltbook, a viral, AI-only social network where OpenClaw agents "hang out" and post autonomously.
Austrian developer Peter Steinberger created OpenClaw, which became the fastest-growing repository in GitHub history.
"[Steinberger] is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. "We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings."
I'm still bullish on AI as a product/process that has the potential to change the world for the better. I am also becoming increasingly concerned about the perceived arrogance and dismissive attitude of some tech gurus in this industry. Wanting to take the technology forward is fine, as long as the pitfalls and dangers are thought through.
I'm not saying take no risks. I'm saying, slow the hell down. Racing to be first with this or that mind-blowing breakthrough isn't worth it if it results in unforeseen, catastrophic changes to the labor force, our economy, or to humanity.
https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2026/02/24/if-ai-were-a-politician-it-would-lose-in-a-landslide-n4949895
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