The Backfire
This post is part of my Medium blog.
I've started keeping a list. Two lists, honestly. One is the people organizing against AI — protest groups, lawsuits, the beginnings of an actual resistance. The other is the people using AI in ways that guarantee the first list keeps growing. I don't know what the lists are for yet. I just keep noticing that things I used to write as fiction are happening in the same season now, and nobody is connecting them.
The first entry came from the New York Times this morning: a montage of the AI-generated political ads flooding this election cycle. More than 220 of them. Better than $137 million spent. Most of them carrying no disclosure at all that a machine made them. Some look cheap. Some are deepfakes good enough to pass. (The Times has the piece.)
I'll make a prediction I'd put money on: this backfires. People do not like being performed at by something that isn't human, and they can tell. I have more faith in the electorate than I probably should. But look at who's making the bet. Elon Musk has put roughly $366 million into this cycle, most of it since July, and a lot of it is landing on ads like the ones in that montage. Musk doesn't think about markets. He doesn't ask what an audience wants. He does what he thinks is right and waits for the world to come around. That's a fine temperament for rockets. As a strategy for getting a suspicious public to enjoy synthetic video, it's an expensive education.
But that's the ads. I said I'd mention them, and now I have.
The second thing is bigger, and I'll keep it short. In France they have a phrase for what the state's finances are doing: la spirale. Spend more than you take in, borrow the difference, let interest eat the budget, borrow again. Interest on the debt is on track to pass €90 billion next year — more than France spends on education. The government is trying to cut €54 billion while high school students have blockaded hundreds of schools over missing teachers, classes of thirty-five, and buildings nobody maintains. Around two thousand arrests so far. (DW has been covering it.)
Our coverage mostly says welfare state, finally collapsing, and moves on. I don't trust it. You can't judge a culture from outside it, and you can't judge a resistance movement from a wire summary either. My guess, and it's only a guess: AI is deeper inside the French spiral than our media is admitting — present in every automation that makes a cut feel inevitable, every efficiency promise that lands on the same families paying the interest bill. A protest movement organized by teenagers who feel abandoned by their own state has a future, and it isn't a quiet one.
For the record, because people ask: I'm not anti-AI. I know how three novels about systems taking decisions away from people can read. I use these tools every day. What I want is more control over how AI gets applied to society — real thought about where it touches people's lives, instead of a shrug — and a more rational approach to managing debt than the one the entire Western world is running, because we are set up for a real fall.
And here's what actually worries me. When the fall comes, the response gets written in a panic, by whoever happens to be standing there when something ugly happens. Rushed regulation doesn't have a great record of making things better. It makes things different, and whether different is better depends on who wrote the rules and who they exempt. I'm not far left. I'm not far right. I don't care which team claims the issue first. I care that the wrong person, in the wrong mood, gets to decide what AI is allowed to be for everyone else — and does it badly, and entrenches the incumbents, and pushes the real risks underground, and the backlash arrives anyway, with no rules left worth defending.
In Essential, the last book, it's 2033 and the argument has become a public vote on which decisions must remain human. The trilogy assumes that pressure builds for a decade before anyone has to answer for it. Watching this season — the ads, the spiral, the students, the money — I'd shorten the estimate.
I used to write the backlash. Now I'm just keeping up with it.