You can’t read anything these days without hearing about artificial intelligence, and the sheer volume of news AI generates can make it difficult to understand what it’s really all about, how it’s being used, and how it will impact us humans in the United States.
At this point in time, many Americans are probably familiar with generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, or Google’s Gemini. All of these are AI Large Language Models (LLMs) that can quickly generate or create text, images, audio, and video content. Though AI has been around for decades, the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 firmly cemented AI in the public consciousness. For the first time, AI could speak to us in formats humans naturally understand.
Now, AI agents are being introduced to the public. These agents can act like a person with a computer, only faster, and they can use the internet, write code or documents (“vibe code”), or even use your computer to complete multiple tasks over long periods of time to accomplish a goal (like researching and booking your trip to Hawaii).
AI is already being used around us in the form of automated systems, but it’s getting rapidly more advanced every day. These advanced models are being integrated into existing systems already in use. For example, Claude AI is being used right now to help the U.S. military identify targets to attack in Iran. All this is happening while the CEOs of AI companies declare loudly that their technology will cause “20% of people” to lose their jobs and that the next few years will be a “painful adjustment” where “every job will be affected, and immediately.”
To help you better understand the real impact of AI, here are five things to understand about how it’s being used in the United States today.
AI is not a fake technology.
Some folks today who seem to believe AI is a fake technology. To state it plainly, AI is not fake. It is a real technology that is improving rapidly all the time.
If you played around with AI a few years ago when ChatGPT came out but thought it made a lot of mistakes or couldn’t generate realistic photos, but you haven’t used it since, you’d probably be shocked by the tremendous strides it’s been making almost weekly since then. As University of Pennsylvania professor Ethan Mollick said, “If AI development completely stopped, we would still have 5-10 years of rapid change absorbing the capabilities of current models and integrating them into organizations and social systems.” AI is a very real technology, and its impact is going to be felt across our economy and society for many years to come.
AI spending has kept the U.S. economy afloat.
Companies are spending trillions of dollars in AI capital expenditures building data centers, power plants, and buying chips. This unprecedented spending is helping to keep the U.S. economy afloat. Remove AI, and our economy would suddenly be much weaker.
The Trump administration has made unleashing American AI a centerpiece of its economic policy agenda, including by pushing Congress to preempt state laws that impact AI without any corresponding federal laws in order to let AI development and adoption flow without restrictions. But this has also led to fears of an AI bubble and potential crash that could impact the whole economy. Separately, the recent war in Iran has led to fears of an energy and economic crisis, including for key resources required to build AI, such as helium.
AI is also being cited as a reason for many layoffs now, though it may just be a convenient scapegoat for these layoffs. Still, fears of losing your job to AI loom large in the public’s mind. A recession would likely lead to increased adoption of new AI technologies by businesses looking to save money by replacing people with AI.
Frontier labs believe we may see huge improvements in AI soon.
AI has become more advanced over the past year, and frontier AI labs—specifically Anthropic and OpenAI—are already hinting that they are seeing successes that could result in what they call Recursive Self Improvement, or RSI.
RSI means that AI models could self-train to even greater improvement, a key step along the path to what is known as Artificial General Intelligence, also called AGI, which describes an AI that has human-like intelligence and skills. If AGI were developed—and skeptics are right to raise their doubts—then we would have what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” which would mean that human intelligence would become abundant in a way our society has never known, with profound implications for the world and economy, such as the potential extreme automation of jobs and possible manipulation of our democracy by AI.
The future of AI in warfare and government surveillance is now.
For decades, we have watched movies and television shows that have warned against the government’s use of AI to wage war and create a massive surveillance state. But AI and other technologies are already being used by the U.S. government in ways that should be alarming, especially because there are few laws or guardrails to protect citizens from abuse.
The Trump administration is trying to create centralized databases that AI can use. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are creating databases to track people including American citizens and using other AI tools in their mass deportation campaign. And Claude is being used on classified systems to select targets in the war in Iran. The Trump administration is trying to keep even tighter control on U.S. AI companies, including by attempting to destroy frontier AI company Anthropic when it attempted to prevent the government from using its tool for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
The future of AI warfare and surveillance is no longer fiction. It is here now.
Voters are paying more attention to AI.
AI is a rising concern for voters. Though it’s still not being cited as a top issue at the ballot box, it’s risen significantly in importance over the past year. It’s also increasingly viewed negatively by voters. It has large salience for many voters, as they are aware of it and think it may impact their lives — which stands in contrast to other technologies like cryptocurrency that do not seem to raise significant concerns for voters. Concerns about AI are also intertwined with other broad societal concerns, such as economic precariousness.
All of this to say: There is a well-documented and legitimate belief — and fear — that artificial intelligence will impact Americans’ jobs and livelihoods. This fear has led the public to pay a lot more attention to AI, even if they don’t fully understand it. They are right to do so.
Adam Conner is the vice president of Technology Policy at the Center for American Progress.
I personally DO NOT trust it. There are too many bad players in the field and there are already way too many scams going on.
Another issue, though it may be a relatively minor one compared to Mr. Hartmann's points, is that those data centers and power plants require an incredible amount of electricity to keep them going, and lots of water to keep them cool.
Yes, he's correct. We're marching along to the same old tunes of the same old drums. Beware.