AI: What Do WE Do?

Turning anxiety about AI into citizen action

MANY OF US ARE ANXIOUS ABOUT AI. We hear warnings about lost jobs, cyberattacks, biological threats, misinformation, and machines whose capabilities may outrun our ability to control them. And it’s easy to arrive at a question that is sure to leave you feeling like a helpless victim:

What can I possibly do about this? How could I possibly affect a technology being developed by trillion-dollar companies?

Perhaps it’s time to ask a different question:

What can we do together about AI?

Deciphering The Story

It helps, I think, to pay attention to the story we’re telling ourselves—not only about AI, but about our own agency.

Speaking personally, I have a push-me-pull-you relationship with AI. Perhaps you do too.

AI has enormous productivity benefits. It may eliminate enormous numbers of jobs. It may help cure diseases. It may concentrate even more wealth and power in a few hands. It could create serious biological and cybersecurity risks. And it helped me research this essay.

So what story should we tell ourselves about it? Here are some options we are being presented with:

The Optimist’s Story:

AI will solve enormous problems and make us more prosperous. This one is being told by the tech bros and President Trump.

The Disruptor’s Story:

AI will eliminate millions of jobs, disrupt communities, and make some already very rich people even richer.

The Market Story:

Competition will sort it out.

And then there is another story:

The Citizen’s Story:

AI is too consequential to leave entirely to technologists, corporations—or, for that matter, governments. The public has both a right and a responsibility to help determine the rules under which it is developed and used.

You won’t be surprised that I’m drawn to that last story.

Citizenship in the Age of AI

You and I don’t need to understand neural networks, computational scaling, or recursive self-improvement to have a consequential role in what happens next.

But we do need some civic literacy about AI.

That means learning to ask questions such as:

• What decisions are my local government and state government making about AI? And believe me: They’re beginning to make them.

• Who is making those decisions, who gets heard, and how do they get heard?

• What organizations in my community are working on AI-related issues involving education, employment, energy, water, land use, privacy, surveillance, or another aspect of it that concerns me?

• What decisions are being made right now that could shape how AI affects my community five or ten years from now?

• Where and how can ordinary citizens participate before those decisions are settled?

Concrete Example

Suppose you live in or around Philadelphia and decide, I’m not going to sit here worrying about AI. I’m going to learn what's actually happening around me.

You might discover that in September, Mayor Cherelle Parker created a citywide Data Center Task Force. It is examining energy and water use, infrastructure, public health and safety, environmental impacts, neighborhood quality of life, jobs, and economic development. It is expected to recommend possible changes to city laws, regulations, and protections by June 30, 2027.

Suddenly, AI isn’t something happening in Silicon Valley. It’s happening at City Hall.

You might also discover a new coalition called No Data Centers in Philly. It is calling for a three-year moratorium on hyper-scale data-center development while Philadelphia establishes rules governing them.

You may agree with that position. You may disagree. You may have no idea yet. That’s not the point.

The point is that there is now a public argument—and you can enter it.

If it’s true that AI will have historic consequences, this may be one of those rare moments of flux when citizens, especially when acting together, can make a very real difference in shaping what comes next. Imagine being able to turn back the clock to the early days of social media, knowing what we know now about how profoundly it would reshape our lives and our society. We may be living through just such a moment again—only this time, the stakes may be even higher.

The resistance to data centers, in particular, may offer something else for citizens who lament polarization: a rare opportunity for citizens to come together across party lines.

I say this because many data centers are being built in rural and Republican-leaning communities, where residents are increasingly pushing back over electricity costs, water use, land, and local control. In Texas, that pressure recently reached Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, previously an enthusiastic supporter of data-center development, who ordered state regulators to halt new data-center permits while the state examines their effects on the electrical grid and water supplies.

This suggests the possibility of something we don’t see often enough anymore: people with very different politics discovering that they have some common interests as citizens—reliable electricity, affordable energy, adequate water, healthy communities, good jobs, and a meaningful say in decisions that affect where they live.

Attend a meeting. Read the city’s proposal. Ask who pays for additional electricity infrastructure. Ask about water consumption. Ask about jobs. Ask about tax revenue. Ask about noise and pollution. Ask what safeguards are appropriate. Listen to the people who want the data centers and the people who don’t.

One Final Irony

AI can help us become better-informed citizens about AI.

I didn’t use AI to write this essay. But I did use it to research it. That’s how I first learned about Mayor Parker’s Data Center Task Force and the No Data Centers in Philly coalition. Then I went to independent sources and checked the information myself.

Perhaps that’s a small example of the larger point. Use the technology. Question the technology. And don’t give the technology—or the people who control it—your citizenship.

SEND THIS ESSAY TO SOMEONE YOU KNOW WHO IS AS CONCERNED AS YOU ARE.