Common Sense 2026: AI In America

I'm tired of hearing "wake up" and being told to throw myself into an environment of endless agitation with no clear aims and no tangible results to speak of. We're not going to fix the world's problems by worrying about them together over the internet. We gotta fix them where we are.

My message is simple: the future is calling. Not in some abstract, far-off way. It's calling now. Pick up.

Today, the future is begging every American, every human being on Earth, to help fulfill its promise.

Not just for Silicon Valley or techno-enthusiast nerds, but for ordinary people. Not just for Wall Street, but for Main Street. Not just for city people, but for rural and small-town America. Ultimately, for everyone.

I grew up in poverty. Tech was my only escape. I went to bed hungry. As a kid, I used our same family PC for 12 years, until it was mine alone. I cried for days when the hard drive eventually died one Winter day, because I grasped what this meant: I went on to lose my daily access to the internet for over a year. Nobody around me could help this 12 year old afford a $70 HDD or even install it if I had - let alone a new $200-300 PC.

Don't worry. America's safety nets were there for me and my family, and we made it. We struggled, but mom and dad loved me. I grew up, moved out, got a job, and since then I've spent roughly 75% of my waking life working in Small Tech, making software. I was computer-native, web-native, it just sort of fit as a path.

And today I make an alright, middling salary that about covers my bills. I've never gotten stock or equity from anyone who ever paid me for a job. I have plenty of friends working in Big Tech, though. And obviously I'm well aware of the rumblings and ruminations afoot in the boardrooms of the world and within the halls from where some of this incomprehensible future tech is already coming out. The world is yet again experiencing a major sea change, but this one is unlike anything before; or maybe it's like everything before, to the power of googolplex.

I've watched this transformation roll in for over 10 years now, slowly at first and then, now, all at once. People wonder if we're going to keep going, but it doesn't matter. Even if we stopped improving now, completely - we've cracked it.

So let me be your canary in the coal mine: we've literally, actually done it, folks.

And when I say that, here's what I mean specifically, because claims that big need evidence: December 2025, OpenAI/Google/Anthropic released new AI with unprecedented abilities (that "new AI" namely being Opus 4.5, Gemini 3.0, and GPT-5.2/Codex) and it's subtle, almost insidiously, but it means nothing is the same anymore.

AI that can actually, properly use the computer. Not just answer questions. Use the computer. Click, type, navigate, build, test, debug, iterate. We now have access to the machines that build the machines. That is a serious, unprecedented inflection point. That's a crack in the dam right there.

Everything downstream of that, including autonomous robots, medical breakthroughs, private and powerful intelligence tools for every American and earthling - is now an engineering problem on a timeline, not the science fiction question mark that it honestly was one or two fiscal quarters ago.

Some of it is here today already. A lot of it. Some of it is five years out. Some of it is twenty. But the thing that makes all of it possible just happened, and you can go use it and build with it today, for free, right now.

And yes, like everyone you've had even an idle conversation with for the last four years, I'm talking about AI, obviously.

You've already heard the hype, and a shocking amount of it is true. In huge swaths of work, this stuff is already better than I am at almost everything. For me, yeah, I don't write code the old way anymore; I direct systems that produce it, test it, and package it. As a knowledge worker, known- or unknown unknowns are no longer a meaningful blocker for me. And everyone I know working deeply with AI has effectively been handed an on-demand team of extremely competent PhDs moving at superhuman digital speed. With that gift, the main limit becomes you: your imagination, your executive agency, and your ability to translate your will into plain-English instructions, then guide them in flight until the work is done to your standard.

I barely have the words for this. This is the stuff we needed, baby. This is the good stuff. This is what we've been waiting for. My job is what some might call "automated" now, sure, but guess what? I still have it. I'm earning more. I'm performing better than ever. 10x, sometimes more. That part is real. When I build software now, I'm no longer the construction worker on the job site; I'm the foreman. And sometimes I can snap my fingers, spin up two or more job sites side by side, and have them work together. It really is a software factory. We need new language for the Intelligence Revolution.

But I'm passionate about this stuff. I'm seeing it for what it is, long-tail, for our species. I never felt like this was something that was going to come and steamroll me the way that people are really feeling right now.

And I think if I don't make sure to say this part, the rest won't land the way it should. I started out as a graphic designer, right? That was my thing. (No I'm not going to say passion, fucker.)

That “taste” and ability to push the envelope in my field, that was what I thought made me special. I could make beautiful thing on the computer! And for a while, that really was enough.

And then the tools got better and better, the floor rose, and I had to face a question that sucked pretty hard: is the thing I'm proud of actually scarce, or did I just grow up in a world where it was temporarily hard to do for a while?

I can't say that reckoning didn't hurt. It did. I had to rebuild, for me, the idea of what special actually means, and basically start to dissect the root of what it is that I could offer that a machine couldn't, today and in 20 years, and that self-rebuilding is how I ended up departing design, going deeper in product, then in AI engineering - each step wider towards what I felt would actually matter in the world, to reduce suffering, to make a net deposit towards prosperity for my fellow human.

The design eye never left. It just found bigger rooms to work in.

So if you're a commercial illustrator, a copywriter, a junior developer, or anyone else staring at this wave and feeling like the ground just opened up beneath you: I see you. I was you. And I'm not going to insult you by saying it's fine. It's not fine. It's a band-aid rip. But I am going to tell you that the path through it is real, I've walked it, and what's on the other side is not smaller — it's bigger than anything the old version of your job was ever going to give you. The question is not whether your craft mattered. It did. The question is whether you'll let it evolve into something the world needs even more right now. Because it can. I'm proof.

The workload demand, for me, for everyone, is simply growing to fit the supply. Yes, there is a wide swath of "bullshit jobs" that are being recombobulated back into the tech world, because some of what those organizations did was very simple processing of inputs and outputs in the way that we can handle far, far, far more effectively and cheaply with AI.

And remember, I was writing code, building digital products, doing all of this well before AI was anything more than laborious, complex machine learning crap where, like the XKCD comic, you could write an image classifier that labeled bird pictures by species only if you have 4 years and a research team. Today, barring the remaining edge cases, that has been reduced to something broadly achievable by one person in an afternoon.

My fellow American, by December 2025, everything had changed. The utopian path stopped feeling imaginary and started feeling real, visible, beautiful, and near. And yeah, part of me wants to grab you by the shoulders in the street and ask whether you realize what this actually means. Because out here, among the people living in this every day, I'm still not sure it has fully sunk in.

Metaphorically, it feels like we're all Wile E. Coyote: as a species, we ran clean off the cliff and kept moving. We still don't know when we're supposed to fall. But maybe, just maybe, AI is the moment we realize we can fly.

So give me the benefit of the doubt for a minute, and let me explain.

As empowered citizens of this universe, Americans are uniquely positioned to help drive the infrastructure of truth, goodness, and freedom that will underpin the intelligence systems of tomorrow's Utopia. The moment is now, and it is dire.

If I can boil this down: if I could wave a magic wand over our social and geopolitical chaos, I would say this: "Let us join hands, turn the page, and seize the opportunity in front of us. In a world increasingly of 'Sub Uno, Multa' (Under One, Many), let us relight the beacons of 'E Pluribus Unum' (Out of Many, One)." America is the OG flat/fucked org chart.

My hot take for you today is that AI may end up being the ultimate tool of equity, democracy, and the integrity of the historical record. I understand that many of you just read that, and are now thinking that I'm fucking ass-backwards insane, or that it must be opposite day today when I'm writing this. But for God's sake, let me get through this meandering point because this point is going to fucking meander. And I think you'll almost certainly walk away agreeing with me on just about everything.

Think about how life was in America 250 years ago: in a muddy world of disease and oil lamps, our forefathers and foremothers did this the hard way, with calloused hands and furrowed brow, unlocking pathways to progress for us to enjoy today. Really just for the benefit of posterity, and the fulfillment of their own curiosity.

Now, joyously, we benefit. You and I get to do the fun part: the same thing, but easier, faster, and a lot more fun. Ever tried life on Creative Mode?

We can DO IT NOW. Let's lock in and build. We're not LOSING anything, not fully. We are GAINING EVERYTHING. My dad was an arborist, and everyone knew he was an artist with a chainsaw, wedging and felling trees right between the garage and the shed, perfect precision every time.

But if my dad's worksite had some b!tchbots that were hauling logs onto the truck or cleaning up the client's property, he could have been giving his entire self to his craft in a way no human has ever been able to, before the heart attack took him. My dad didn't make it far enough to see that there is real hope for us today, but he would have been as excited as I am about all this, same with mom.

Let's mark the threshold, and from now until Utopia, harness American AI to build a brighter tomorrow of health, happiness, truth, liberty, freedom, purpose, expression, and Goodness. Get everyone on this train, goddamn it.

Cast away whatever distracts and enrages you today, and whatever else will not serve you tomorrow. In the face of what we can create together now, many of those burdens will soon be moot.

Let's fulfill the promise of the American experiment far beyond what even the giants on whose shoulders we stand could have imagined.

AI would be simply astounding to our forefathers, who are posthumously forgiven for often mistaking providence for what we can now explain with science. The idea of a "brain" in a box, and of embodying those brains in iron men, would hit them with the same kind of mind-blow The Matrix or The Truman Show hit us with. They would probably say: "We absolutely do not have time to codify the right guardrails for this. That's on you now. Good luck, sons and daughters."

Again, and in reference to the contemporary meme of the time traveler meeting the medieval peasant who actually understands the smartphone just fine, and is not, in fact, impressed by the Dorito from the future: it's not that our forefathers wouldn't understand or comprehend the idea of AI, but instead it's that they would realize there are implications to a democratic republic that they don't and can't understand or predict for us ahead of time. We have to go into that future and hold fast to the tools they gave us.

Their technology, the printing press, the steam engine, and early experiments with automata / the parallelization of concurrent divided labor, those were the technological marvels of our founding fathers' time, showing results that painted a picture of a bright beautiful tomorrow.

They knew that with those technologies, the world was going to change, and more technologies would result, but it was the uniquely American implementation of those technologies that would go on to be so, so crucial in the validation and enablement of the American experiment that they believed in, and the continued persistence of all that is good about it today, with the principles that concentrated power should be for the benefit of the people, and never the other way around, and everything downstream of that which America has achieved towards the universal cause of humanity.

At the center of it sits our crown jewel, our precious infinity stone: American technology. There's nothing like it, and there never will be. And I say that not to dismiss the competition — let there be exuberant competition for the benefit of us all. America is ready to run. But we run different, because we run open, and that's the whole point.

In the 1700s, the USA-haters, the scared-ass punk-ass flat-footed kings and tyrants, and everyone whose empires of suffering felt threatened by the American idea of truth, transparency, communication, and freedom reacted the same way tyrants always do: with suppression, subjugation, control, fear, self-serving concentration, and the perpetuation of injustice.

Meanwhile, Americans were shipping white-hot justice across the country. Thomas Paine's Common Sense was basically a meme that started a war. It's so American I could almost cry. We invented the internet, people. America still has a crucial part to play in building Utopia, and maybe the most important one: liberty, equality, popular sovereignty, individualism, justice, diversity. Grassroots and bottom-up on everything that matters most. AI is not an exception to that. It may be the most important place we could possibly hope to exemplify American principles.

There is a very very real alternate track timeline world in which, without America's shining example of refutation in history, our ancestors' conviction to say 'No, we will not live this way, there is a better way' - Earth in 2026 very well may have been the dominion of roving warlords, dynastic emperors, unchecked god-kings, and hopeless, wanton desolation of the good and common people. There may have been no other known way than savagery at scale. Like Loki, we seized the roots of the timelines and, at great pain to ourselves, channel energies into constructive socio-civic machinery and the apprehension of the impossible, raw potential of production. We set the standard, built the framework, made the mould, choreographed the dance, showed people that consciousness, this existence, could be something more than apathetic, subservient misery.

Instead, that's not what we have. We have a bulwark, a bridgehead in the arena from which good can fight back against the worst faces of human evil. The stairway to tomorrow is lit before us, and it's ours to climb. They will follow.

I'm not talking about waging war, staging a revolution, or world policing. I'm talking about an example set for all humanity, a symphony so beautiful the world has no choice but to stop the madness and simply sing along. America will be a fount of abundance so prolific, so impossible to ignore that the tools used by evil dictators and cruel despots against their oppressed masses will become invalid.

Common, everyday American people fight for truth, for good, for the light, in a world that increasingly seeks to subjugate people in darkness. The Eagle watches. The American people watch. We are not perfect, we are not God's chosen, we are as capable of misdeeds and mistakes as any. And to deeply understate it, our systems, governments, incentives, structures - there are deep flaws in our inertial momentum as a result of compromises we've made and where we came from. America is not omnipotent. But we are strong. Still standing. Always watching. And as a people, America has been uniquely capable of affecting Good in this world in a way that is, unquestionably, Exceptional.

Nobody does it like we do it, and we'll always be hated for our blessings, down to the last forgotten unhoused family on a cold city street. America's historical detractors have never much cared which Americans they hate. It's a sad fact, and among the many hard truths my children will someday have to face. It was well into my own life before I understood the character of the world I lived in, and the depth and breadth of the suffering humans leave in their wake.

The preservation of innocence is a tragic beauty, and it's always been the dreamers, the lovers, play-pretenders, and the best qualities of everything the most stalwart of Americans have laid their lives on the line to defend, who end up making all the difference in blazing a trail forward in pivotal moments like the one we find ourselves in today. America was founded by a group of warriors defending our shared dream of We the People, and that's never stopped being what we are, though as we know there are those that work tireless to see that our principles, values, morals, are tested - ideally for them, to the point of breaking.

The gift of freedom and liberty is that children can grow, live, and love long before they fully understand why those principles matter. Compassion, generosity, fairness: those are principles of the American people too. Under the shelter of those first-layer principles, the rest can grow and flourish, as so many American-led breakthroughs already have.

You can't get done what we do, not on our level, not in tyrannical autocratic nations, or in societies where the people are not made to feel NOT ONLY are they completely free to pursue their individual dreams, goals, and ambitions, BUT also that the mere act of doing so offers the potential to improve life for everyone, everywhere on earth.

And by the nature of humans and physics, we will never be truly rid of the horrors that still linger — a bright world of possibilities, yes, but one with darkness still in it. We can only seek to understand and mitigate them, boxing in the harsh realities of an uncaring universe as tightly as we can. That monster may never be truly vanquished, except insofar as we equip our great-(*googol)-grandchildren to party at the heat death of the universe: black-hole power, good friends together, replicators, neuro-holodecks, and a middle finger to the end of it all. A distinctly human refusal to go quietly into that good night.

But this 'ancestor liberty infrastructure' - American law, thinking machines, our unique institutions, the internet, the long march of transparency upon humanity, much of it pioneered here first - means the cruel operators of history can never again rest as easy as they once did. We have to continue this, obviously.

We persist in this American struggle, this human struggle, two and a half centuries on, with gratitude for the treacherous narrow straits through which our ancestors passed against all odds, carrying the promise of you and me in their arms. That road led to this moment, where the potential of tomorrow is again immense, just as it was for our founding fathers 250 years ago. But it was always a risk. Always a desperate gamble. It always will be.

With eyes open, we have to recognize that, just as on the founding day of America, we are not beyond the dark times yet. It is now considered naive not to imagine that the worst may still lie ahead. There is still generational work to do. All we can do is carry on. But we have tools today that even a few years ago we could only dream of.

That is the precariousness and the promise of the moment. It is as real and profound as it was when they drafted the Declaration of Independence, and no less important to the descendants who will judge what we did here 250 years from now, in 2276.

Will they be enjoying Star Trek-type shit? Or will they be living I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream? What we do today decides, America. Dead serious. All jokes aside. Will you bring the resilience required? Or will you spend your life caught in rage bait, shouting into the void alongside tiny 4b-parameter LLMs? Ffs, put that shit away for now and let's build the future. Please. (I'm sorry I'm such a prick about this.)

The future demands that we build not just from the top down, but from the bottom up. America has always been a wild frontier, first physical and now digital, and until we fulfill the promise of the intelligence revolution, we're still on our own out here. The cavalry is not coming. It's on us, fellow American. We need to roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and get this technology working for us all, from the metro to the sub-rural, on a grassroots, day-to-day level. Everything, everywhere, all at once. Get to know it. Fill your own learning gaps. The technology can teach itself to you in whatever way you need. Build something, anything, that creates value for you today. Scale it up. Scale it out. Move on. Accelerate this.

Only your village knows which intelligence solutions your village needs, and will need next. Don't let the modern equivalent of the imperial monarchy of the 1700s prescribe or gatekeep what you need to thrive on your own continental home soil. That is for you to decide. It's the most American thing I can think of.

Look, I have friends who work in tech. In truth, 'Big Token' wishes you wouldn't let yourself be so much prescribed and gatekept. The more ideal environment, obviously, is a robust arena of open, shared progress and abundant ground-level implementation on small, individual- and then eventually community-scale levels, to great effect across society, which I believe to be imminent, just like Usenet led to webrings led to various other networks, communities, and, to strip away the technicality and get to the humanity, groups of people having an important positive impact on each others lives in a way that would have been impossible without the technology. To the extent that yes, it has absolutely enabled tragedy and horrors that too would not have been possible without it, but that I can myself say with full dissonant ambivalence and full self-disgusted discomfort: what we got was worth the tragedy, in the course of technology being inflicted upon society. And in no small part because of where we're about to go with it from here.

But if you are enraged by AI, you understandably see the economics of this moment very differently. The cultural realization that Humanity Really Did It with AI will bring immense money, and that reality requires Big Token to maximize profit right now, even if many of the people inside those systems genuinely want true American values to take root in the spread of this technology. And it will take root. But that is for you and me to see done, not Big Token, not Big Government. You and I, American. Do you feel the weight of that responsibility yet?

"They" are just like "us" - I despise these terms, by the way - and many of them agree with this idealism as much as you or I would. But in this moment, they cannot simply choose not to make money, not to push forward, not to let the inertia play out. The momentum would implode senselessly and disastrously. "Just stop" is not an option. And rightly so: that would sabotage the very mission I'm describing to you here and asking you to take up with me.

The problem is, the discourse in the public consciousness today paints AI as something that is "happening to us", instead of the Manhattan Project for All Americans that it is. It's not just for some guys at Los Alamos and a quarter million scientists on a need-to-know basis anymore. It's for all Americans - for all the world. We gave it away. China gave it away even harder after that. And you do not need to wait for someone to build something new for you tomorrow, or give you permission. It's already out there, and it is getting cheaper, faster, and better. Engage with it more deeply; you'll be glad you did. My life is already transformed. I already have digital superpowers in abundance, with new ones every day, and I am already what I call 'Hyperthinking.' So get the fuck over here and hop in, bitch. We're going to the future.

If you are someone enraged by AI, I beseech you: follow me into a thought experiment. Strip everything away until it is just humanity and this technology, in frame and in focus.

No countries. No Sam J. BezoMuskerberg. No data centers, wars, conspiracies, or economy. Just an ailing grandmother, a neglected child, or a brilliant mind condemned to meaningless labor because their era asked them to behave like a robot instead of live like a human being with goals, dreams, and purpose.

And now place in that same frame an autonomous, solar-powered, self-recharging, private, offline, secure, open-source, fully tested, human-aligned, medical-grade embodied assistant, ready to be deployed for any good and reasonable purpose.

Labor. Cleaning. Medical care. Entertainment. Business. Security. Research. Physical assistance. Companionship. Moving. Laundry. Cooking. Dishes. Emergency response and preparedness. Remote physical access to the home or business from your phone, abroad. Even fully autonomous 24/7 businesses launched and managed by everyday people through agentic loops, embodied assistants, and drones.

Now, in your mind's eye, start painting the vignettes with me. Of this brighter tomorrow. Yes, every technological sword is double-edged. I'll get there. But first, picture this:

Picture it: the grandson delivering the elder-care robot, pulling it out of the box, getting it configured together. Then the next month it fucking saves her life. She falls and loses consciousness, and it autonomously escalates to the grandson and emergency services. Or one morning she cannot get out of bed for food and water, and this purpose-built, secure, offline-first medical machine renders lifesaving aid. (That is possible with this technology today, in 2026, and really with the breakthrough class that arrived in late 2025.)

Want to go full-blown Boston Dynamics / Transformers home-invasion fantasy right now? Remember those traumatizing ADT commercials from the 2000s where some masked dude busted in while the family was in the living room and the alarm sent him scrambling? Fine. Let's indulge. Let's picture how this technology could enforce some God-given, blue-blooded, hot American justice.

On a still night at a rural farmstead, two men with ill intent enter through the bedroom window of a little girl whose parents are asleep upstairs. The embodied assistant charging across the room instantly identifies the auditory profile of an incursion. The girl is not safe. Green eyes flash awake in the dark. "JOHN DEERE HOUSEHOLD DEFENSE SERVICE ENGAGED." An alarm whoops. An eagle cries. A Van Halen power chord tells the intruders that shit just got real. Within seconds, the full home security system is active. The bulletproof assistant places itself between the intruders and the girl and advances. It confirms the girl is clear, identifies the men as unknown, and escalates with focused nonlethal deterrents while loudly relaying the situation to emergency services. Overwhelmed, the intruders are thrown back out the window. The parents enter, confirm the emergency, and take the girl to safety. If needed, the robot keeps incapacitating. If not, it shifts into sentry mode: spotlight, megaphone, live 911 narration, maybe even a paired camera drone, depending on local law and airspace.

But of course, in the better version of that future, there is no incursion. The deterrent is the existence and ubiquity of the technology. And of course grandma is not ailing, because her needs are met — and if we keep building, if we nail it across decades the way we nailed the last two years, her AI doctor dissolves the cancer before she ever feels it. That's the far horizon. But the near one — the robot that catches her when she falls, the wellness check from across the world, the autonomous presence that means she's never truly alone — that's not twenty years out. That's now. That is if we get serious.

The danger in that future is not this shit. It is something bigger, more insidious, already lurking ahead of us. The Next Thing. The thing our forefathers knew would always come next.

The advancements and operationalization of AI in the 2020s feel to me like the impossible, last-second arrival of the artillery from Fort Ticonderoga onto Dorchester Heights: hauled more than 300 miles, over mountain and under canyon, against every headwind and midwinter blizzard, in the eleventh hour of hopelessness. And then, by God, here it is. Somehow they brought it to bear. Our fighting chance at a tomorrow all Americans can believe in. Do you realize how fucked we were for a second before AI showed up like this? I can hardly deny I'm pretty proud of us all on this, yet again.

And 250 years ago to the day, in March 1776, Americans watched the Brits sail away, tail between their legs. The redcoats were basically like, "Please, we will not destroy anything if you just let us sail away. Damn it, how the fuck did they do it, and where the FUCK did all those cannons come from?" and if not for that and a million other impossible moments wrought into being by the hard work of normal, everyday people you'd never know were all pulling on the same rope with you, because they got you sipping on that brain poison that makes you mad and sad all the time.

We are Americans, bitch. We pull this impossible shit out of our ass, and we always will. So yes, we watched the mindless drones of the crowned royal ruffians sail out of the history books of America that day, leaving swiftly and orderly in exchange for us not blowing them any further to holy hell than we already had. If that does not get your patriotic blood pumping, you and I have different valuations on a well-placed: "Get the FUCK out of here with that. We are doing it OUR way."

And today, going forward, that will be the ultimate fate and end state of all evil, all senseless pain and suffering, infliction and affliction on consciousness in this known universe, to simply be defeated, to sail away, and to be fought back again and again as it diminishes, to be written out of the history books of tomorrow and be forgotten, and to set our grandchildren to new, uncharted heights of actualization, potential, happiness, achievement, purpose, satisfaction, peace, love, and exploration of the stars (all of which is our purpose in life, in case you missed the memo).

Not for Americans alone. For the world. For consciousness. Para la vida. For the future of all. And we will leave our signature on those history books as the generation that figured it out, got its head out of its ass, took the moment seriously, did hard things, and actually got shit done, just like they did when they founded this country.

And for one beautiful moment, think about this: The scattered atoms that once made up our ancestors, those who toiled in suffering for us all their lives, are destined one day to make up our nth-great-grandchildren: explorers of the stars, influencers of spacetime, vanquishers of entropy.

They will both look at us, and we will get the nod.

My fellow American. Please. I want the nod. Let's lock in, learn, and build.