August 2026
Abrams's diagnosis of the AI moment: engineering brilliance is abundant and cheap, while the judgment about what deserves to be built — and for whom — is the scarce input nobody is scaling.
Transcript
I'll push back. It used to be a requirement for to be a corporation. You had to show what you were doing for the public good.
No, it doesn't exist anymore. So not only were you subject to the powers of the state and therefore subject to the powers of the people, but also having a more explicit tie to what are the ends that you are going to advance that align with the public interest. And I think now we've gotten so much away from what is it you're trying to actually build for? To your point earlier, we were discussing there's a hell of a lot of slop and folks don't like slop, especially when building that slop requires a data center in their backyard. Or perhaps it's perceived that building that slop requires more of their personal data. The question, understandably, is what the hell is this all for? And this is my kind of chief concern with a lot of the AI companies right now is their enunciation of what they're actually building for is incredibly imprecise, very vague, and then they'll just throw out something like, oh, well, we're going to cure cancer. Yeah, you know, I see how you're trying and you're making some investments and so on and so forth. But the American people deserve a much more compelling story about what it is you're actually doing to advance the well-being of the general welfare than just Will Cure. Cancer at some point. Do you agree with me? Where am I going wrong? And then we'll get to the positive stuff because I know you have some good examples there.
Yeah, I mean, I generally agree across the board. And I think this is built on that tech, while in some ways has been tremendous for us all and opened up creativity and new opportunities and economic prosperity for some. At the end of the day, there has not been trust that has been created. So pre-AI, there was not trust created across the tech industry to the general public writ large. And that includes the fragmentation of how workers were viewed. If you weren't in software and you were doing the trades, for instance, you were viewed, and I'm firing for effect here, you were viewed as lesser than. And that was, hey, you got to be in the in-club in relation to tech and be a software developer. And remember, all of these folks were preaching that if software, software, software, and STEM, STEM, STEM, and that's what you have to do if you're going to have a livelihood. Well, now that's pivoted and like, oh, now we're going to have the software developer apocalypse. So as these tech oligarchs, if you will, and whether people view oligarchs and pejorative or positive, I will let folks translate on that. It's just a reference to the monopolistic aspect here where, guess what? This is where now you told us one thing and now something else is happening. And we're fighting for our privacy. We're fighting for our data rights. We're fighting for data ownership. We're fighting for algorithmic choice and so on and so forth. And they never built any trust out of that from a broad societal standpoint. And so the narrative is as well with AI is, to your point, it's been horribly put out there. I think a lot of it was, I am an optimist where I think that there will be a tremendous amount of jobs that are created and we're not focusing on what those jobs can and should be. And I'll fire for effect here, perhaps in this respect. Engineers do a really shitty job of telling stories. Engineers do a really shitty job. Like, you know, we have a lot of Steve Wozniaks running around, but not many Steve Jobs. And without Steve Jobs, there would be no Apple. Woz would have built the best homebrew club kit computer, and no one would have heard of Apple. And we have in the Zuckerbergs of the world or in the Muss of the world, it is this perspective of telling these narratives and stories that do not resonate or not clear with the everyday person because they don't understand how does the lumber worker, how does the coal miner, how does the farmer, how does the doctor, how does the insert here, whatever profession, it's much more of a, hey, get out of our way and we're going to tell you what to do. And this is the world we want to create and we don't need your input and we're going to automate everything. And that, and everyone should, you know, so I think it's a terrible narrative that's been put out there when in fact, there could be so much positive aspects of, in many respects, a JFK type aspect is to, hey, we're at this S-curve inflection point, this evolutionary tipping point. Look what we've developed. Now, from a JFK-like perspective, we choose to go to the moon. What's the world we want to build? Not have shoved on us and not have thrown at us. And I think that's the frustration where people don't feel like they have agency. And this started with social media. And it's just amplified now. And people are hungry for being able to problem solve and have agency and feel empowered and back to the constitutional freedom. And all those are implied there. And instead, they're feeling plastic freedom. They're being told, hey, look at everything you have and this kind of thing. And it's plastic because they recognize that we don't have the freedom or agency in this digital world that we thought that we should have. So there's more there. And I may be rambling a bit, but I think it's, again, it's complex and complicated as to the aspects around this.
Rambles are always appreciated on scaling laws. So don't worry there. I think that this also begs a bigger question, which is I was nerding out recently on the difference between a trust. Trustee model of elected representatives versus a delegate model of representation. And the understanding was at the founding, you would want to elect a trustee, someone who you thought could represent your community and advance the best things for your community. Now, there has been a shift over time, not only to a delegate model of representation, where people want them to specifically do what a community asks them to do, regardless of whether they think that's in the best interest of the broader community. So, not asking them to defer to their own judgment. We've since moved to a model of what some people call a personal delegate model of representation, where people will only support what their elected official does if it's what they want them to do, regardless of whether a majority of the voters or the rest of the community may contest that view. They're instead just advocating for adherence to their own personal values. And that's where I see that trust component coming in because people don't trust their officials to be able to have that awareness of what's going on and representing their views faithfully. But instead, it's just this atomic vision of democracy that I think is really concerning and can be perpetuated when you spend so much of your time exclusively online or only in these plastic environments that you referred to. So, that was my own rant and ramble. And now I want to talk about how we get out of this. But do you have an initial response there?
Yeah, I mean, look, I'll go right to the, and it's the
next part of how to get out of this. And that, as you know, I'm deeply involved in citizen or civic assemblies and delib tech, deliberation technology. And that includes where AI fits in as part of that. And for those who are not familiar with citizens or civic assemblies, it's a very old idea, you know, but it's, I'm simplifying, think jury duty for issues and it's civic issues, but it's also can be used in business settings. It can be used in organizational settings writ large. But think of it in this way: that, you know, a random set of citizens is called up on an issue. Take, there's, we did a citizen assembly on youth homelessness here in central Oregon. There's one being done in Connecticut right now on property taxes. And random set of citizens get called up to be part of those delegates, those assembly members, but it has to be statistically representative of the demographics of the community, whatever the size of that community is. That is not how jury duty works. It's not statistically representative. And so in this case, I have seen personally as to the trust that this builds. In Central Oregon here, we are on the dividing line of what's called the Greater Idaho Movement, where the eastern portion of the state wants to secede to Idaho in part because they don't trust Portland. They don't trust Salem. They don't feel representative. And they're not necessarily wrong in some respects. In fact, they're right in aspects. They need to be heard and understood. But the solution aspects around this is we haven't developed the mechanisms or the systems to say, how do we sit down and as citizens together have the agency and the power to make the decisions for our true representation here? And this is where the trust building that happens in these citizens and civic assemblies is tremendous and incredibly proven. And I'm happy to go into detail in this respect, but those are the types of solutions. And on the deliberation tech side, or we talk about bridging algorithms and right now we have algorithms which are putting us in our bubbles and our silos and reinforcing our belief systems and ensuring that, hey, my belief system is not going to be impacted. So back to your point on, hey, I'm electing this representative or here's my choice and they don't specifically follow my belief system. This is something where how do we change and how do we require from a technology perspective or standardizations is to how do we encourage bridging and healthy dynamics and healthy conversation instead of the worst of us and incentivizing the village idiots.