We Don’t Have to Accept an AI Future Designed by Big Tech
Big Tech wants us to believe that an AI-powered future is inevitable. But the technology’s consequences—from invasive surveillance and weakened public services to rising costs for local communities—are already raising serious questions about who benefits and who gets hurt. Ryan Biller explores why meaningful regulation is so urgently needed, what a better future could look like, and how ordinary people can challenge the companies shaping it.
AI Doesn’t Have to Be This Harmful
In 2016, an automated algorithm in Arkansas began cutting Medicaid benefits for people with severe disabilities, leaving some without the care they needed to get out of bed, bathe, or eat. It was an early warning of what happens when technology is deployed without accountability—and when the people most affected have little say in how it's used. A decade later, artificial intelligence is making decisions that shape everything from healthcare to policing, while the companies developing it face remarkably few constraints. But as Ryan Biller reports, the attorney who fought Arkansas's algorithm is now part of a growing movement determined to challenge Big Tech's power and put people back in control.
From the Reporter’s Notebook 📓
Writing about artificial intelligence makes for a weird, existential crisis-inducing endeavor. The deeper my research went, the more unsettled I felt. Halfway through the article, I was convinced of an imminent apocalypse, of a world void of human-made literature, poetry, film, photography. A world dominated by a handful of money-lusting robber barons and their legions of killer robots! Of a world of beeping data centers instead of rivers, of AI slop videos on Instagram instead of forests. Privacy was disappearing, if it wasn’t already gone, as AI turned oligarchic fantasies of total surveillance into a nightmarish reality.
Eventually, though, I encountered something else: resistance to this fast-approaching and depressing future. Bernie Sanders, for instance, pushing to pass bold new laws to tighten the leash on Big Tech, a civil rights attorney battling the State of Arkansas — and winning — for its implementation of a computer algorithm to cut Medicaid benefits, and rural Utah communities protesting data center construction.
In reporting this story, I realize that our future is uncertain. But it is, ultimately, up to us to decide.
Next Up in the Series: Voting Rights
As the midterms approach, the work of protecting ballot access and democratic participation is growing more urgent.
Read More From the Series
Why Having Insurance Still Doesn’t Guarantee Mental Health Care
Patients seeking mental health care are confronting ghost networks, provider shortages, denied claims and rising barriers to treatment. Here’s what advocates say could make the system work better.
Read Misha Valencia’s feature here.
How Big Money Took Over American Elections
The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision helped create a new era of corporate and billionaire spending in elections. Here’s how that system took shape — and where efforts to rein it in are gaining ground.
Read Anoa Changa-Peck’s feature here.
How Congress Can Take Back Its Power Over the Courts
Congress has the constitutional power to expand the lower courts, reshape the Supreme Court, limit its jurisdiction and restore checks on an increasingly powerful judiciary.
Read Lisa Needham’s feature here.
What If We Treated Housing Like a Human Right?
America’s housing crisis is the product of decades of underbuilding, restrictive zoning, rising costs and policy choices. There are ways out — if we’re willing to think differently about housing.
Read the reporting from Ryan Biller here.
The Student Debt Crisis Needs More Than Another Repayment Plan
As borrowers face rising payments and an increasingly chaotic loan system, experts and advocates are pushing for solutions that address the cost of college itself — from stronger grants to free college and debt cancellation.
Read the feature from Rainesford Stauffer here.
America’s Child Care Crisis Was a Political Choice
For decades, the U.S. treated child care as a private responsibility instead of a public good. States are now testing a different future.
Read the full piece from Elliot Haspel here.
America’s Public Health System Was Too Easy to Break
Replacing Trump’s health officials won’t be enough. Rebuilding America’s public-health system means restoring scientific expertise—and creating safeguards that can survive the next administration willing to ignore it.
Read the rest from Kavin Senapathy here.
About the Series: What Would It Take to Actually Fix This Country?
Our new series looks past the churn of daily news to interrogate the systems shaping American life, and offers tangible fixes to the problems we collectively face.
Read the full introduction to the series here.