ESSAY · JUNE 2026

Over the last year, I've had a series of chance conversations in grocery stores, parking lots, and public meetings with people who did not ask to be part of the "AI revolution." Some are small business owners. Some sit on local boards. Many are teachers trying to keep a classroom running on a tight budget.

Again and again, I hear the same two things. First: "I don't want AI in my classroom. My students already have enough to deal with." Second: "Our town would never agree to a big data center." There is a calm certainty in those statements — a belief that if we just refuse, the wave will go around us instead of through us.

Recently, I watched Ray Kurzweil's latest interview about artificial intelligence and the future. The contrast between that conversation and these everyday encounters could not have been sharper.

THE STUDIO FUTURE: AGI, IMMORTALITY, AND SELF-DRIVING EVERYTHING

In the interview, Kurzweil calmly predicts that by 2029 artificial intelligence will match the best human minds in every field, and that by the 2030s we will have AI "inside us" so seamlessly that we will not know if a thought came from our biological brain or our computational one. He talks about "longevity escape velocity" by 2032, when each year of life buys you more than a year of additional expected lifespan, and about simulated humans replacing years of drug trials with a few days of computation.

He and the interviewer speak easily about robots filling factories, universal basic income cushioning job losses, and average wealth rising again and again as automation accelerates. They point to charts showing that average income has multiplied roughly tenfold over the last century and take that as evidence that technology "makes everyone richer" in the long run. Listening to them, you could almost forget that every one of these promises rests on land, water, electricity, and people somewhere having to absorb the cost.

THE WAVE THAT LOOKS HARMLESS FROM FAR AWAY

The image that comes to mind is a tsunami. Out in deep water, the wave looks harmless — just a gentle rise on the surface that two men in a studio can surf for sport. But as it races toward shore, the water piles up, and the people standing on the beach — teachers, parents, small business owners, rural communities — are the ones who will feel it hit first.

The people I meet are standing on that beach, focused on lesson plans and local politics, certain that they can keep AI out of their classrooms and that their towns can simply say "no" to a data center. Meanwhile, Kurzweil is describing a world in which AI is literally inside our bodies, our jobs are reshaped or erased, and the demand for compute grows by orders of magnitude. These two futures are on a collision course, and most people have no idea.

ENDING CAR CRASHES — BY ENDING YOUR RIGHT TO DRIVE

One small moment in the interview captures this perfectly. Kurzweil notes that roughly 40,000 people die in car accidents every year because of human driving and points to autonomous vehicles as the solution. He highlights that Waymo has had essentially no fatalities in its operations so far and suggests that if we just get humans out of the driver's seat, we can "do away with accidents largely."

I want fewer deaths on the road as much as anyone. But notice what goes unsaid. In this story, the way we solve the problem is by taking away personally driven cars altogether, shifting control of mobility to whoever owns and operates the autonomous fleets. Your freedom to drive yourself becomes a public-health risk to be eliminated, rather than a part of your life that might be redesigned together with you.

It is the same pattern we are already seeing with data centers and AI more broadly. Disruption and change are treated as things that can be managed from above if ordinary people will simply accept that the experts know best. You and I are invited to be passengers, not decision-makers.

WHAT THE CONVERSATION LEAVES OUT

The interview is not just optimistic — it is also incomplete. There are several blind spots that matter deeply for people who will be living with the consequences.

Choice about merging with AI

Kurzweil speaks about putting AI "inside us" as if it were almost inevitable. What is missing is any discussion of who gets to say "no" and still participate fully in society. Will a teacher who declines neural implants or AI wearables be considered irresponsible or unemployable? Who decides what level of integration is "normal," and what happens to people who, for religious, cultural, or personal reasons, do not want machines inside their bodies? The future is framed as something that happens to us.

Who owns the new wealth

When Kurzweil talks about wealth, he talks in averages. But averages hide the distribution. Recent work on data center expansion shows exactly how this plays out: some regions gain large tax-base growth and tech jobs, while neighboring communities receive higher power prices, water stress, and noise — sometimes with minimal direct benefit. The question Kurzweil does not ask is: "Wealth for whom?" Who owns the AI companies, the robot fleets, the data, and the infrastructure? And who gets told, politely, that their town must adjust to the new reality because "the future" requires it?

The cost to land, water, and power

In the interview, compute power mostly appears as clean numbers: trillions of operations per second, exponential curves, abstract growth. There is no mention of where that compute lives — in vast buildings on real land, drawing power from real grids and water from real rivers and aquifers. In the United States, communities from Oregon to Virginia are already pushing back against large data center projects because of concerns over energy prices, water use, noise, and greenhouse gas emissions. None of that shows up in a conversation where AI is weightless and invisible, floating somewhere in "the cloud."

The people closest to the ground

Throughout the interview, Kurzweil and the host talk about AI twins trained on thousands of pages of their own writing, personalized longevity regimes with advanced sensors, and robots taking over undesirable jobs so people can be "more creative." These are not the lives most people are living. The teachers and parents I talk to are grading papers at kitchen tables, worrying about their students, and trying to keep groceries and utilities paid. They do not appear in the story except as "average income" on a chart or as anonymous drivers who should be replaced by software.

SCHOOLS ON THE FRONT LINE

My conversations with local teachers tell a consistent story. Many of them want nothing to do with AI tools. They are already overwhelmed with behavior issues, testing requirements, and constant policy changes. Adding "figure out generative AI" to their plates feels, understandably, like a bridge too far.

Nationally, they are not alone. Surveys show that a large share of educators either avoid generative AI or feel unprepared and unsupported in using it responsibly. In some districts, tools like ChatGPT are simply blocked, and any student caught using them is punished. At the same time, university programs and education experts warn that not teaching students how to use AI may leave them unprepared for jobs, civic life, and basic digital literacy in a world where these systems are woven into everything.

Saying "I will not use AI" may feel like a stand on principle, but it can also become a way of leaving students to confront the tsunami alone, outside of any structured guidance. What's missing, over and over, is a shared conversation that treats teachers as partners in deciding how AI should enter the classroom, instead of as an obstacle to be worked around.

STAYING INFORMED

The most important thing any of us can do right now is refuse to look away. Not out of fear — fear is what the powerful count on to keep us passive — but out of the same instinct that makes a good farmer read the sky before a storm. You watch because what you see matters. Because the land you tend deserves someone paying attention. Because the people around you are counting on someone in the room who has been watching long enough to recognize the pattern.

Staying informed in this moment does not mean following every benchmark or reading every white paper. It means knowing what is being built near you and why. It means understanding who owns the systems making decisions about your life. It means asking, at every school board meeting and county commission and kitchen table conversation, whether the people in the room have been told the whole truth — about the costs, the tradeoffs, and the alternatives. It means passing what you know to the person next to you, the way seeds get passed between neighbors — quietly, practically, with the understanding that what survives is what gets shared.

The wave is real. But so is the ground beneath your feet. And the ground has a memory that no server farm has ever been able to match.

The conversations I've had this year are not with Luddites. They are with people asking for time, information, and respect — space to understand what is coming and to decide, with their neighbors, what kind of town they want to be. The sooner we bring people like them into the center of these decisions, the better chance we have of making room for the future without erasing the ground beneath our feet.