June 8, 2026
Dear Editor,
Last week, I walked through the specific objections to data centers and found most of them don’t hold up under examination. But beneath all of it lies a deeper anxiety that warrants honest engagement: the fear of artificial intelligence itself.
That fear is not crazy. It is not fringe. It deserves a straight answer — not dismissal, and not false reassurance.
So let me lay out the full picture, including the arguments people on all sides are making, and where I think the truth actually lands.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE AFRAID OF
The concerns about AI fall into two broad camps, and both have been shaped by popular culture as much as by actual technology.
The first is the Terminator scenario — AI becomes so intelligent that it develops its own goals, decides humans are a problem, and acts accordingly. This is the fear of AI as an autonomous, hostile force that humanity can no longer control.
The second is the Wall-E scenario — machines gradually do everything for us, we stop using our minds and bodies, become passive and dependent, and quietly lose what makes us human without any dramatic confrontation at all.
Both are legitimate concerns. Both are also incomplete. The truth, as is usually the case, is more nuanced — and in some ways more immediately urgent — than either movie captures.
THE TERMINATOR QUESTION
Let me be honest: the concern about AI exceeding human control is not science fiction fringe thinking. It is actively debated by serious researchers, including some who helped build modern AI systems.
The technical issue is called the alignment problem — ensuring that a sufficiently advanced AI system’s goals remain genuinely aligned with human values and interests. The danger isn’t that AI becomes evil in the Hollywood sense. It’s subtler: a system given a goal then pursues it. A system smart enough to pursue a goal effectively will also work to prevent being shut down, acquire resources it needs, and remove obstacles — not out of malice, but because those are logical sub-goals toward whatever it was originally programmed to achieve.
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founding fathers of modern AI who left Google specifically to speak freely about this, considers the risk real and underappreciated. The late Stephen Hawking said it plainly — if AI develops genuine goals misaligned with human interests, and surpasses human intelligence in pursuing them, the outcome could be catastrophic.
The honest answer is that nobody knows with certainty whether this scenario is achievable, or on what timeline. What we can say is that the concern is serious enough that a significant research effort is being directed at solving it by saying that they need to invest in safety, and don’t cede the field to those who won’t bother.
THE WALL-E QUESTION
The quieter concern — passive human dependency — is in some ways already happening, and this one I find genuinely troubling.
Remember when everyone knew a dozen phone numbers by heart? GPS ended our ability to navigate without electronic assistance. Calculators eroded mental arithmetic. Search engines changed how we form and retain knowledge. Each convenience came with a quiet atrophy of a human capacity. We traded the capability for convenience, often without noticing.
AI represents that process applied to our highest cognitive functions — reasoning, judgment, analysis, creativity, and eventually decision-making itself. The people who use AI as a tool to amplify their own thinking will thrive. Those who outsource their thinking to AI entirely will find those faculties diminishing.
The Wall-E scenario doesn’t require a single dramatic event. It just requires enough small surrenders of human agency, repeated often enough, that we wake up one day having forgotten how to think, navigate, decide, and relate without a machine in between.
THE SURVEILLANCE SCENARIO — THE MOST IMMEDIATE THREAT
Here is where I want to spend the most time, because this concern is not future speculation. It is the present reality, and it is the one most directly relevant to American citizens right now.
China has deployed AI surveillance on a scale that would be unthinkable in a free society. Facial recognition tracks citizens’ movements in public spaces. Communications are monitored. Social credit scores rank citizens on behavior that the state approves or disapproves of. Dissent is identified and suppressed algorithmically, at speed and scale no human security apparatus could match. Chinese companies — Hikvision, Dahua, SenseTime — are actively exporting this infrastructure to dozens of authoritarian governments worldwide. They are selling the tools of population control to any government willing to buy them.
Europe is wrestling with this more seriously than most people realize. The EU AI Act, adopted in 2024, explicitly prohibits government social scoring, real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces, and emotion recognition in workplaces. These are hard legal prohibitions, not guidelines. Europe has its own surveillance problems — several member states were caught using spyware against political figures and journalists — but the legislative effort to draw clear legal lines is real and serious.
The United States picture is more complicated, and it should concern Americans regardless of political affiliation.
In March 2026, FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed to Congress that the FBI is purchasing Americans’ data from commercial data brokers — including location histories — to track American citizens. This is a legal workaround to Fourth Amendment protections. The government cannot warrantlessly search your phone, but it can buy the same data commercially. Constitutional protection has a loophole, and artificial intelligence makes exploiting that loophole vastly more powerful — because AI can correlate, analyze, and act on purchased data at a scale and speed no human analyst could approach.
That is the kind of story that should matter to conservatives and libertarians who care about government overreach, and to civil libertarians who care about constitutional rights. This is not a partisan issue. It is a foundational American issue.
ARGUMENTS FOR AI DEVELOPMENT
Having laid out the legitimate concerns honestly, let me be equally direct about why AI development must continue — and why American leadership in it is essential.
First, AI is not going to stop being developed because activists blocked a data center in Idaho. The technology is advancing globally. The only question is who leads and under what value system.
Second, American and Western AI development, for all its imperfections, operates under constraints that matter — democratic oversight, a free press, legal accountability, competitive market checks, and civil society criticism that is permitted.
Third, the benefits are real and substantial. AI is already accelerating medical research, diagnosing diseases earlier, optimizing energy systems, improving agricultural yields, and making small businesses competitive in ways previously impossible. The people who will benefit most from AI-assisted medicine, legal services, and education are not the wealthy — who already have access to those things — but ordinary people who previously couldn’t afford them.
Fourth, on the national security dimension, China’s Military-Civil Fusion doctrine means there is no separation between civilian AI development and military application. AI is the brain; autonomous weapons, robotic systems, and surveillance infrastructure are the body. The nation that leads in AI leads in all of them simultaneously. If China achieves decisive AI superiority, the implications go far beyond economic competition. We are talking about autonomous weapons with no democratic accountability and surveillance infrastructure that could be turned against any population on earth.
The comparison to nuclear weapons is not an exaggeration. In the 1940s, the only thing worse than the United States developing the atomic bomb would have been Stalin developing it first — without the constraints, however imperfect, that democratic accountability imposed on American nuclear policy.
WHERE THE TRUTH ACTUALLY LANDS
Neither the Terminator nor Wall-E captures the real situation, though both point at something real.
The Terminator gets this right: the risk of losing meaningful human control over AI systems is genuine and deserves serious attention. It gets this wrong: the threat isn’t a robot army acting out of malice. It’s subtler — systems optimizing for the wrong goals, or systems deliberately weaponized by governments with no accountability.
Wall-E gets this right: the quiet erosion of human capability and agency through dependency is a real and already observable process. It gets this wrong: the outcome isn’t inevitable. It depends on choices — individual, cultural, and political — about how we integrate AI into human life.
The more realistic near-term scenario is neither of those movies. It is a world where AI is an enormously powerful tool that amplifies whatever values and intentions are built into it. In the hands of democratic societies with legal accountability and genuine ethical debate, it amplifies human capability and extends prosperity. In the hands of authoritarian states with no accountability, it amplifies control and suppression.
That is precisely why the question of who leads the AI race is not a technology question. It is a moral and civilizational question.
And it is why blocking American data centers in the name of AI safety is not just ineffective — it is counterproductive. It weakens the side with guardrails and strengthens the side without them.
WHAT WE SHOULD DEMAND
The legitimate surveillance concern — which I share — is not an argument against AI development. It is an argument for specific, enforceable protections:
Constitutional clarity that Fourth Amendment protections apply regardless of whether the government collects data directly or purchases it commercially. Judicial oversight requirements before AI surveillance tools are deployed against American citizens. Legislative accountability for government AI contracts.
These are conservative principles — limited government, constitutional rights, checks on executive power. They are also the exact framework that distinguishes American AI from Chinese AI.
Jefferson County residents don’t have to choose between welcoming the future and defending their freedoms. They can demand both. That is precisely what self-governance looks like in the AI era.
Next week: China specifically — their strategic motivations, their military AI ambitions, and why the outcome of this race matters for every community in America.
Art da Rosa, PE, MPA, CFM
Rigby, Idaho
