Summary
The narrative surrounding artificial intelligence is one of catastrophic “doomerism” and it must shift to a more balanced recognition of its transformative potential. Ai acts as a powerful equalizer, enabling under-resourced individuals and small teams to compete directly against multi-million-dollar corporations. Is the negative sentiment being driven those at the top protecting their own interests?
Peter Drucker once said the computer is inherently amoral. It doesn’t have a moral urge to harm humans, as some suggest. Hunger for power and money is a human train, not an Ai trait. Ai will reflect human intent and halting its development in the United States would simply hand a competitive advantage to foreign rivals like China, Russia, and India. Rather than fearing existential threats, we should embrace positive development.
Positive Ai development is already beginning to lower costs of law, healthcare, and education and this is what has larger monopolistic and regulatory captured industry leaders scared.
In the legal domain, AI tools allow solo practitioners and public defenders to rapidly filter through vast volumes of paperwork, neutralizing the resource advantage of heavily funded corporate legal teams.
In healthcare, AI-driven diagnostic tools—such as low-cost health evaluation scanners and systems detecting strokes or diabetic retinopathy—promise to dramatically reduce medical costs and improve patient outcomes.
In education, Ai expands access by providing tailored learning resources and curricula to individuals who cannot afford elite institutions.
These scenarios are already happening, I’ve spoken to founders across the country and it’s for this reason I believe we are seeing a push for Ai regulation now.
The primary push for strict regulations often stems from entrenched corporations seeking to preserve their market moats rather than genuine safety concerns. That looks to be the case here.
Powerful industry players frequently use their political influence to advocate for heavy-handed, FDA-style regulations that create prohibitive barriers to entry for smaller startups. Historically, dominant powers and public anxiety have demonized nearly every major innovation, including bicycles, steam trains, and modern medicine.
Is China secretely pushing these Ai-doomerism campaigns seeking to slow down innovation? Are the big Ai companies like OpenAI and Anthropic pushing for these organizations to maintain their control and push others out? Are giant healthcare companies like Pfizer and Phillips pushing for them to maintain monopolistic control over healthcare? Are Bar Associations are large legal companies pushing for them to maintain legal advantages? I have zero firsthand knowledge, but we need to be extra cautious.
To protect immense economic opportunity and foster widespread societal benefits, policymakers must avoid panic-driven regulation that shields legacy entities from competition. If we screw up Ai, we just may miss out on the biggest opportunity to make education, healthcare, and legal help affordable to all.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] In light of all the AI doomerism, is kinda what I’m calling it, uh, I wanted to talk to everybody about what really concerns me a lot, and it’s not AI killing us. Uh, Peter Drucker said, “The computer is not moral. It’s amoral.” Not immoral, amoral. It doesn’t have a moral compass. It’s gonna learn that from people.
So can AI technology do bad things because humans are driving it? Absolutely. We’ve seen that with drones. We’ve seen them used to capture beautiful aerial footage. We’ve seen them used in combat. So yeah, that’s gonna come. But it’s the wrong choice for the United States to, to stay behind on this. We can’t call China, we can’t call India, Japan, E- Russia, every other country and say, “Stop producing AI.
We’ll stop producing…” It’s just not gonna work. So we need to invest in these tools. We need to keep going, but we need to do so ethically and balanced, and freaking out about AI killing everybody is not the way to do it. We need to have a balanced conversation, and we need to be very, very careful [00:01:00] right now before going into heavy-handed regulation.
Here’s why. I wrote these notes out to keep myself a little organized so this doesn’t take 45 minutes. But I’ve been tracking this for years. I’ve written about it in Quartz, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. I’ve talked about it on various shows, on my own Justin Brady show, and on a local show that I produce as well.
And here’s what concerns me greatly: AI has the power to allow very small companies and small teams to disrupt larger ones. That’s significant. That’s extremely significant. Listen to that. You, in your house, can pull up a computer and create a company and disrupt a multimillion-dollar company if you have a better AI and a better strategy For some organizations, that is what is terrifying.
So employment is a major moat for some of these organizations. If you have a great idea, for example, and you [00:02:00] rush it to market, you c- you probably can’t beat a team with 200 people that steal your idea and get it to market faster. They have lawyers, they have teams, they will beat you in, in many cases.
That’s dangerous for these bigger companies. That’s why they don’t want smaller companies having access to, uh, extremely powerful AI. All– And we’re already seeing this happen. We’re already seeing smaller companies starting to disrupt bigger s- bigger companies. We’re seeing small companies pour into very, very niche products and niche markets with the help of AI and automation.
It’s already happening. AI allows people with almost no money, also from a legal standpoint, think ab- think about the legal implications here. There’s healthcare implications, but think about the legal implications here. Right now, if a giant organization or someone who’s very well-funded wants to sue you and you don’t have a lot of money, you’re kinda screwed.
That’s it. Game over. You can have the best… You can be completely innocent, [00:03:00] but not, because someone can run legal circles around you. With AI, it will allow even very, very small law firms or public defenders a lot more access to research. Uh, one example is, uh, a large team can bury the other team in paperwork, but if that one-person legal team has AI to filter through that paperwork, that advantage goes away.
So even in the legal industry, AI can really level the playing field, and someone with almost no money or, or no money at all working with a public defender or a local legal clinic, with AI can actually mount a pretty good legal defense or even a lawsuit against a very large organization and have a fighting chance.
That’s not good for some of the larger organizations that use money, influence, and power to bully small companies. Think about Um, AI in the healthcare space. The– We heard, I think [00:04:00] it was two to three months ago, Claude Healthcare, a Anthropic’s company, was going to invent a scanner that uses AI to do a full evaluation, full health evaluation for fractions of the cost of what’s currently available.
Um, also, there are real-world examples of this in my home state of Iowa. I’ve been interviewing, uh, tech founders that have created, uh, AI scanning technology that can scan and look for diabetic retinopathy, and another one with stroke victims, improving stroke victim outcomes using existing CT scans. Like, this is super cheap stuff.
Think about how the cost of healthcare and, like, local small organizations, single-person, two-person teams building better healthcare technology and improving the lives, curing cancer. AI theoretically… Well, not even theoretically, I’m actually seeing exact examples of this already. I’m already seeing this.
AI can allow healthcare costs to dramatically [00:05:00] drop across the board, but there’s a problem, and that prime– Let me- Go back to, like, educate– wait, education. Before I move on, education’s another one. Think about how someone with access to zero education can’t go to an Ivy League, no money, can use AI to help them understand resources and educate them and provide information to them, provide a curriculum, and connect them th- to the right people to get a better j- better education.
The, the results or the, um, the possibilities here that AI gives to people that are under-resourced are, is incredible. But there’s a problem, and the problem is the larger companies don’t want that happening. Now, I’m not saying it’s nefarious, but the larger companies don’t stand to benefit if there’s an even playing field.
And so one of the things that the larger companies are going to push for and fearmonger about [00:06:00] is how dangerous things are and that we should regulate it. Because if we regulate it, who writes the regulations? The larger companies that have Congress people as friends on speed dial. Those are who write the regulations.
You’re not writing the regulations. I’m not writing the regulations. I can apply some pressure, but those regulations will not benefit you. Now, even if it’s a large medical pharmaceutical company that is pushing for FDA-style regulations against AI companies, let’s say they’re doing it entirely innocent.
They are going to trust themselves more than they’re going to trust you. They’re going to tell Congress, “Hey, we should be the ones helping you guide regulations around AI for everyone’s safety,” right? This is how it’s going to go. So think about some of the most heavily regulated organizations right now in the United States, education, law, healthcare.
These are also some of the most expensive And they all, by the [00:07:00] way, startups, including some of the startups I have worked with, some clients of mine, are doing their best to bring costs down in these areas, especially healthcare. I have a f- a handful of healthcare clients, and they have invented superior technologies that can d- that can deliver superior health outcomes, but for a fraction of the price.
And the obstacles that have been put up in front of them through the FDA are absolutely crazy. Does this mean the FDA is some bad organization trying to prevent, uh, innovation? Absolutely not. There are people putting pressure on the FDA to increase regulations to put pressure on those companies to prevent competition, absolutely.
It doesn’t mean the FDA’s bad, it just means perhaps they’re somewhat captured. And so we need to be very, very careful before applying an FDA-style regulatory body around AI, because it’s not gonna keep you safer. That’s not what it’s going to do, [00:08:00] because that doesn’t apply to organization– That doesn’t apply to countries like China, Pakistan, India, Russia, Japan.
What, name your country, it doesn’t even matter. They’re not going to abide by those rules. They’re gonna still proceed with this stuff, and so you’re actually more at risk because of that I wish, I wish people understood that there is a lot of good to be gained from AI, and I wish people understood that there are some very, very large organizations and very, very large players that have a lot to lose if people like you and me have access to AI.
And if you think this is new, if you think this is a new phenomenon, it’s absolutely not. There– The, the history of large entrenched player– the large players with large moats trying to disrupt technologies that could disrupt their livelihood is long. The bicycle, the bi- the humble bicycle was demonized because the spinning wheels, this is [00:09:00] according to Jason Feifer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur.
He had a book, really good book, um, and in it he writes that people feared the, the humble bicycle because the spinning wheel would make people crazy and cr- and cause psychosis. The train, the train, the, the steam engine train was going to destroy society because if women got on the train, their uteruses would fall out
Um, but if you go back and just ask, uh, go do a Google search, go do some research, heck, ask Grok, Gemini, whatever, give me a history of technologies that were demonized and why. You will see a long list that is just as long as written history. It’s, it’s, um, it’s not a new s- it’s not a new strategy. It’s been going on forever.
And even, even modern medicine was demonized. And now that modern medicine’s not demonized, things like TCM, traditional Chinese medicine, and herbal medicine, chiropractic, acupuncture, um, natural health, food, healthy [00:10:00] food , these things are now being demonized. So what you need to understand is that all the doomerism around AI might not be coming from who you think it’s coming from.
Now, are there people that work in these organizations that are scared? Absolutely. Doomsday cults are not new. People have organized around new technology and fearing new technology, like I said, since the beginning of time, but let’s be more balanced. Let’s not freak out. And most importantly, let’s not tell Congress to regulate this thing because this thing, AI, may be one of the biggest economic opportunities of our li-lifetime, and it would be, it would be such a shame to stop progress and something that could give you a huge advantage over big companies, something that could give you better healthcare outcomes for next to nothing, and something that could allow you to mount an incredible legal defense should the state, should a government, [00:11:00] should a giant corporation ever come knocking at your door.
Let’s be careful, let’s take a step back, and let’s realize AI can be good. Certainly AI can be bad, but we need to take a measured approach here and not freak out. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk
