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insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.” A new tune by Charli XCX, a British pop star, captures both the papal and the popular mood: “Spring, Summer ‘26/When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it/Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell.”

Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today. Elon Musk, a character who could be straight from Mackay’s pages, will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars. Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra.

We want to be sure that in the critical fields ​we are always able to control the services and control the data in Europe," she told reporters.

If we want an A.I. that serves the public good, we need to define the public goods that A.I. can serve and create the conditions under which A.I. can be useful.

Right now, we’re seeing promising pilot projects. Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory worked together on a project that used A.I. to analyze more than 32 million materials to discover an electrolyte that might improve lithium-ion batteries. But projects like these are a sideshow right now as the A.I. giants chase the guaranteed revenues of corporate clients. Only public funding has the possibility to bend the industry toward public problems.

OpenAI just released, and what you’ll see is that the A.I. system was able to combine two of A.I.’s strengths to achieve the result: One was a vast knowledge of existing mathematics, such that it could apply a different branch of the discipline to the problem. The other was the ability to attempt possibilities that would have been too laborious for human mathematicians to try.

The AlphaFold advance was possible only because of the Protein Data Bank, a laboriously created database of protein structures that the National Science Foundation began funding in the 1970s. No Protein Data Bank, no AlphaFold.

When A.I. is pointed at the right problem, in the right way, the results can be remarkable

But there is another policy conversation that is strangely absent: How does A.I. benefit the public?

The future of A.I. and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley. It must not be dictated by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit. It must be decided by workers, parents, teachers, artists, scientists, communities and the American people. It’s our future. We must decide it.

Or will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed A.I., with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?

Further, there is a very real fear that as A.I. becomes smarter than humans it could eventually function independently, with potentially catastrophic consequences

Energy is the substrate of everything material in the economy. When the substrate transforms, capital allocation has to follow. Anything that runs on electricity, which is increasingly everything we want more of, including AI, inherits the curve

Solar has its own version of Moore’s Law, Swanson’s Law, where the cost of a photovoltaic module falls roughly twenty percent for every doubling of cumulative production. That has held for forty years. The result: solar is now the cheapest electricity in human history in most of the world, under coal, under gas, under even the nuclear we never built.

AI capabilities in 2026 are running roughly a decade ahead of what the consensus forecast in 2018 would have allowed. That gap is the standard error of a linear forecaster looking at an exponential process.

Institutions that treat AI as a programme to manage will be outpaced by those that treat it as the operating system to build on.

Force Three: Technology as Substrate. AI is not a feature. It is not a project. It is becoming the substrate of decisioning, fraud detection, underwriting, compliance, customer interface, and increasingly product itself. And it is only one part of a deeper technological maelstrom, compute, energy, and quantum compounding against each other in the same window of years