It’s probably no coincidence that the current sky-high predictions about AI’s ability to outthink many humans reached a crescendo in 2024, when almost 50% of the nation voted for a convicted criminal and pathological liar to become their supreme leader. Earlier, in the 2020 election, almost 47% of Americans voted for a convicted criminal to lead the nation.
Political pundits and sociologists still have only partially discovered why so many Americans, including those in the bottom half of income earners, would vote against their own self-interests and put their faith in a failed businessman and con man to uplift their own apparently deficient financial and socially insecure lives to a man who has never done anything positive for other people in his whole life.
So, enter AI, with its proven ability to provide fast, mostly accurate information to people who seemingly cannot figure out how to manage their lives in this increasingly technological and complex society.
Average Americans face the biggest wealth gap in modern times. According to Inequality.org, the top 10% of U.S. residents own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, people at the bottom have moved into “negative wealth,” meaning their debts exceed their assets, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. A CNBC / SurveyMonkey Poll (July 2026) found that 63% of U.S. adults live paycheck to paycheck, up from 59% earlier in the year.
History shows that the wealthy never willingly give up their wealth, status, and power, so American capitalism has devised entirely new ways to give the masses the illusion that they can navigate their way out of the debt rat race their entire lives.
In a testament to the inventiveness of American capitalism working in the most advanced consumer society in world history, Americans can use credit cards, home equity loans, sports betting, prediction markets, bets on crypto, selling insurance policies, second mortgages, home equity investments, payment plans, payday loans, installment loans, bank loans, debt forgiveness programs, and that old traditional remedy, bankruptcy, to solve or end their credit indebtedness problems.
Of course, none of these really benefit the average borrower. Anyone who has tried to negotiate with monopolistic cable, internet, phone, car loan, and utility providers quickly finds out that “saving” money is a ruse. These monopolies have teams of actuaries to calculate their base costs and needed profit margins before they will ever cut your subscription fees by $1. That’s how the system works. You either must go off-grid and find a new provider, such as a streaming service, to replace that expensive cable bill, or choose an alternative.
So, can AI help fix this?
No, because the people who control AI are the biggest and richest companies and individuals in the world. They don’t provide anything that won’t increase their wealth.
Today, AI is being introduced to the world in its near-free form, but like the Internet when it was first introduced, AI will soon become a subscription service with fees high enough to pay for the huge data centers and their never-ending electricity appetites.
As it is today, every AI inquiry loses money because providing the answer costs more in electricity, chips, and processing than providing a free response. This is certainly a temporary loss, as the tech billionaires will soon implement their monetization schemes.
AI Will Cost Consumers
This is the introductory stage of a new drain on consumers worldwide, who can add that future monthly AI bill to their other utility expenses without getting a wage increase or a cut of the profits from the AI industry, which has conveniently converted free personal data and the contents of the world’s libraries into a for-profit business.
AI is the 21st century’s version of the mining industry, and both share a despicable history of looting natural assets –natural ores and minerals in mining, and social histories and libraries in AI—into the most powerful conglomerates of their respective ages.
A report by Goldman Sachs, Seizing the AI Innovation Supercycle Across the Digital and Real Economies, trumpets AI as reshaping every sector of the economy—from software and cybersecurity to robotics, defense, and industrial manufacturing. The companies that align technological vision with decisive capital strategy will define the next era of growth.”
That’s the New World Order, but coming from Goldman Sachs, this prediction only applies to investing, financing, and accessing the capital markets for new loan sources. It does not address the collateral damage it will do to average workers, invasions of privacy, wealth distribution, and who will pay for the data centers.
Given AI’s many benefits, should a voter use AI to ask, “Should I vote for someone who opposes my own self-interest?”
Certainly.
When I asked this question, ChatGPT said, “Not necessarily. I’d suggest clarifying your priorities first. What exactly is the self-interest at stake? And how much weight does it have compared to your other values like your community, and long-term goals, or principles.”
That answer was very high-minded. When I asked ChatGPT, “Should I vote for a convicted criminal who is running for public office?” the AI answer asked me to consider the conviction and then weigh it against the candidate’s policy record, accountability, and rehabilitation.
Now, if any Trump supporter asked this question to ChatGPT, they could see that Trump has no accountability or record of rehabilitation for a life as a failed and criminal businessman, yet that did not stop 50% of the country from voting for him twice. 
So, can AI prevent Americans from voting against their own self-interest? Maybe mastering a basic AI class should become a mandatory voting requirement in red states. No business would ever vote against its own self-interest, so why would everyday Americans, especially those in the bottom half of the wealth pool?
Can AI cure stupidity? Will AI ever alter the bell curve and put more people in the upper echelons of higher thinking? Not if you ask Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who already believe that they represent a superior class of humans that will never intentionally mingle with the masses.
So where does that leave us?
Are America’s Best Days Behind It?
Too many Americans are driving down the highway of American life and looking in the rearview mirror.
The “good old days” that many conservatives yearn for, when the American family could live comfortably on a single income and still afford an annual vacation, entertainment, and a cabinet full of food, are unknown to most Americans under 50 today.
The current American worker is a slave to credit rating agencies, incessant commercialization, unresponsive government, and a long list of assaults on their personal privacy and ability to make extra money.
Pop culture is the best gauge of future trends, and based on the proliferation of dystopian, doomsday, Goth, living dead, second-coming, Messianic, and zombie stories, young people have created their own visions of the future, and it definitely does not include the classic American Dream. That’s because the middle class has been decimated by Republican economic policies for decades, beginning with the myth of “trickle-down economics,” an unproven political scam perpetuated by Ronald Reagan and successive Republican economists.
Many younger people know they won’t make enough working a low-paying job to afford a house, so they have opted for high-risk quasi-investments in sports betting, crypto, unproven trading schemes, and prediction markets in a last-ditch effort to win the lottery and afford a future.
These are all dead ends designed as diversions to avoid the basic question: How do you redistribute wealth in the U.S.?
This is the fundamental question that corporate Democrats have avoided for decades, mainly because they are too aligned on financial issues with Republicans. Some corporate Democrats in the Hillary Clinton campaign hated Bernie Sanders more for his democratic socialism platform than Donald Trump. This was a big mistake since it allowed Trump to steal the very popular social democratic policies advanced by Sanders and corrupt them into his right-wing populism.
The damage caused by Trump’s criminality and mentally unbalanced leadership, fueled by right-wing think tanks, has done societal damage that will take a generation to repair. His physical destruction of the White House, the Kennedy Center, and Washington, D.C., is only the outward havoc he created. He has also spoiled the nation’s ethics, morals, basic government functions, the courts, and world opinion, and it is becoming increasingly evident.
All this is happening as AI is being touted as the engine of a New Age or as a destructive force. It’s probably both. The problem with this first generation of AI is that humans designed it, unconsciously embedding their own prejudices, need to succeed at all costs, and deviousness. Newer versions of AI, which are constantly being created, will either expand on those original flaws or, with regulation, try to correct or eliminate those sinister traits.
AI can fix stupidity by providing answers derived from rational, machine-generated analysis. The problem is that ordinary people who use AI still make decisions that are more emotional than rational. The sad fact that Trump, a convicted criminal and sociopath, was elected twice by voters shows that the problem with America is Americans, not AI.
