Manifesto
You’re being sold an AI future where you’re obsolete or irrelevant. We see it differently.
Doomers proclaim that AI will take your job and then your life: automation today, annihilation tomorrow. Pacifiers, meanwhile, promise that AI will make your job obsolete; machines handle reality, you handle the remote.
We reject these artificial stories. The reality on the ground is different. AI shouldn’t kill work, it should transform it. AI isn’t robbing people of purpose, it’s liberating them from drudgery so that they can do what humans do best. In factories and hospitals, in construction sites and power plants, Americans are discovering that deploying AI works wonders.
This is Working Intelligence: intelligence that works, wielded by the workers who will always matter most. We’re here to tell their stories.
What We Know: The American Worker is Our Greatest Strength
American workers are the most transformational force in human history. Their creativity, ingenuity, and freethinking built the railways; won World War II; and sent Man to the moon.
Yet many Americans now spend their days mired in meaningless toil. Paperwork, spreadsheets, and calls steal them away from solving problems, treating patients, and building things. Already, thousands of Americans are using AI to free themselves from process to get back to outcomes. The ATM didn’t replace bank tellers: it enriched their lives. AI can do the same.
What We Believe: AI Should Not Replace, But Supercharge
Doomers and pacifiers alike think that AI will replace American workers. Doomers fear, and pacifiers welcome, a future of conformity: a world in which AI flattens human difference. Silicon Valley is already selling such bland, dumbed-down slop.
But this sameness squanders both the genius of American workers and the potential of AI to amplify them. Forcing everyone into soulless, cookie-cutter tools doesn’t generate innovation – it repeats mediocrity at scale. AI’s true power comes not from making everyone the same, but making everyone more of themselves. It shouldn’t standardize; it should supercharge.
What We’re Building: America, Working
Just as the Wright Brothers could not imagine the space shuttle, we cannot imagine the exact future of AI. But we do know that, like with the airplane, American builders must drive AI. Markets, democratic oversight, and cultural forces will let good AI flourish as bad AI flounders.
American AI leadership is not only a technical but a moral imperative. Our principles of individual liberty, democracy, and meritocracy must inform AI’s growth so that autocrats and technocrats do not. If these principles prevail, then our lives, our families, our workplaces, our communities, and our nation will be stronger.
The AI Optimists at Palantir and Beyond