AI Shame Is a Gate To Keep The Working Class Out

I keep hearing friends swear they will never touch AI because they trust their own brains and refuse to let a machine think for them. The claim sounds principled until you check what they actually do. A recent survey shows most self-declared abstainers still lean on chatbots or autocorrect or recommendation engines every day, often without noticing. Using AI is no longer the exception, it is the default, yet admitting it feels unfashionable, as if convenience were a character flaw. That pose worries me, because it repeats an old pattern. Every major technological leap makes the world materially richer while carving a deeper trench between the people who grab the new tool early and the ones who hesitate. I was a kid when Bill Gates and Amancio Ortega set the upper ceiling for wealth. Now we watch Musk and Zuckerberg vault far beyond it, helped along by a pandemic that left the working crowd with steeper rents and fewer paths to home ownership. If ordinary workers accept guilt as a reason to avoid AI, they hand the joystick to the class that already owns the servers.

The rich have found a new way to soothe their consciences and it comes wrapped in eco-friendly language about artificial intelligence. They claim responsible citizens should avoid large language models because servers drink rivers dry and algorithms atrophy human thought. It sounds noble. In practice it keeps the newest tool on the top shelf where only corporate giants can reach it. Nvidia books revenue that outpaces entire national budgets. Microsoft pours cloud credits into every corner of industry. They understand what the tool does: it multiplies reach, shortens cycles, and compounds advantage. When polite essays urge restraint they serve the boardroom, not the planet.

Look at any honest chart. Real wages for the working majority have drifted while asset values for the top fraction have climbed a cliff. Add AI to that graph and the cliff turns into a vertical wall. A coder who knows the prompts can deliver a week’s output before Monday lunch and bill accordingly. A coder who stays pure earns yesterday’s rate for yesterday’s speed. Multiply that across law, medicine, design, logistics. The distance between skill and compensation grows until the old ladder looks like a museum piece.

We are told the servers guzzle water, so better not engage. Yet the data centres already spin. They feed recommendation engines, surveillance contracts, and marketing campaigns whether you type a prompt or not. Boycotting a tool that is already on does not cut the power. It simply keeps it shining on someone else’s desk. The household that adopts and adapts has a shot at agency. The household that waits for perfect ethics inherits the rising bill without the offsetting income.

History offers a blunt precedent. Early print culture widened literacy. Those who learned to read by candlelight escaped, at least partly, the feudal hold. Telegraph broke the news monopoly of capital cities and farmers organised across thousands of miles. The internet let a teenager in a small apartment publish to the world. Each wave enriched hustlers and harmed bystanders, yet every wave also gave ordinary people fresh leverage if they reached for it quickly enough. AI sits in that lineage. It will not fix injustice on its own, yet refusing the instrument hands the microphone to whoever is least concerned with fairness.

This newsletter exists because I use the models, openly. I feed them research, query their drafts, discard what rings false, keep what unlocks a tighter argument. A post that once demanded three late nights now arrives in an afternoon, freeing hours to chase sources, to interview writers, to push advertisers toward products that match our values. The same loop lies open to a nurse preparing patient notes, to a mechanic pricing parts, to a student piecing together a grant proposal. Energy cost is real, so is server waste, yet the surest way to narrow the gap is to translate new capacity into broader hands as fast as possible.

When critics insist you leave the tool untouched, ask whom that silence serves. The planet will only heal if policy bends and policy bends when public voice grows louder, not quieter. Fluency in AI expands output, speeds analysis, sharpens satire, and arms more citizens for the debate ahead. Use it. Break it. Rebuild it. Share your findings. Every prompt pulled from the top shelf is one small wedge against the widening wall.