Power OVER Artificial Intelligence

Happy Sunday. Five days ago I left a lecture room at Hopkins in Washington, D.C. and got on a plane to Las Vegas, to speak to a room predominantly full of men who spend their time bending steel, stainless, and galvanneal into the physical skeleton of American infrastructure. I was there to talk to the National Association of Architectural Metal Manufacturers about artificial intelligence, and on the flight home I walked away with more certainty than ever about where the real fight over artificial intelligence is actually taking place. For most of my thinking, I believed it was external, happening in conversations I was not privy to or part of. But I now realize it is largely happening inside every single one of us, in a very quiet decision about how much power we hand over to something we have not even bothered to define correctly because of how fast it has moved.

These are not people who write code for a living, and they are not developers. In fact, most of them walked in wearing steel toed boots rather than blazers. They are the people who fabricate the metal that holds up data centers, and they are as close to the infrastructure of this technology as a human being can be without ever touching a GPU. As I sat in my hotel room preparing the talk, I realized I was gearing it toward a room of engineers and geopolitically aware artificial intelligence researchers. But that was not the room. I was standing in front of people who build, and not in the tech bro sense of that word, but people who actually build. And I found myself needing to answer a much older question for them. Where does artificial intelligence actually belong in a person's life, and in a person's sense of who they are.

That question got a lot more urgent a few weeks earlier, when the head of national security at Anthropic came and spoke to my class at Hopkins. I walked out of that room with immense fear.

Fear sells right now. Every week there is a new open letter or a new founder telling us that the company he built might end the species if someone does not hand him the regulatory keys first. There is a real public argument happening among the people who build this technology about whether that fear is sincere or strategic or both, and about whether they are protecting the public or protecting their own market position. I do not sit here and claim to know the internal motive of every executive making that case. But I do know what fear does to a room full of tradesmen sitting in Las Vegas to hear a twenty one year old talk to them about artificial intelligence. It does not put people on the edge of their seats, anxious or cautious. It freezes people. It is paralyzing. And that exact position is where you do not want to be standing when the ground under your industry is moving.

So here is what I offer. The people who write the rules and the people who write the headlines both benefit from artificial intelligence sounding like a mind. A mind can be feared. A mind can be blamed. A mind can be given a personality and a will of its own that would allegedly need regulating the way you would regulate a person. So I offer up a definition instead, from the work of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, who spent years working toward a formal definition of an AI system. They describe it as a machine based system that, for objectives that are explicit or implicit, takes the input it receives and generates outputs such as predictions, recommendations, or decisions that can influence a real or virtual environment. It generates output from input, and the objectives were set by a human before any of that ever happened.

The last part is the one I care most about. Human defined objectives. Every time you let someone talk about AI like it is a person with its own intentions, you are quietly signing away the human part of that sentence.

I anticipate next week I will be sending out a piece on recursive system intelligence, since a number of you have reached out to me about it. But for this issue of Human Prowess, I want to get at the psychological pulse underneath all of this. Why fear feels like the safe choice.

There is a reason fear feels responsible, even when it is a passive, subconscious thing. Back in 1966, a psychologist named Julian Rotter published research on what he called locus of control, the degree to which a person believes they are steering their own outcomes versus believing outside forces are steering for them. People who believe they are in the driver's seat handle stress better and recover faster from setbacks. People who believe the wheel belongs to something else, luck, fate, a machine, freeze and eventually stop trying at all. Fear of artificial intelligence is a locus of control problem wearing a technology costume.

This is not abstract for the men I spoke to this past Thursday. The trade is an identity in a lot of ways that desk jobs are not. In September of 2025, two researchers, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph Thornton, published a paper describing what they are calling AI replacement dysfunction, a proposed clinical pattern of anxiety, insomnia, and identity confusion showing up in people who have not even lost their job yet, but are at credible threat of losing it.

Seneca wrote a letter to his friend Lucilius almost two thousand years ago, making a point that has aged far better than most things written about fear since. He told him that there are more things likely to frighten us than there are to actually crush us, and that we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. Seneca wrote this having already been exiled once, and he would eventually be ordered to take his own life by the emperor he had spent years advising. He could speak to the difference between real danger and imagined danger more credibly than almost anyone in history, and he still landed on the same conclusion I did in that ballroom.

This is the actual work I am doing at Hopkins right now, studying the macroeconomic and geopolitical weight of artificial intelligence, and the conclusion I keep coming back to is boring compared to the headlines but true. Power in this era does not belong to whoever builds the smartest system. It belongs to whoever stays closest to using it and setting its objectives, instead of standing off to the side either worshipping it or fearing it.

I want to be honest before I close this out. I said earlier that I walked out of that Anthropic talk afraid, and I meant it. I am twenty one years old, building my career at the exact moment the rules of every career are getting rewritten, and there are nights that fact sits heavy on my chest instead of feeling like an opportunity. I have not fully solved this for myself either. What I have decided is that I would rather spend my fear on something productive, studying this technology closely enough to understand exactly where the human objective sits inside it, than spend it curled up waiting to see what happens to me. That is not comfort. It is a choice I have to make again most days.

So here is what I am actually asking you to sit with this week. Where in your own work have you quietly handed the wheel to a fear you never bothered to define. If somebody in your life is more scared of artificial intelligence than curious about it, forward them this issue. Somebody has to be the person in the room who calls the machine what it actually is instead of what it is being sold as.

See you in two weeks.

Keep winning, Jaron.