There is a decision a lot of folks are making right now out of well-intentioned principle and I worry it may come back to haunt all of us* (*as in those of us who have never appeared in Forbes, shopped for a luxury yacht, or hosted a Met Gala).

Writers, designers, engineers, researchers - people who think for a living are looking at generative AI and deciding to sit this one out. Not learning to use it, not touching it, and in some cases actively rallying against its use altogether.

Given the circumstances it is a natural reflex and one I frequently dream of getting in on (it's honestly kinda hard as a data engineer though). But it's one I think could come back and painfully bite almost all of us* in the ass.

First, why are folks doing this? These models were trained on work nobody asked to hand over. The tools have already started displacing people who did nothing wrong except work in a craft that models learned to emulate.1

If you identify with this crowd, I honestly can't knock you for it. But I would strongly urge you to consider the consequences.

The truth is that refusing to use these tools will not make them go away. It will only concentrate more wealth and power in the hands of people who already hold most of it.

If that sounds like hyperbole, sit with the scale for a second. The poorest half of the planet, more than four billion people, hold somewhere around $2.6 trillion between them. Last week, per multiple sources, a single individual crossed a trillion dollars on his own.2

You don't have to assume bad intent from everyone who got rich. You only have to watch what the system does and lately it seems to bend toward the people who already own most of it. AI is the strongest lever of our time for keeping it that way and where you can actually see the intent, its not subtle. Lawmakers from both parties trading stocks while shaping the chip and AI bills they vote on,3 the biggest players absorbing their most promising rivals through deals deliberately structured to dodge the antitrust review a real acquisition would trigger,4 and those same incumbents lobbying for "safety" rules calibrated so that only a company their size can clear the bar.5 Funny that the one thing both sides seem to agree on is getting theirs.

The reason I bring all this up comes down to one thing. I would feel a hell of a lot more comfortable watching the folks who want to come up use this power to fuel their own thing and disrupt the existing power structure than watching the folks already on top fight tooth and nail to keep it through anticompetitive means.

The power itself is a force multiplier for anyone wanting to start something new. One person can ship in days what used to take a full team weeks, for reasons I get into in the post on how the craft is changing. You no longer need an army rallied beside you to take even your simplest idea to market. Entrepreneurship stops being a path open only to the select few. In fact, as the "stable 9 to 5" starts to disappear, it may quietly become the default one. These hypotheses are a core part of the reason I left the corporate world when I did.

Alternatively, the mass refusal to get in on the shift holds or grows. In that version we get the real dystopia where "work becomes optional" curdles into "work is no longer practically available at all" and state-sponsored welfare6 is what's left. Its then happily dictated by the same people who spent years preaching against it.7

I'm optimistic though. I'd like to believe enough of us catch on before it's too late.

You cannot out-capital a trillionaire. That race is over and neither you nor I were ever in it. But the cost of becoming genuinely dangerous with these tools is about as low as it is ever going to be. The distance between someone who wields them well and someone who refuses to learn them is going to widen for years. The cheapest moment to cross that distance was yesterday. The next cheapest is now. The window isn't open because anyone is being generous. It's open because the tools are new and nobody has pulled the ladder up yet.

So if you've been sitting this one out on principle, I'd urge you to reconsider. The principle feels like a stand but manifests as a surrender. The people who pick the tools up get to shape what comes next. The people who don't just absorb whatever shows up.

References

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  2. Musk's roughly $1.1T figure: Bloomberg / Forbes / Reuters off the SpaceX SEC filing. The poorest-half figure (~$2.6T held by ~4 billion people): Oxfam's 2026 inequality report.

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  3. Bipartisan congressional stock trading around chip / AI legislation (e.g. the CHIPS Act).

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  4. Reverse acqui-hires: Microsoft–Inflection, Amazon–Adept, Google–Character.AI. Big players hired the founders and teams and licensed the tech while structuring the deals to avoid HSR / merger review. Drew FTC and UK CMA scrutiny; Sen. Wyden's letter to the FTC and DOJ called them anticompetitive.

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  5. The "regulation as a moat for incumbents" critique: rules pitched as safety but built around compute thresholds, licensing, and accredited evaluators that large labs absorb and startups can't. Documented around EU AI Act lobbying (Corporate Europe Observatory). Note: The labs dispute it, and it has been leveled at more than one of them.

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  7. Peter Thiel, in his 2009 Cato Unbound essay "The Education of a Libertarian," blamed the rise in welfare beneficiaries (alongside women's suffrage) for making "capitalist democracy" an oxymoron, and concluded he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible.

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