The Real Fear Isn't AI - It's Life *Without* AI
I just met two 21-year-old college students whose comments shocked me.
Their names are Jack and Josh. I met them last week at an XPRIZE event. After my opening remarks, they came up to thank me - not for advice, not for funding, but because they finally felt they had found their people: adults who were not afraid of AI.
On campus, they told me being openly optimistic about AI makes you a target. “Classmates call us naive, reckless, greedy - even dangerous.” These are two young entrepreneurs who look at AI and see solutions, and they are being ostracized for it.
I have not stopped thinking about them.
IMHO, the real danger is not a life with AI. It is a life without it. Allow me explain…
ANTI-TECH EXTREMISM IS REAL - AND ESCALATING
Anti-tech extremism is not theoretical anymore. More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI acquired by WIRED shows a rising category of anti-tech extremism, with threats aimed at AI, data centers, and tech executives. The key distinction matters: peaceful protest is legitimate; violence, arson, and targeted threats are not.
In Europe, anti-tech violence has already crossed into sabotage. In November 2025, attackers claimed responsibility for arson at an AI-campus construction site connected to Equinix in Meudon, France. In January 2026, the German group Vulkangruppe claimed responsibility for sabotaging power infrastructure in Berlin, citing AI and data-center energy demand.
April was worse. Italian police arrested a 26-year-old accused of planning terrorist acts inspired by the Unabomber. Then, on April 10, a 20-year-old from Texas threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s SF home and was later arrested near OpenAI headquarters with incendiary materials and a manifesto titled “Your Last Warning.” Prosecutors say the document threatened AI leaders.
Whatever one thinks about AI risk, firebombing a home is not protest. It is terrorism.
And here is the dark irony: slowing AI down would hurt the very people these movements claim to protect.
MY FEAR OF LIFE “WITHOUT AI”
Health: W.H.O. projects a shortfall of roughly 11 million health workers by 2030, concentrated in low- and lower-middle-income countries. That is not a staffing inconvenience. It is a global healthcare emergency.
AI is already helping read retinal scans, flag cancers, triage patients, design drug candidates, and extend scarce clinical expertise. Without AI, millions remain at the mercy of geography - alive or dead based on whether a trained specialist happens to be nearby.
Education: UNESCO reports that 273 million children and young people are out of school. The World Bank estimates that 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple text. UNESCO’s more recent teacher-shortage reporting estimates the world needs roughly 44 million additional primary and secondary teachers by 2030.
In 1984, Benjamin Bloom described the famous “2 Sigma Problem”: students receiving one-on-one tutoring performed about two standard deviations better than conventional classroom students - roughly the 98th percentile. For 40 years, we knew personalized tutoring worked. We simply could not scale it.
AI changes that. A great AI tutor does not replace parents or teachers. It gives every child a patient, adaptive, always-available co-pilot - especially where no human tutor is coming.
Existential risk: Climate, pandemics, food insecurity, energy scarcity - these are problems with deadlines. Human institutions are not moving fast enough.
Google DeepMind’s GraphCast showed that AI could produce 10-day global weather forecasts in under a minute and outperform the leading ECMWF system on 90% of 1,380 verification targets. AI is also accelerating protein design, optimizing grids, improving crop science, and compressing drug discovery timelines.
The people most afraid of AI are focused on possible future harms. Billions of people without AI are living a guaranteed present catastrophe.
“The question is not whether AI is dangerous. Powerful technologies always are. Instead, the question is whether we can afford the danger of not having it.”
THE LUXURY OF CAUTION
The loudest anti-AI voices often come from places with decent hospitals, reliable schools, stable grids, and functioning infrastructure. They can afford another decade of hearings, committees, frameworks, and footnotes.
A mother in Lagos with a child who has an undiagnosed heart defect cannot. A farmer in Bangladesh watching crops fail from unpredictable weather cannot. A student in a crowded classroom with no tutor cannot.
When critics talk about AI risk, they often focus on what might go wrong someday. Meanwhile, real people are dying from conditions AI could help catch today. Real kids are falling behind every semester. Real problems with real deadlines are getting closer to the cliff.
Every year we delay, people die from conditions AI could have helped detect.
WHAT ACTUALLY CONCERNS ME…
I keep thinking about Jack and Josh.
They are 21. They will inherit the world we build (or fail to build) over the next decade.
I want them to inherit a world where AI helped us solve problems we could not solve alone: where a child in rural India has access to personalized education; where early disease detection is not a luxury good; where we beat the ticking clocks on climate, pandemics, food, and energy.
I do not want them to inherit a world where fear won.
That terrifies me more than any sci-fi scenario.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
If you are an entrepreneur: Use AI to build what was previously impossible. Aim at solving billion-person problems.
If you are an executive: Make AI fluency a core operating requirement, not a side project.
If you are an investor: The world’s biggest problems are still the world’s biggest business opportunities. Back builders solving real problems with real deadlines.
If you are a student: Do not let anyone shame you for being excited about this technology. Jack and Josh are right: the future needs optimists who build.
If you are a parent: Teach your kids to use AI as a co-pilot, not a crutch. The skill is not avoiding AI. The skill is asking better questions and solving harder problems with it.
To a future of Abundance,
Peter
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P.S. The team at Abundance360, my personally curated Community of world-class entrepreneurs and business leaders, is hiring a Marketing Operations Manager to help scale the operational engine behind our events, programs, and Member experience. We’re looking for someone who loves building workflows, coordinating launches, improving systems, and making complex operations run smoothly, someone with strong execution skills and hands-on experience with tools like HubSpot, Asana, and AI tools/LLMs. If that sounds like you, apply here!
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The AI debate comes down to which deaths you can picture. One side sees a vivid future catastrophe. The other sees a statistical present one: a child who never gets diagnosed because the nearest specialist is a country away. Both are real risks. We are simply built to fear the death with a face and shrug at the death with a number.
Caution feels moral, but it is mostly a pricing bias. We overpay to avoid the risk we can see and let the one we can only count run. Strip the labels and the argument is the visible against the statistical, and the statistical never had a chance in a human mind.
Peter, I feel you have missed the point on this one. I am an enthusiastic user and supporter of AI, but so long as Sam and Dario and Elon strut around telling everyone that their livelihood will be gone in 3-5 years, combined with numerous companies citing AI as the basis of massive layoffs, whether true or not, and a total lack of transition planning coming out of the government, this is a very predictable human response.
There is a massive lack of leadership around this. We, the AI-fluent, are the reason for this technological backlash and if the neo-Luddites prevail it will be because of our lack of empathy for how difficult this transition will be for many people. People are not against AI or the possible prosperity it will bring, they are afraid they won't be able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.
For this great transition to succeed, we must do better than occasional lip service to things like UBI. How are we going to bring hundreds of millions of people--and this is just in the United States-- successfully through this transition? That is the central issue and we must be honest about who bears the costs, how we will build real support structures for them, and unambiguously make the case that the destination is worth the journey.
We are failing at this and at a monumental scale.