As we look back on 1776 after this July 4th holiday, it's a good opportunity to skip forward and predict what our forebears will think of us. When our descendants assess our policies, ideas, and culture, what will they see? What errors, born of myopia, inertia, or misplaced priorities, will they lay at our feet regarding today's revolutionary technology—artificial intelligence? From their vantage point, with AI's potential and perils laid bare, their evaluation will likely determine that we got at least ten things wrong.
One glaring failure will be our delay in embracing obviously superior AI-driven technologies like autonomous vehicles (AVs). Despite the clear safety benefits—tens of thousands of lives saved annually, reduced congestion, enhanced accessibility—we allowed a patchwork of outdated regulations, public apprehension, and corporate squabbling to keep these life-saving machines largely off our roads. The future will see our hesitation as a moral and economic misstep, favoring human error over demonstrated algorithmic superiority.
They will also criticize our stubborn refusal to integrate AI-based policy forecasting into our legislative processes. While AI models could have analyzed the long-term societal and economic impacts of proposed laws, helping us anticipate unintended consequences and optimize for human flourishing, we largely relied on antiquated, human-limited methods. This neglect meant our policies often lagged behind technological change, undermining the very notion of effective, responsive governance.
Crucially, they will likely question our failure to establish new intellectual property frameworks even after it became evident that current copyright and patent laws disproportionately favored incumbents and no longer served their intended purpose in the age of AI. Contemporary delay reinforced monopolies, rather than fostering a vibrant, decentralized ecosystem of innovation that truly benefited independent creators and inventors.
The future will equally lament our oversight in adjusting our schools and workforce development programs. They will see our delay in instituting widespread AI literacy for the general public as a critical blunder. We did not take the requisite steps to equip citizens with the fundamental understanding to navigate an AI-saturated world—to ensure they had access to the latest tools, discern AI-generated misinformation, and grok the foundational technical aspects of AI so that they could contribute to AI policy conversations. This lapse compromised our collective pursuit of an informed, participatory democracy. Compounding this, our sluggishness in adjusting reskilling and upskilling programs meant we left vast segments of the workforce vulnerable to displacement, rather than proactively empowering them with the skills to thrive alongside AI.
Perhaps more fundamentally, they will indict our failure to see data sharing as a social good. In an era where data is the new oil (or even the new water!), we allowed its collection and control to remain highly fragmented and proprietary. We did not establish robust, ethical frameworks for data cooperatives or public data trusts that could have fueled innovation for the common good—in healthcare, urban planning, and scientific research.
From an innovation perspective, the future will see our lack of sufficient investment in basic AI research as a monumental strategic error. Our focus skewed heavily towards optimizing existing models, rather than dedicating resources to more elementary inquiries that could uncover the next generation of transformative AI systems. This shortsightedness potentially limited humanity's long-term scientific and technological trajectory. This misallocation of resources will be underscored by our prioritization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) over the development and deployment of robust, beneficial generic AI applications. The speculative pursuit of an arbitrary, unspecified goal often overshadowed the immense, tangible benefits that could have been realized through focused development of practical, specialized AI solutions for pressing societal problems.
Finally, our descendants will not forgive our inadequate investment in public digital infrastructure and universal access. As AI became a foundational layer for economic opportunity and civic life, we allowed a significant digital divide—now an algorithmic abyss—to persist, denying equitable access to the very tools needed to participate in the new economy. From places like New Braunfels, Texas, to rural Virginia, the future will look at our massive, energy-hungry data centers and transmission lines and ask why we also showed a lack of adequate support for the communities disrupted by the immense physical requirements of AI development. These energy-intensive facilities placed environmental and social burdens on local populations without integrating them into the AI ecosystem's benefits.
As things stand, the ledger of future complaints against us concerning AI will be long. But this prophecy need not be our destiny. By confronting these potential failures now, by prioritizing sustained innovation and adaptive governance, we can still pivot towards a future where AI serves humanity's highest aspirations. The time for foresight and courageous action is now, before the future passes its final judgment.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.