The AI race that warrants the lion’s share of our attention and resources is not the one with China. Both superpowers should stop hurriedly pursuing AI advances for the sake of “beating” the other. We’ve seen such a race before. Both participants lose. The real race is against an unacceptable status quo: declining lifespans, increasing income inequality, intensifying climate chaos, and destabilizing politics. That status quo will drag on, absent the sorts of drastic improvements AI can bring about. AI may not solve those problems but it may accelerate our ability to improve collective well-being. That’s a race worth winning.
Geopolitical races have long sapped the U.S. of realizing a better future sooner. The U.S. squandered scarce resources and diverted talented staff to close the alleged missile gap with the USSR. President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightfully noted, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He realized that every race comes at an immense cost. In this case, the country was “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
President John F. Kennedy failed to heed the guidance of his predecessor. He initiated yet another geopolitical contest by publicly challenging the USSR to a space race. Privately, he too knew that such a race required substantial trade-offs. Before Sputnik, Kennedy scoffed at spending precious funds on space endeavors. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy reversed course. In his search for a political win, he found space. The rest, of course, is history. It’s true that the nation’s pursuit of the moon generated significant direct and indirect benefits. What’s unknowable, though, is what benefits could have been realized if Kennedy pursued his original science agenda: large-scale desalination of seawater. That bold endeavor would have also created spin-off improvements in related fields.
Decades from now, the true “winner” of the AI race will be the country that competes in the only race that really matters—tackling the most pressing economic, social, and political problems. The country that wins that race will have a richer, healthier, and more resilient population. That country will endure when crises unfold. Others will crumble.
AI development and deployment involve finite resources. The chips, energy, and expertise that go into creating leading AI models are in short supply. Chips accumulated by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other massive AI labs to train the next frontier model are chips not being used to address more socially useful ends. Likewise, an AI expert working on a new AI-driven missile system is an expert not working on how AI can solve problems that have long been put on the back burner in the name of winning the geopolitical race of the moment.
Imagine the good that could come about if instead of prioritizing the pursuit of an unreachable AI frontier, we turned already impressive models toward the problems that will shape our long-term communal success. Early signs suggest that a pivot to this race would immediately improve the status quo. First, consider the potential for rapid improvements in health brought about by better, more affordable drugs. According to the Boston Consulting Group, AI-based discoveries or designs have spurred 67 clinical trials of new drugs. AstraZeneca reported that AI had cut its drug discovery process from years to months.
Second, consider the possibility of providing every student with personalized tutoring—setting us on a path to again become the most educated and productive workforce the world over. AI programs deployed in Bhutan helped students learn math skills in a fraction of the time when compared to classmates who received traditional math instruction. Closer to home, Khanmigo— an AI platform designed by the Khan Academy —is giving students personalized lessons in 266 school districts across the United States.
Third, and finally, consider a world in which traffic fatalities were halved thanks to the broader adoption of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous Vehicle (AV) companies have leveraged AI to make rapid advances in the ability of their vehicles to drive in all conditions. Further focus on these efforts may finally make AVs the majority of cars on the road and, as a result, save thousands of lives.
To redirect our AI race toward societal benefit, we need concrete policy changes. Federal research funding should prioritize AI applications targeting our most pressing challenges—healthcare access, energy development, and educational opportunities. Complementing this approach, tax incentives could reward companies that deploy AI for measurable social impact rather than pure market dominance. Additionally, public-private partnerships, similar to the one between Texas A&M and NVIDIA involving the creation of a high-performance supercomputer, could create innovation hubs focused specifically on using AI to solve regional problems, from drought management in the Southwest to infrastructure resilience on the coasts.
The choice before us is clear: we can continue the myopic pursuit of AI superiority for its own sake, or we can choose the wiser race—one toward a more innovative and prosperous future. History will not judge us by which nation first reached some arbitrary artificial intelligence threshold but by how we wielded this transformative technology to solve problems that have plagued humanity for generations. By redirecting our finite resources—chips, energy, and human ingenuity—toward these challenges, we can ensure that the true winners of the AI revolution will be all of us, not merely one flag or another. That is a victory worth pursuing with the full measure of our national commitment and creativity.
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.