It Pains This Lifelong Progressive to Admit It, but Donald Trump Stumbled onto a Truth About AI

Calling it “Artificial Intelligence” was a public relations catastrophe that set humanity up as the machine’s adversary from day one.

Make no mistake: I disagree with Donald Trump on virtually everything, and it pains me to write this. Yet when he recently tried to rename “Artificial Intelligence” with one of his trademark superlatives, he inadvertently pointed out a glaring truth: “AI” has been a branding and communication nightmare from the start.

Calling a tool an “artificial” version of human “intelligence” sounds less like a helpful assistant and more like a menacing rival engineered to replace us. Before the public ever laid eyes or hands on this amazing technology, technologists picked a name that invited suspicion and dread rather than curiosity.

Yet the name was only the opening act of a much wider rollout failure.

I saw my first computer at Stanford University in 1960 while attending high school in Palo Alto. After spending the first half of my life immersed in playing music and sales, I transitioned into computer science, marketing, and advertising for the second half. Having watched computing evolve over six decades—from room-sized mainframes to desktop publishing and the cloud—I am appalled by the colossal misfire defining the simultaneous explosion of generative AI and hyperscale data centers.

Tech companies pushed the technology onto the world without ever explaining it to the people whose lives it reshaped. They did not explain the trade-offs, invite dialogue, or earn trust. They simply clobbered the general public over the head with the technology.

In classic product marketing, rule number one is WIIFM—What’s In It For Me? If you ask society to embrace a seismic disruption to how they work, create, and live, you have to clearly demonstrate how it improves their lives on their own terms. Instead, Silicon Valley led entirely with what was in it for Silicon Valley: staggering compute metrics, record GPU sales, corporate productivity claims, and dizzying stock valuations.

The cardinal mistake was confusing engineering enthusiasm with public readiness. Insiders were head over heels about what they were building, assuming the sheer audacity of the code would win everyone over. But people in general do not welcome change. And when they have it forced upon them blindly, regardless of the potential benefits, they will not welcome it with open arms; they push back with fear and resentment.

Leaving the public in the dark created two distinct problems:

First, on the software side, the narrative immediately filled with worst-case scenarios—job displacement, copyright disputes, and deepfakes. Rather than framing AI as an accessible, empowering tool for everyday human problem-solving and expression, it was dumped onto the market like an unregulated experiment.

Second, and perhaps most neglected, is the physical reality: the data center boom. For thirty years, the industry marketed “the Cloud” as an invisible, weightless magic where photos floated into thin air and streaming videos cost nothing in physical terms. The public was never taught that the digital world has massive physical weight.

Now, uninvited concrete-and-steel industrial complexes are popping up in rural counties and suburban backyards, straining local power grids, driving up residential electric bills, and consuming millions of gallons of cooling water. Communities feel invaded because no one ever explained that every search query, every viral video, and every online post requires a humming, high-voltage engine room somewhere down the road.

The resulting cultural paradox is staggering: millions of people take to social media and streaming platforms to vent their outrage over data centers, using the exact high-bandwidth, energy-hungry server infrastructure they are condemning to broadcast their protests. They aren’t hypocrites by design; they are uninformed by default, because the tech industry spent decades hiding the machinery behind slick marketing instead of educating the public on the real physical costs of digital convenience.

Technologists forgot the most fundamental rule of human adoption: delivery and packaging matter just as much as underlying capability.

What we’ve got here is a classic failure to communicate.

And a hamburger well presented is still infinitely better than a steak in the face.