# I drove 3,000 miles and saw the America AI is leaving behind > Source: > Published: 2026-08-19 11:10:50+00:00 # I drove 3,000 miles and saw the America AI is leaving behind *Lewis Liu drove for nine days to get to his new home in Silicon Valley. On the journey he saw the America that risks being left behind* When America was a young nation, hundreds of thousands of people packed their possessions into wagons and headed west in search of something better. St Louis became known as the Gateway to the West. Farther along the Missouri frontier, Westport, now part of Kansas City, became a jumping-off point for the Oregon and California trails. From there, families travelled for months across prairies, mountains and desert, typically covering little more than a dozen miles a day. Some were pursuing fertile farmland in Oregon; others headed towards California in search of land, opportunity and, eventually, gold. The journey was dangerous enough that many never completed it. Last week, my family of four made our own journey west: Short Hills, New Jersey (outside of New York City) to Palo Alto, California (centre of Silicon Valley). We travelled not in a covered wagon but in a brand-new Volvo XC90, with air conditioning, GPS and credit cards. Our furniture had arrived at the new house a week before we did. The greatest immediate dangers were our younger son’s car sickness and my wife’s hatred of driving. We weren’t searching for physical gold. We were moving to Silicon Valley in search, perhaps, of AI gold. And somewhere across those 3,000 miles, the drive profoundly changed how I understood America. ## The places left behind The first thing you notice driving rather than flying across the country is how much of it has been left behind. We had planned to stop for lunch in Wheeling, West Virginia. Online, I found photographs of a charming old downtown and picked a restaurant. 10 miles out, our seven-year-old threw up spectacularly across the back seat. By the time we arrived, frazzled and badly in need of lunch, the restaurant was boarded up and much of the surrounding downtown felt eerily empty. We kept driving. The next day, crossing Illinois, we stopped almost on a whim in Casey, a town of fewer than 3,000 people that advertises a collection of absurdly oversized objects: a gigantic rocking chair, wind chime, mailbox and pencil, among others. My sons loved it. A five-storey rocking chair may have been their favourite sight of the entire trip. But what interested me was the story behind it. Local businessman Jim Bolin began building record-breaking objects after the financial crisis to put his struggling hometown back on the map. It worked. People driving across the Midwest began stopping. Businesses benefitted. Casey eventually accumulated more than a dozen Guinness World Records. Bolin died earlier this year, but his family and community continue what he started. There was something deeply American about the whole thing. A town is dying. One person has a ridiculous idea. Instead of waiting for someone else to save it, he builds the world’s largest wind chime. And somehow, it works. ## America used to believe it could build anything That same day we stopped in St Louis. The Gateway Arch is magnificent: an improbable 630-foot sweep of stainless steel rising beside the Mississippi, conceived to commemorate the city’s role in America’s westward expansion. Construction began in 1963 and was completed in 1965, with no fatalities. We watched a film about how it was built. What struck me wasn’t just the engineering, it was the attitude: of course we can build this thing. Today, we marvel at videos of Chinese bridges, airports and high-speed rail lines appearing almost overnight. Watching footage of the Arch being assembled, I was reminded that America once projected exactly the same focused optimism. Difficult things existed to be solved. Infrastructure was something to be built. The future was something to be engineered. To keep our sons off their iPads, we listened to Little House on the Prairie as we crossed the Midwest. The story requires the historical context we slowly explained to them: westward settlement was not movement into an empty continent. Indigenous peoples already inhabited and depended upon these lands, and American expansion displaced them, sometimes violently. But one aspect of the pioneer mentality became impossible to ignore as we travelled across the same enormous geography. Imagine leaving your family, your community and almost everything familiar because you possess an almost irrational conviction that life could be better beyond the horizon. A river wasn’t something crossed by driving over a bridge; wagons could literally float while swimming horses pulled them forward. Disease, accidents, drowning and weather killed travellers. The National Park Service estimates that nearly one in 10 emigrants on the major trails did not survive the journey. And yet they went. ## The physical landscape explains America After Kansas City, the scale of the country became almost difficult to comprehend. We crossed the remnants of the prairie and then spent what felt like an eternity driving across Kansas and eastern Colorado. For the record, this was by far the most boring part of the journey. Eventually the Rockies appeared. My wife and I both learnt to ski in Colorado, separately, years before we met. Returning now was unexpectedly sad. In August, the mountains had almost no visible snow, and large areas of forest were filled with dead or damaged trees. The causes are complicated, but the vast mountain pine beetle epidemic that has affected Colorado’s forests was intensified by drought stress and warmer temperatures, which helped beetles survive and expand into areas that were previously too cold. Looking at those forests while driving past some of the wealthiest ski communities in America raised another question for me. America is extraordinarily good at individual action. We may be the best society on earth at it. But why are we so bad at collective action? That question became even sharper in Utah and Nevada. Utah was astonishing: the Colorado River cutting through red-rock canyons, Arches National Park, the almost extraterrestrial hoodoos of Goblin Valley, then green mountain valleys unexpectedly appearing between enormous stretches of desert. West of Delta, Utah, we drove into one of the emptiest landscapes I have ever experienced. A roadside sign warned that there would be no services for more than 80 miles. Most of the time I could see no houses, no other cars and virtually no evidence of human settlement in any direction. Even in a modern SUV, it felt strangely daunting. I kept thinking: how on earth did people cross landscapes like this in wagons? In a car, 80 miles without services or petrol is an hour. At wagon speed, it represents the better part of a week. To enter that landscape with your children required more than courage. It required an almost unreasonable belief in your own agency. And somewhere in the Nevada desert, I realised: this is founder territory. ## A nation of founders I have spent much of my adult life building companies. Until this drive, though, I had never appreciated at such a physical level how deeply the founder mentality is embedded in America. The country was populated and built, sometimes heroically, sometimes brutally, by people prepared to abandon certainty for possibility. They believed the individual had agency: that you could move somewhere new, build something, farm something, invent something, start again and provide for your family. That instinct still explains an enormous amount about America today. It explains why a businessman in a dying Illinois town builds a gigantic rocking chair rather than accepting decline. It explains Silicon Valley. It explains why Americans start companies at rates that often bewilder Europeans, our tolerance for failure, our reverence for entrepreneurship and, at our best, our almost absurd optimism about the future. I [recently wrote in this column](https://www.cityam.com/ive-lived-the-american-dream-but-as-the-country-turns-250-im-watching-it-die/) that I am the product of the American Dream and that I am watching that Dream disappear. My parents arrived in America with almost nothing. My father washed dishes and delivered pizzas while completing a PhD; my mother folded clothes in a laundromat before eventually building a career in data science. They finally bought a house in a wealthy suburb, where my brother and I grew up. Decades later, I was packing my own children into a car in the same New York City suburb and driving them west towards a new life in California. The symmetry was impossible to miss. So was the contradiction. The America those pioneers believed in, and the America my immigrant parents believed in, depends on agency. You take risks because you believe effort can materially improve your life. Yet modern America increasingly works against precisely that belief. We have financialised enormous portions of daily life. We have allowed monopolies and rent-seeking businesses to extract greater shares of people’s incomes. Housing, education and healthcare increasingly feel beyond individual control. Capital is rewarded substantially more generously than labour, and wealth itself purchases access to opportunities unavailable to everyone else. If people cease believing that effort changes outcomes, the American Dream doesn’t merely become economically harder. It loses its philosophical foundation. ## Silicon Valley needs to remember the rest of America We finally crossed the Sierra Nevada and arrived at our new house nine days after leaving New Jersey. My sons had never seen it. Their furniture was already waiting inside. It was an extraordinarily emotional end to the journey. And, as someone who has moved here to build and invest in AI companies, it left me with a conviction. The AI boom cannot forget the rest of America. The technology industry currently speaks endlessly about artificial general intelligence, trillion-dollar companies and enormous productivity gains. But the more important question is much simpler: will these technologies give ordinary people more agency, or less? Used badly, AI could accelerate exactly the trends already hollowing out the American Dream: concentrating power in a handful of corporations, replacing labour while rewarding capital, extracting ever more value from individuals and reducing people to passive consumers of systems they neither understand nor control. But built differently, AI could do something much more interesting. It could give a small-town entrepreneur capabilities once available only to a large corporation. It could give an individual professional a way to amplify their expertise. It could give doctors or nurses time back to serve more patients. In other words, AI could bring back founder mentality for all. It could give Americans back some of the economic agency that made people believe they could take a risk on themselves in the first place. But there is one lesson America must add to its founder culture. Individualism alone cannot solve everything. A founder can build a company. A businessman can revive a small town with a giant wind chime. A pioneer family can cross a continent. But individuals alone cannot stabilise the climate, rebuild national infrastructure, protect competitive markets or create an education and healthcare system that gives every child a genuine chance. Those things require collective action. Perhaps the America we need to rebuild combines both ideas: the pioneer conviction that an individual can change their destiny, and the civic conviction that we are responsible for building something larger than ourselves. Being a founder is wonderful. But the highest form of founding isn’t simply building something that makes you rich. It is building something that leaves the country better than you found it. [Lewis Liu is co-founder and CEO of Twin-1 AI](https://www.twin1.ai/) *For the road-trip curious: Short Hills, NJ (start) → Pennsylvania → Wheeling, West Virgina → Ohio → Indianapolis, Indiana (overnight) → St Louis, MO → Kansas City, Kansas (with three days visiting family in Mission Hills, Kansas) → Golden, Colorado → across the Rockies via I-70 and Loveland Pass in Colorado → Moab via the Colorado River scenic route → Moab (overnight) → Arches National Park → Goblin Valley State Park → across western Utah to Ely, Nevada (overnight) → US-50, the “Loneliest Road in America”, through Eureka, Austin and Fallon, Nevada → Sierra Nevada Mountains → drive over the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge → Palo Alto, California. 3,200+ miles in nine days.*