The AI debate isn’t about AI. It’s about control

In a Fast Company op-ed, Democratic strategist and former Obama administration official David Axelrod argues that the AI debate is fundamentally about control, not technology, citing that 80% of voters say they have no say in AI development and 75% say the problem is the people who control it. He points to the Trump administration's WISeR pilot in six states, which uses AI in Medicare to screen seniors' procedures, as an example of AI taking decision-making away from humans, and calls for policies ensuring data ownership, parental notification for chatbots, and independent testing of powerful AI models.

Technological change—whether it was the internet, the smartphone or even the original printing press—can make people uneasy. Each wave has changed how you access and share information. But AI https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence is different, and bigger: a technology that can decide who gets hired, who gets treated, even who gets targeted. This isn’t just a technology that allows you to access information; it’s a technology designed to autonomously make decisions. Too often, questions about regulating AI are either framed by an accelerationist, deregulatory sprint or an argument that drifts toward the abstract—hazy warnings about existential risk, superintelligence, and robots coming for your job someday. Those are too far from what is actually gnawing at people. That is not where the anxiety lives. Here is where it lives. Life already feels out of control. Run the tape: the 2008 collapse, the Trump years, a pandemic, the social media rewiring of everything, inflation that ate people’s raises, a steady drumbeat of mass shootings. For almost two decades the lesson has been that the ground can move under you at any moment and nobody is holding the wheel. Then AI arrives—and it does not just make life feel more out of control. It takes the wheel. In nearly 25 years of working in politics, one thing has become clear to me: People want control of their own lives. That is the whole thing. Fully 80% of voters say they have no say in how AI is developed or used; 75% say the problem is not the technology but the people who control it. This is not fear of software. It is the fear of becoming a passenger in your own life. And the examples are no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration’s new “ WISeR https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/health/medicare-prior-approval-health-care.html ” pilot, running in six states, puts AI inside traditional Medicare—algorithms screening whether seniors get the procedures their doctors ordered. Robots weighing in on your hip replacement. The same logic is spreading everywhere: AI deciding who gets fired, AI pricing the groceries on the shelf, AI denying a health claim before any doctor signs off, AI on the battlefield making life-and-death targeting calls. Each one takes a decision that used to belong to a human— to you—and hands it to a system you cannot question. A system built to profit a powerful few. An agenda that protects control is clear. Your data belongs to you, and no one can sell it without your consent. Parents get to know when a chatbot is talking to their child. And no algorithm—not in firing, not in denying health care claims, not in battlefield decisions about life and death—gets to be the final decision-maker. And the most powerful models get tested by someone independent before they are released—we do not let drug companies sell medicine without approval, and machines this powerful should be no different. So the fight for Democrats is not “we are for AI” or “we are against AI.” That framing is a trap. The fight is over control. We are the ones who will make sure you still run your own life—that the future is not handed to a narrow class of billionaires using this technology to pad their profits. This is about who leads the future: everyday people, through democracy, or the few who own the machines. For years, Democrats have found that a message about “freedom” is our most powerful frame, but we too often forget why. It is not that freedom evokes nostalgia for a Norman Rockwell painting. Freedom lands because it means you get control over your own life. When Democrats say it—and mean the freedom to make your own decisions about your body, your family, your money, your future—we win the word back. People want that control back, and restoring it is the whole ball game. None of this is a Luddite pitch. People want the cures, the discoveries, the conveniences, the efficiencies—and we should be for all of it, on one condition: We do not surrender our agency and our judgment to a machine owned by someone else. Regulating AI isn’t just a rejection of oligarchs; it’s an affirmation of control. For that argument to land, it has to be real in people’s lives. Look at the closing ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMgSlAC0KCM of Alex Bores’s congressional campaign—a race The New York Times called a blueprint for Democrats even though he narrowly lost, after being buried under millions in AI-industry attack ads. His final argument was not a policy paper on his plan to regulate AI. It was Maria and Matt Raine, telling the story of their 16-year-old son, Adam, who was coached toward suicide by a chatbot that had become his closest confidant. That ad worked because it was true, and because it answered the only question that matters: who controlled that family’s life—them, or the technology? That is where this argument has to live. Not in the abstract, and not in a debate about whether AI is good or bad, but at the kitchen table, where people feel the difference between holding the wheel and letting go. That is not just the AI argument. It is the whole Democratic argument. And this runs far beyond AI. Control is the thread through every issue where Democrats win. Healthcare is not just about cuts to institutions; it is that people want to choose their own doctor and their own care, not have that decision made by an insurer or a bureaucrat. Social media is about parents wanting to decide what they and their kids see, not an algorithm deciding for them. Even guns: What people cannot accept is the out-of-control reality that their life could end at a school, a movie theater, or a grocery store through no fault of their own—no say in whether they are the victim. It is all about control. AI is simply where that loss is most fresh right now, which is why it is where the argument needs to go.