They’re Terrified You’ll Figure This Out: AI Is the Greatest Power Shift in Human History, and the Broligarchy Knows It

The data-backed case for why AI fear is a control mechanism, who benefits from your hesitation, and why ordinary people adopting AI freely is the most radical act of our time.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

We are told, repeatedly, to be afraid of artificial intelligence. That it will replace us. Enslave us. End us. The warnings come from billionaires on stages, from breathless headlines, from a cottage industry of AI doomsayers who have made fear their product.

But there is a question worth asking before we surrender to that fear: Who benefits from your hesitation?

The answer, when you follow the data, is both clarifying and alarming.

First, the Gender Data, Because It Tells the Whole Story

Start here, because this is where the pattern begins to reveal itself.

In 2023, only 11% of women were using generative AI, compared to 20% of men. By 2024, that had grown to 33% of women versus 44% of men, a gap still significant, but closing at a remarkable pace. Deloitte predicted that women’s AI adoption in the United States would match or surpass men’s by the end of 2025.

What’s driving the gap in the first place? Not capability. Not access. Research from Harvard Business School identifies a primary driver as ethical hesitation, women are more likely to question whether it is right to use these tools. That’s not weakness. That is a different, arguably more rigorous, relationship with consequence.

And here’s what happens when women do adopt AI: a 2024 report on AI-assisted women micro-entrepreneurs in India found that over 95% felt more confident in independent financial decisions, with household income rising 30-40% in the first year, and 97% felt more valued in their communities. Research on women entrepreneurs broadly shows post-AI adoption revenue growth averaging 20%, with some sectors reaching 25%.

AI, in the hands of historically marginalized people, is not a threat. It is a lever. A profound equalizer. Which raises the obvious question: who wants to keep that lever out of reach?

The Fear Is Real. But Is It Warranted?

Let’s be precise, because intellectual honesty matters here.

Among machine learning researchers, the people who know AI most deeply, the median estimated probability that AI could cause human extinction is approximately 5%. That figure, known as “p(doom),” is debated, but it represents the considered view of experts, not the public panic it has spawned.

Pew Research found that more than half of U.S. adults are extremely concerned about AI eliminating jobs, compared to only 25% of AI experts who share that level of concern. The gap between public fear and expert assessment is not a gap of information. It is a gap of narrative management.

A 2025 PNAS study confirmed that apocalyptic AI narratives consistently dominate public concern even when people are simultaneously aware of more practical, immediate risks. The sensational crowds out the real.

This is not accidental.

Meet the Broligarchy

There is now a name, informal but widely used, for the cluster of male tech billionaires who have fused Silicon Valley’s ideological ambitions with the machinery of authoritarian political power. The Broligarchy.

In the 2024 U.S. election, Silicon Valley’s tech-authoritarian ideologies found convenient alignment with MAGA politics: shared resentment, elitism cosplaying as populism, and a mutual interest in deregulating AI and cryptocurrency while dismantling democratic accountability.

These tech billionaires are now referred to, without irony, as oligarchs, for their money, power, and direct access to the White House.

One analyst put it with brutal clarity: “tech authoritarianism is the parasite and MAGA is the host.” The broligarchy saw an opportunity with a candidate who could openly violate law without consequence, and seized it. This is not an ideology where the world is a better place for most people. It is a world built for tech billionaires.

The ideology is not incidental. Peter Thiel, whose network has its hands on Pentagon contracts, vice-presidential appointments, and AI infrastructure, has openly declared that “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.” That is not a prediction. It is a preference.

The Mission Statement That Lost Its Soul

The OpenAI story is the sharpest illustration of the contradiction at the heart of this entire enterprise.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with an explicit mission: to build artificial general intelligence that safely benefits humanity, “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

In late 2024, OpenAI announced plans to restructure away from nonprofit control, sparking immediate backlash from former staff, Nobel laureates, and civil society groups. The reversal of those specific plans came under legal and public pressure, but the direction of travel was unmistakable.

Most telling: a review of OpenAI’s 2024 IRS filing revealed that the word “safely” had been quietly removed from its mission statement. The original read “to build general-purpose AI that safely benefits humanity.” The new version dropped that word entirely. This change coincided with the company’s transformation toward a profit-focused structure.

A single word. But that word was the whole promise.

When a company removes “safely” from its mission to benefit humanity, it is not refining its language. It is telling you something.

AI Does Not Automatically Liberate, But It Can

Here is where intellectual honesty requires a harder truth.

A 2025 PNAS study found that AI advancement has actually hindered democracy in many countries over the past decade, because AI is more complementary to government rulers, who have preferential access to administrative data, than to civil society.

Four firms currently control approximately 90% of global AI computing power. That is not democratization. That is extraordinary concentration in the hands of a very small, very homogeneous group of people.

The same tool that can lift a woman entrepreneur in rural India runs on servers owned by a handful of oligarchs. The liberation AI offers is real, but it is not guaranteed. It is contingent on whether ordinary people use it, or whether fear keeps them on the sidelines while the powerful build moats.

This is the crux.

What This Actually Means, The Argument in Full

Let’s assemble the complete picture the data has given us.

A male-dominated tech oligarchy, ideologically aligned with resurgent authoritarian movements worldwide, is actively working to concentrate AI’s power in their own hands. Their stated ideologies are explicitly anti-egalitarian. Their political alliances are with forces that historically oppose women’s autonomy, minority rights, and democratic participation.

Meanwhile, the people who would benefit most from AI adoption, women, marginalized communities, individuals without institutional backing, are the ones most successfully discouraged from it, by fear narratives that bear little relationship to what AI experts actually believe.

The fear is not incidental. It is functional. A broadly AI-literate humanity is harder to govern, harder to exploit, and harder to contain within hierarchies that have always depended on information asymmetry to maintain power.

Every woman who uses AI to start a business that didn’t need a bank loan. Every first-generation student who uses it to access knowledge that once required expensive gatekeepers. Every community that organizes, creates, or builds using tools that used to require institutional permission, these are not just personal victories. They are structural threats to the consolidation of power now underway.

This Is Personal, And Why It Matters

I have spent years working on this problem from a different angle.

ISCed.org was built on a simple, radical premise: world-class education should be free, globally accessible, and built on open-source technology, not monetized, not gate-kept, not owned by anyone whose interests diverge from the student’s. It is aligned with UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal #4: quality education for all.

TATANKA AI Learning Academy extends that mission into the AI era, building AI-powered, culturally inclusive education that centers Indigenous knowledge, matriarchal perspectives, and the voices historically excluded from both technology and the institutions that teach it. TATANKA’s curriculum is aligned to UNESCO’s International Standard Classification of Education. It is built for the people the Broligarchy has never built anything for.

These are not technology projects. They are power projects. The technology is just the most honest lever available.

The difference between ISCed/TATANKA and OpenAI is not capability. It is intention.

One was built to empower.
One removed “safely” from its mission statement.

Fear < Love

The Broligarchy is not omnipotent. It is afraid.

It is afraid because the thing it has built, AI, contains within it the most potent democratizing force in human history. And it knows that once ordinary people stop being afraid of it, the information asymmetry that has always underpinned concentrated power begins to dissolve.

The fear campaign is the tell. You do not spend this much effort convincing people to avoid a tool that serves your interests.

The most radical thing you can do right now, as a woman, as a person from a community that has been told technology is not for you, as anyone who has ever been governed rather than empowered, is to pick up the tool. Learn it. Use it. Share it.

Not for the tech bros. Not for the shareholders. Not for the mission statements that quietly delete the word “safely.”

For yourself. For your community. For the future that has always belonged to all of us.

JJ is the founder of ISCed.org, a global free virtual school aligned to UNESCO SDG #4, and TATANKA AI Learning Academy, an AI-powered, culturally inclusive education platform built for communities historically excluded from both technology and institutional learning.

Sources referenced in this article:

• Gender AI adoption gap & Deloitte predictions: https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/technology-media-and-telecom-predictions/2025/women-and-generative-ai.html

• Harvard Business School on women and AI hesitation: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/women-are-avoiding-using-artificial-intelligence-can-that-hurt-their-careers

• Women micro-entrepreneurs & AI income impact (Unilever/Kantar): https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2025/how-ai-and-digital-tools-are-empowering-women-microentrepreneurs/

• AI usage statistics by gender: https://gptzero.me/news/how-many-people-use-ai/

• p(doom) and existential risk narratives (PNAS): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419055122

• Public vs. expert AI concern gap (Pew Research): https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/views-of-risks-opportunities-and-regulation-of-ai/

• AI hindering democratization (PNAS): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2423266122

• AI compute concentration: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04119

• Silicon Valley’s authoritarian turn (Literary Hub): https://lithub.com/how-silicon-valley-became-a-center-of-reactionary-anti-democratic-politics/

• Tech billionaires as oligarchs (NPR): https://www.npr.org/2026/05/06/nx-s1-5813505/how-silicon-valleys-new-tech-right-has-profited-by-aligning-with-maga

• Tech authoritarianism analysis (KQED): https://www.kqed.org/news/12037319/what-is-the-nerd-reich-and-how-did-they-get-involved-with-the-us-government