AI lacks a Steve Jobs — tech industry's failure to articulate its value to the public is an existential risk
Jan 7, 2026
Key Points
- The tech industry lacks a credible moral voice—comparable to Steve Jobs—to explain why innovation serves the public interest, leaving AI vulnerable to regulatory capture and public rejection.
- San Francisco faces Boston's fate of regulatory and cultural decay, but the stakes are far higher: the city's collapse would erase a third of U.S. GDP growth from the last decade.
- Polling shows Americans see AI primarily as wasteful and harmful, enabling scams and gambling; without a compelling case for near-term tangible benefits, voters may choose to imprison tech executives and dismantle data centers.
Summary
Tech's narrative crisis is an existential threat to the American technology ecosystem. Will Manitis argues that the industry has fundamentally failed to articulate why it deserves to exist on the national stage, and the consequences could be catastrophic.
Manitis traces Boston's collapse as a technology hub to three aligned forces. Massachusetts charges 6.4% sales tax on SaaS while most states tax software not at all, pushing founders to leave. Founders pay $860,000 on a $10 million exit in Boston versus zero in Austin. A Puritan culture too intertwined with power cannot police itself. Perverse incentives push talent and capital elsewhere. Boston generated $14 trillion in enterprise value over two decades nationally; Boston itself generated $100 billion. You cannot legislate your way out of a collapsing talent network.
San Francisco is now on the same path. Prop M imposes an office vacancy tax. Elite networks defend their own. Bad actors flood into AI. The stages are set for the same death spiral. But the stakes are incomparably higher. Boston's collapse cost the U.S. a few hundred billion in enterprise value. San Francisco's would erase a third of the country's GDP growth over the last decade.
The existential failure runs deeper than economics. The tech industry has no coherent moral argument for its existence. Polling suggests the average American understands AI as a technology that wastes water, spikes power costs, scams grandparents, and exposes children to gambling and sexual content. If the best defense of AI is that it produces better sports-betting chatbots, voters will choose to imprison tech executives and burn down data centers instead. People protect sewage systems and power grids because they understand them as bulwarks against chaos. The public does not believe technology serves that function.
Tech lacks a Steve Jobs—someone who can make the moral case for progress with earned authority and genuine earnestness. Jobs could explain stock options in plain language or paint the computer as a bicycle for the mind because he commanded attention and belief. Current leaders trigger visceral public rejection. The rationalist subculture that dominates AI discourse has inverted the sales job. It assumes the in-group already understands AI is good and focuses instead on convincing skeptics it's dangerous. Jobs did the opposite. He dwelt on tangible, near-term impact: how a tool could teach languages, enable creativity, diagnose disease for the uninsured. Only then did he jump to long-term implications.
The problem is structural. Apple's business model required no venture capital messaging to financial markets. The capex intensity of modern AI demands constant pitching to investors, governments, and the public. Jobs' monopoly on tech earnestness, cemented by his death, made any successor who attempts genuine optimism look like a pale imitation.
Without a credible voice that can articulate why innovation is a moral necessity and not just a profit opportunity, the technology industry faces the same fate as Boston. First taxed, then looted, then exhausted. The 2028 election could become a referendum on whether to cage and kill the American technology sector. That outcome seems politically plausible if tech cannot rebuild public faith in its purpose.