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Mark Cuban thinks the dislike for AI is going to get worse. He…

Mark Cuban thinks the dislike for AI is going to get worse. He connects the data center building boom, and the community resistance to building those data centers, directly to a broader societal rejection of AI. That's his read. Mine is different. I've thought for a while now that the backlash is a watershed moment, not a trend. A point in time. The kind of thing that feels enormous while you're in it and then, a year or two later, nobody quite remembers what the fuss was about. My thinking is simple: AI is already everywhere. You don't argue against the tide coming in. It's a losing argument before you even open your mouth. Eric Schmidt got booed at a university commencement address for talking about AI. Students booing the former CEO of Google for mentioning a technology they're already using on their phones. That tells you something. Not that AI is bad. It tells you that it's become impossible to ignore, and that makes people uncomfortable. There's a concept called the K-shaped economy. A K has two lines coming off it, one going up, one going down. The rough rule of thumb is this: if you're not AI native, you're on the downline, and you might not even know it yet. The people calling AI output "slop" and treating resistance like a principled stand are on the downline. That's not where you want to be. But here's where Mark Cuban's scenario gets genuinely interesting, and genuinely dark. If he's right, and the dislike hardens rather than fades, the downstream effects aren't just cultural. They're political. If young people can't find jobs and they attribute that to AI, the societal shift could be severe. We're not talking about a hashtag. We could be looking at political movements in America that would have seemed fringe five years ago. Look at what's already happening in New York. That's not nothing. So we have two possible futures sitting right next to each other. In one, the backlash dissolves. AI is so embedded in daily life that resistance becomes an abstraction. Nobody remembers being against it, the same way nobody now argues against GPS or email. Everybody's using it, it's everywhere, and the people who were loudest about AI slop quietly started using AI to write their newsletters. In the other, the dislike calcifies. Data center projects stall out against community resistance. Young people locked out of entry-level work start organizing around what displaced them. The politics get ugly. I think I'm right. I think this moment passes. Pushing back against AI is a failing argument and always has been. But I've been wrong before, and Mark Cuban has a decent track record of reading where things are going before most people see it. So which is it? Watershed moment that fades, or the beginning of something that reshapes how America thinks about technology and work?