PNC

THEY ALWAYS TRY TO STOP THE FUTURE WHEN THEY LOSE CONTROL. This is about power, money & control. Why else would Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario all suddenly agree that AI development needs to slow down? Open-source AI is catching up to the frontier labs, and the gatekeepers are terrified of normal people building extraordinary things they can't control. History keeps repeating itself: 📚 PRINTING PRESS — 1515 The printing press let ordinary people spread ideas without permission. Pope Leo X required books to be approved before printing. Governments and churches banned books, seized presses and burned prohibited works. In England, unlicensed printing was criminalized. Control the press. Control the information. ⚡ ELECTRICITY — 1889 Electricity was portrayed as “The Unrestrained Demon.” After deadly electrocutions in New York, Mayor Hugh J. Grant ordered parts of the electric-light system shut down. Yesterday’s demon became today’s critical infrastructure. 🚗 AUTOMOBILES — 1865 Britain’s Red Flag Act required a man to walk in front of early cars carrying a red flag. They invented a machine faster than a horse, then legally forced it to move at nearly horse speed. They forced the future to operate at the speed of the past. 🚗 CARS — SWITZERLAND — 1900 The Swiss canton of Graubünden banned automobiles from its roads. The public voted repeatedly to keep the ban. It lasted, with exceptions, until 1925. Today nobody thinks twice about driving there. 🧮 CALCULATORS — 1975 In 1975 Ireland banned calculators from schools. In 1986, American teachers were still protesting calculator use in classrooms because they feared students would stop learning math. Today every phone has one. 🔐 ENCRYPTION — 1990s The United States treated strong encryption software like a munition. Computer scientist Daniel Bernstein had to sue the U.S. government for the right to publish encryption source code. Think about that: The government tried to control math written as computer code. 🌐 INTERNET — 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act, which criminalized broad categories of online speech. The ACLU sued Attorney General Janet Reno. The Supreme Court struck the core restrictions down in Reno v. ACLU. The internet worked because ordinary people didn’t need permission to publish. 🐧 OPEN SOURCE — 1998–2002 Microsoft’s leaked Halloween Documents called Linux and open source a “direct threat.” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer later called Linux a “cancer.” Then Microsoft lobbied the Pentagon against wider use of open-source software, warning about security and intellectual-property risks. The Pentagon’s own MITRE study found that banning open source would actually hurt national security. Free software threatened the gatekeeper. ₿ CRYPTO — UNITED STATES — 2010s–2020s China simply banned crypto. America took a different route. Regulators sued Coinbase, Kraken and Binance while refusing to give the industry clear rules. In 2026 there are still no clear rules and the US ceded a decade of blockchain innovation to other countries & lost a generation of its brightest entrepreneurs. Companies moved offshore. Exchanges moved offshore. Token launches moved offshore. Liquidity moved offshore. America didn’t kill crypto. America pushed much the industry overseas. 🤖 AI — 2026 Now Bernie Sanders is proposing the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. It would permanently ban superintelligent AI and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator approves the rules. Their proposal includes penalties of up to 20 years in federal prison for violating or attempting to circumvent the restrictions. Twenty years. Not for using AI to commit murder, theft or fraud. For violating the government’s restrictions on developing certain AI systems. Today they call it “superintelligence.” Tomorrow? Your model. Your code. Your GPU. Your research. SAME FEAR. DIFFERENT CENTURY. Printing gave people information. Cars gave people mobility. Calculators gave people computation. Encryption gave people privacy. The internet gave people communication. Open source gave people software without permission. Crypto gave people money without permission. AI gives people intelligence on demand. Every one threatened somebody’s control. Regulate actual harm. Punish actual crimes. But don’t ban knowledge. Don’t ban code. Don’t ban research. Don’t ban the future. You cannot stop the future. You can only decide who gets to build it.