“A ministry shut down twelve thousand degree programs. A startup opened a waitlist for robot maids. Both are running the same play. Announce the future first. Let the proof show up whenever it shows up.“
Why Nobody Asks You What You Wanted
I’ve thought about this for decades. Why does nobody ask you what you want? You pay for everything. You keep these shaky business models alive. Instead, companies just push. Loud ads. Pushy marketing. They tell you what you want instead of asking.
It’s not about who you are. It’s about training your habits, one small purchase at a time, so a handful of companies profit while you stay stuck.
Do you want to be happy and free? Or do you want to know what it feels like to never be asked, to be played instead? Maybe that’s the point. Maybe you need to finally say no thank you.
Here’s a real example. Between 2021 and 2025, Chinese universities cut 12,200 degree programs and added 10,200 new ones. The cuts hit foreign languages, marketing, design, and photography, degrees the government said led to fewer jobs. The new programs are robotics, chips, farm tech, and rare-earth science. In four years, China rebuilt more than 30 percent of its college system.
A degree takes years to finish, so today’s choices become tomorrow’s workforce. Nobody asked the students what they wanted to study. (Source: Ministry of Education figures, reported by Xinhua, South China Morning Post, and Rest of World.)
My home country ran the same kind of system, Prussian-style, cookie-cutter schools built to produce the exact number of workers each industry needed. The results were not always great.
China isn’t the only one doing this. It’s just doing it loudly. Catch up if you can, because you’re already behind. This isn’t tied to one country. It’s everywhere. Nobody is asking what you want. Maybe that’s okay too. Maybe the discomfort is what finally pushes you to say no thank you, and go build what you actually want.
The Same Play, Different Player
“Every era reaches for its own version of that mark. The symbol changes. The question, who decides who’s spared, is close to five thousand years old, and the technology itself has never once answered it.”
A company called Tau Robotics just opened a waitlist in San Francisco. They plan to send a humanoid robot to clean your home for $30 an hour. The robot isn’t fully autonomous, a human operator watches and guides it from somewhere else. I find this fascinating and would try it myself. But I want to know who’s behind it, and whether the business is even sustainable.
Read the fine print and the story shrinks. A real person still does the work, just from behind a desk somewhere else. That adds distance between worker and customer, not less. Right now it’s an invite-only waitlist for a business nobody has tested at scale.
The Ever Shortening Reality and Fantasy Gap
This gap between story and fact isn’t just a Tau Robotics problem. While finishing my book, 50 Years Behind the Wheel, I kept landing on the same point. Technology is rarely the problem. The problem is the people who figure out how to make you use it for their benefit, not yours. A hammer can build a house or tear one down. The tool is neutral. The person swinging it is not.
You can see the same shape in AI right now. Right after the electric vehicle boom, Wisk Aero is building toward pilotless flying taxis, backed by a White House certification program. Most companies fly with a pilot first, build a safety record, then ask regulators to approve the pilotless version. Wisk wants to skip straight there.
If you can prove safety quietly, you’ve won the hardest part, getting people to trust the tech with their lives, the same way we trust cars and planes. Sell the future loudly today. Prove it later. A cleaning robot with a hidden human, or a plane that can’t fly itself yet, it’s the same sequence. Announce the destination first. Let the arrival catch up whenever it does.
None of this makes the tech fake. The tool stays neutral, how people use it decides good or bad. But the future gets announced, funded, and marketed, and in China’s case, forced by law, long before anyone has proof it works. Nobody asks what you want. By the time results come in, a whole generation has already built their lives around someone else’s bet.
The Best Version of the Other Argument
The strongest pushback to my argument showed up the same week, by coincidence. Meta’s CEO wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing the real danger isn’t AI moving too fast, it’s AI staying in too few hands. Don’t mistake this for someone speaking for you, Meta runs a full-time PR machine like every big company.
His real point is that history rewards sharing tools, not locking them up. Other AI CEOs make the same call for open source, and even Microsoft, once the biggest defender of closed software, backs this now. Notice the pattern. When a company falls behind, it starts calling for cooperation.
The Wright brothers weren’t a big institution. If AI becomes a personal tool, like electricity or the PC, regular people get more power at first, before big companies figure out how to control it. Here’s the irony. Facebook started as a way to reconnect with classmates. Now its CEO warns that too much power in too few hands is dangerous.
It’s a real argument, but it’s still a tech CEO defending his own market, not the technology itself. Garage revolutions do happen. But this answers a smaller question than the one I’m asking. Whether AI ends up locked in a few companies or spread across every phone, one question stays open either way. Who decided this was the thing to build next, at this cost to everything else we could have funded instead?
The Mark That Decides Who’s Spared
“Nobody asked the marketing major, the Japanese-language student, or the woman on the waitlist what she actually wanted. The asking was never part of the plan.”
There’s an old story about this exact feeling. In Exodus, the night the last plague hits Egypt, households with lamb’s blood on their doorposts get spared. Centuries later, during the siege of Jerusalem, Ezekiel describes something similar. A mark, the Hebrew letter tav, drawn like a simple X, gets placed on the foreheads of the righteous. Whatever destroys the city passes them by.
Two moments, centuries apart, same story. Something huge and indifferent is coming. The only real question is who gets marked safe, and who draws that mark.
It’s probably a coincidence that a robot-labor company calls itself Tau. The Greek letter has nothing to do with the Hebrew one. But the echo is worth sitting with, because every era reaches for its own version of that mark. Sometimes it’s a ministry deciding which twelve disciples get to survive. Sometimes it’s a term sheet deciding which city gets the waitlist first. The symbol changes. The question underneath, who decides who’s spared, is almost five thousand years old. Technology has never once answered it.
What Was Never Asked, But Decided Nonetheless
None of this argues against AI, robotics, or the degrees China chose to fund. I use AI every day and like it. It’s a tool. But I want to learn how it fits my life before someone else decides that for me.
After forty years working, I’ve noticed something. Companies that control a tool make more money deciding how you use it than you ever will. Think about your phone. Apple and Google track where you go and what you like, on a phone you paid for. Free alternatives exist, but most people don’t bother.
Cured diseases, safer planes, businesses built without venture money, all of that is worth wanting too. This technology has already delivered some of it.
But look closer, at the personal level. Nobody asked the marketing major, the language student, or the photography student what they wanted before the ministry closed their programs. Nobody asked the woman on Tau’s waitlist if thirty dollars an hour for a robot in her kitchen solved the problem she actually had. The plan came from people who already decided what everyone else needed.
It comes back to knowing what you want before someone hands you a tool built for their benefit. Not what you’re told to want. Not what a government scorecard says you should have studied. What would you spend the next ten years building, if anyone had bothered to ask?
Nobody stops you from saying no thank you. Nobody stops you from asking simple questions. Does this serve me? Before any big decision, ask one more question. Who does this serve?
Here’s the funny part. A more accurate name for this technology would just be enhanced computer power. Call it ECP. By threatening our independence again, it might finally push us to ask the harder question. What do I want to do? Simple, right?