Samantha Oltman: AI's Inevitable Future Is a Story Being Sold

The phrase "get on board or you will be left behind" has become so familiar in AI discussions that it reads as observation rather than argument. Writing in The Guardian, Samantha Oltman names this as the load-bearing move in public AI rhetoric: however contradictory the specific fears and promises might be, they "fit neatly into the overarching message of the people building this technology: AI's dominance is inevitable. Get on board or you will be left behind."

The interesting part of that observation is what it implies about the structure of the discourse. You can be optimistic or apocalyptic, worry about job losses or celebrate efficiency gains, and still end up at the same destination. Inevitability is the conclusion regardless of which premise you start from. Oltman's counter is plain: "the version of AI that we're being sold doesn't have to be the version we buy. Nor does it need to be the story we believe in."

What the piece does not supply, at least in what has circulated publicly from it, is a detailed map of what those alternative versions might look like, or which specific actors she names as exemplifying the absolutism she describes. The argument, as far as available reporting reflects it, is primarily diagnostic -- it identifies a rhetorical mechanism more than it charts a different path forward.

Still, the diagnostic step is not nothing. For anyone evaluating AI tools in their organization, or following AI governance debates, recognizing when "you have no choice" is doing the heavy argumentative work is a useful instinct to develop. Oltman's piece gives that instinct a name.