# Commentary: I build with AI every day. In Lexington, it's already doing more good than harm. **Published:** 2026-06-04T14:41:00.000Z **Source:** [Editorial](https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6787?view_id=14&redirect=true) **AI-generated:** yes (claude-opus-4-8) **Canonical:** https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/commentary-the-case-for-ai-optimism _A council member said artificial intelligence has "far greater potential for collective harm than collective good." I've spent four years building with these tools — and the free civic maps in our own city are the rebuttal._ At the General Government and Planning Committee meeting on June 2, Council Member [Emma Curtis](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6787) (District 4) said something I've been turning over ever since. Introducing the city's AI policy — a policy she sponsored — she was honest enough to admit it didn't match her own convictions. "At my core," she said, "I believe that A.I. has far greater potential for collective harm than collective good." I want to start by giving her credit, because it's rare: she championed a governance framework she personally distrusts, because the city needs guardrails either way. That's principled. The environmental cost of large data centers is real. So is the concentration of this technology in a handful of corporate hands. Those are concerns worth raising, and I'm glad someone on council is raising them. But on the core question — harm versus good — I've come to the opposite conclusion. I've been building software with AI professionally since 2022, nearly every working day, and I am, frankly, blown away by what it can do for ordinary people. So I'd like to make the case for optimism, and I'd like to make it with evidence sitting in our own city. **Here's the thing about "collective good": it's not a slogan. It's a thing you can click on.** Over the past year, using AI, I've built and given away a small library of civic tools that didn't exist before, that cost residents nothing, and that require no login: - The LFUCG Meeting Archive — every council and committee meeting, transcribed and searchable in plain English. Ask it a question, get an answer with a link to the exact moment in the video. The city has recorded these meetings for years; until now, almost nobody could actually find anything in them. - The 2026 LFUCG Donor Dashboard — who is funding the people asking for your vote, laid out so you can see it before you fill in the bubble. - The Lexington Precincts Data Map — click any precinct and see how that corner of the city actually voted in 2024, race by race. - The Lexington Map Layers — cameras, flood gauges, council districts, construction, live incidents and more: the public datasets the county keeps, stacked onto one map you can actually read. None of that was funded. No grant, no vendor contract, no development team. One person, with these tools, turned public data that was technically "available" into something a working parent can use in the ninety seconds before the bus comes. If that isn't collective good, I don't know what we're measuring. The reason I can build those things isn't that I got smarter in 2022. It's that AI collapses the distance between an idea and a finished thing. A small example from my own block: back in 2023 I wanted a pollinator garden for my neighborhood. I used AI to help design it — the plant list, the sun map, the layout — and then to help write the grant application that paid for it. The flowers are real. The bees are real. The grant was real money. What AI removed was the part that usually kills these ideas: the dozen hours of unglamorous work between "wouldn't it be nice" and "here's a fundable plan." Multiply that across a city full of people who have good ideas and no time, and you start to see the shape of the upside. **We've been here before — every time.** The horse dealers of 1905 weren't stupid to fear the automobile; it ended their trade. The carpenter handed his first circular saw didn't love it on day one. Every genuinely powerful tool arrives looking like a threat to the people whose craft it touches, and the fear is usually sincere and sometimes even right about the disruption. But find me the person today who wishes we'd banned the car to protect the stable, or outlawed the power saw to protect the hand plane. The disruption was real. The verdict of hindsight is still unanimous. The mistake is never adopting the tool — it's failing to steer it. Because here's what I think an optimist actually has to do: insist we point this thing at love, and good, and human connection. The most valuable things in the years ahead won't be the things AI can do — they'll be the things it can't. Our connection to the physical world, and our connection to each other. A garden you can stand in. A neighbor you actually know. A council meeting you show up to. If AI is good for anything, it's good for buying back the hours we lose to drudgery and handing them back to us to spend face to face. That isn't a threat to human connection. Used right, it's the thing that finally makes room for it. **Which brings me to the real danger — and it isn't the tool.** If the thoughtful, well-meaning people decide the right response to AI is to put up walls and back away, we will not stop AI. We will only guarantee that the people left holding it are the ones who never had a second thought — the worst actors and the deepest pockets. Curtis is right to worry about a handful of billionaires controlling this. But the answer to that worry is not to cede the field to them. It's the opposite. It's for the rest of us to grab the wheel. We the people are the bus driver here, and we should act like it. We also have more leverage than the pessimists think. If Anthropic raised its prices to a million dollars tomorrow, the open-source community would still be building capable AI models and giving them away for free — the same way it already gives away the software that runs the internet. This technology will not be locked behind one corporate door unless we choose to stand outside it. The commons is real, and it's ours to use. So the question in front of Lexington was never "AI or no AI." It's whether we drive, or get driven. I've seen what one person can build for this city with these tools in a single year — free, for everybody. I'd respectfully ask Council Member Curtis, and anyone who shares her worry, to imagine what a whole city of us could build if we decided the potential for good was worth reaching for. I think it's enormous. I think it's already here. And I think we should drive.  **[Paul Oliva](/about/paul-oliva)** is the founder and publisher of The Lexington Times and a software engineer who has built with AI professionally since 2022. He builds free, open civic tools for Lexington — including the meeting archive, donor dashboard, and maps linked above. ## Sources - [Council Member Emma Curtis's remarks — LFUCG General Government & Planning Committee, June 2, 2026 (clip 6787)](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/meeting/6787) - [Off-Beat: The AI policy, the Pope, and the data-center ban nobody mentioned — The Lexington Times, June 3, 2026](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/off-beat-ai-policy-and-the-data-center-tell) - [LFUCG Meeting Archive](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/) - [2026 LFUCG Donor Dashboard](https://app.lexingtonky.news/lfucg/) - [Lexington Precincts Data Map](https://precincts.lexingtonky.news/) - [Lexington Map Layers](https://maps.lexingtonky.news/) --- This is an opinion column by Paul Oliva, founder and publisher of The Lexington Times. The views are his own. It was drafted with AI assistance (claude-opus-4-8) from his notes and experience, and finalized by him for publication.