The AI Race Nobody Voted For Is Already Underway

Collective awareness of the AI prisoner's dilemma has not produced collective action — and that gap is the story. The competition between the United States and China is characterized by participants who understand the structural trap and are accelerating regardless. This is not hypocrisy; it is the precise logic of a prisoner's dilemma, where rational individual choices produce collectively irrational outcomes. What is unusual about 2026 is that the irrationality has become legible to observers outside institutional settings, including the Bluesky users who noted that humanity has "no one driving…