America Is More - by Quinten Lisowe - The Lisowe
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America Is More<br>Happy 250 America and Reflections on AI Engineer World's Fair
Quinten Lisowe<br>Jul 05, 2026
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It’s July 4th, 2026. America’s 250th birthday. After a week at the AI Engineering World’s Fair, this feels like a good moment to try to put into words what I think the American spirit actually is.<br>It’s not that it’s a melting pot.<br>It’s not about guns.<br>I’d hazard to say it’s not even freedom of speech.<br>America is more.<br>More ambition. More scale. More delusion. More beauty. More decay. More stupidity. More genius. More success. More failure. More immigration. More guns. More freedom of speech. More of everything, all at once.<br>I came to San Francisco for AI Engineer World’s Fair, and by the end of the trip I felt like I had accidentally walked into the purest expression of that idea possible.<br>The first thing that hit me was the physical scale of the place.<br>Flying into San Francisco, looking out at the landscape, the mountains, the hills, the way the city seems to be built in defiance of the terrain itself, it felt absurd. Beautiful, but absurd. The roads in the city tilt at angles that make driving a car feel like a roller coaster. The landscape surrounding the city looks like it was designed by a set director who took “good enough” as a personal insult.<br>Then I got to the venue, Moscone West.
3D model of Moscone West. It is difficult to convey over the internet just how grand this place felt.<br>Massive. Grand. Oversized in a way that felt almost theatrical. It had that very American quality of not being content to merely function. It needed to impress you too, to be better than any conference hall you’d been in before.<br>After a few hours at the “New Engineer Orientation” meetup for first time attendees to AIE, I made my way outside and decided to head to my hotel. I looked at google maps to see how close it was, saw it was only 15 minutes and figured I could just walk.<br>Within minutes I passed a man so hunched over and visibly broken that it almost didn’t register as real at first. Not because homelessness was some abstract concept to me before, but because the intensity of it felt unnatural. And then I saw another. And another. And another. I checked my phone, saw where I was, and immediately went wide-eyed as I recognized the name “Tenderloin”.<br>Even in my rural part of the midwest, I had heard of this place, and had a strong hunch that this was a bad idea. If you haven’t had the privilege, look up “tenderloin sf” or “fent bent'“. Apparently being hopelessly addicted to fentanyl is so common there that it has its own colloquial term.<br>So instead of walking back, I ordered my first Waymo, ten feet from one of these slumped over zombies.<br>Inside the car: leather seats, silence, sensors, software, cameras, a machine doing something that would have sounded like science fiction not that long ago.<br>Outside the car: piss on the sidewalk, people wandering around as vagrants or laying on the side of the sidewalk, not even begging for money.<br>The dichotomy between the two did not stop there. As I was autonomously driven to my hotel I could not stop staring out the window at all the drug-addled homeless people. The intensity I initially saw didn’t stop for the entire ride either.<br>As my Waymo pulls up to my 4-star hotel, I am greeted by grand neo-classical doors that automatically open for me as I approach. I walk inside and see granite steps and a lobby that just feels pristine.
The Marker in SF<br>This country is not moderate. It never has been. The people who crossed an ocean to get here were not moderate. The separatists were not moderate when they signed the Declaration of Independence. The pioneers who crossed a continent in search of getting filthy rich off of the gold rush were not moderate. The country that scaled the industrial revolution, has the highest incarceration rates in the world, build cross-continental railroad tracks, has been one of the fattest countries on earth for the last several decades, pioneered commercial deployment of self-driving cars, spends more on the military than the next 6 countries combined, has the majority of the frontier AI labs, has not one but two reusable rocket companies (and the only ones in the world to do it), and not to mention HAS GONE TO THE FUCKING MOON , is not at all reasonable or moderate.<br>That’s America.<br>A land of extremes.<br>America is not subtle.<br>America was built by people willing to leave. People who looked at the old world, rejected it, crossed an ocean, and built a new life for themselves in the new world. The gold rush filtered for that a second time, because it wasn’t enough to come to America. Some people got here, looked west, and said, “I want more.”<br>So they crossed a continent too.<br>Places carry the values of the people who built them, and California feels like it was built by people with an abnormally high tolerance for risk, reinvention, and delusion. I mean that...