Living at the center of the artificial intelligence boom has not made Bay Area residents less conflicted about it. A Los Angeles Times feature published Thursday traced that tension from Fort Mason protest lines to an Oakland campus courtyard where teenagers helped elders set up phones.
Outside OpenAI's DevDay conference at the former military base on Sept. 29, demonstrators — some in killer-robot costumes — chanted "Sam Altman, get off it; choose people over profit" and held signs against lethal autonomous weapons, ICE contracts and soaring rents, the Times and NBC Bay Area reported. Inside, CEO Sam Altman told developers he hoped AI could feel "more like a new renaissance than a new industrial revolution," while the company showed agent tools meant to act as a second set of hands on users' work, NBC reported.
A different tech week across the bay
The next day in Oakland, Oakland Tech Week struck a quieter note. At Mills College at Northeastern University, Senior Technology Day matched residents with Northeastern and Oakland Unified students for hands-on help. One senior left with Clipper card transit fare loaded on her iPhone after an hour with an 18-year-old business student; another sorted email sync and cloud storage with a psychology major, Northeastern Global News reported.
AI literacy educator Norman Weekes, who founded community groups teaching Black and senior residents about chatbots, warned the room that tools can flatter users and spread bad information. "If you never use AI, that's great, but you should understand it because ... it's going to affect people you love, if not yourself," he told the Times. Assata Olugbala, 81, of Oakland said Google's Gemini kept answering questions she never asked and that she wants more human contact, not bot conversations.
Policy pressure meets pocket anxiety
The Times noted that anxiety spiked after an Anthropic researcher resigned last month arguing companies are "gambling with our lives," while President Trump and major AI firms signed a voluntary self-policing accord and Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed California bills aimed at safer AI for children and workers, plus an order to speed safeguards including a "kill switch" if systems slip out of control. In San Francisco, housing advocates at the DevDay protest argued future IPOs will mean more evictions. Across the bay, the same week mixed fear, curiosity and practical help — a snapshot of a region that builds the tools and still argues over who they serve.