Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm.
Yesterday, multiple Anthropic employees casually announced online that they thought the types of AI they’re building could kill billions of people. Not in some distant hypothetical future, but in the...
View ArticleAnthropic Just Threatened to Kill Billions of People. This Is Not Okay.
Yesterday, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic engineer, resigned. As he explained on X: “[OpenAI and Anthropic] are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” A former...
View ArticleWendell Berry and the Promise of the Deep Life
Wendell Berry died last week at 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he farmed his land using traditional techniques and wrote with pencil and paper in a cabin lacking electricity. Berry was...
View ArticleAre We at War with AI Agent “Civilizations”?
I thought I was done talking about the OpenAI hacking attack from July, but I was wrong. Last week, OpenAI released more details about the incident, which turned out to be stranger than people...
View ArticleHas AI Gone Rogue?
The AI story of the summer should probably be the uncertain financial position of the AI labs hoping to launch record-breaking IPOs shortly. Technology news, however, has instead been dominated by...
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On AI Coding and Its Discontents
Back in January, I received a note from a senior software engineer in Silicon Valley. He described himself as an AI skeptic who became converted after trying Claude Code for the first time....
View ArticleDid OpenAI’s New Model “Go Rogue”?
A couple of weeks ago, the AI company Hugging Face announced that they had discovered an intrusion into their production infrastructure. They didn’t know the source, but noted that large language...
View ArticleWhy Reading Matters
Last week, Rose Horowitch published a splashy Atlantic article titled “The End of Reading is Here.” (Ironically, given the subject matter, it weighed in at over 8,500 words.) Horowitch’s argument,...
View ArticleBeware of Productivity Paradoxes
Few recent technological innovations were better poised to become a productivity slam dunk than the personal computer. Spreadsheets, word processors, databases, presentation software, email – the list...
View ArticleDear AI Companies: Stop the “Doom Trolling”
Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario. The Ford Motor Company releases a slick whitepaper making the alarming claim that they’re concerned their popular F-150 pickup trucks might soon...
View ArticleAI Isn’t Breaking Work. It’s Already Broken.
The Financial Times recently reported an interview with Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work AI Institute. Hinds was discussing a new survey of 6,000 digital workers, which included the following...
View ArticleWhy Isn’t AI Taking Our Jobs?
The leaders of AI companies often compare their technology to industrial automation: just as machines eliminated jobs that depended on human brawn, AI will eliminate jobs that rely on brains....
View ArticleThe Pope vs. Silicon Valley
Last fall, the Notre Dame philosopher, Meghan Sullivan, participated in a closed-door meeting at the Vatican. She was there to discuss AI ethics with a group of religious thinkers, academics, and...
View ArticleOn God and LLMs
The second chapter of Genesis poetically describes the beginning of the human story. “The Lord formed Adam from the dust of the earth,” it reads. “He blew into his nostrils the breath of life and man...
View ArticleThe Dark Side of the Jevons Paradox
If you’ve been following technology news recently, you’ve probably noticed a sudden increase in references to a 19th-century economics theory called the Jevons Paradox, which is named for the...
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Easy is Overrated
“Something is up in academic research,” write the members of an AI Task Force convened by the journal Organization Science. As they go on to elaborate: “If you are an editor or reviewer at a journal...
View ArticleOn Bottlenecks and Productivity
David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sports Gene and Range, has a new book out called Inside the Box. As with all of Epstein’s books, I really enjoyed it. He’s one of...
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Who Asked For This?
Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto published an insightful article in The Verge. It boasted an intriguing title: “Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want.” “Within recent memory, people who...
View ArticleBrandon Sanderson vs. AI Art
Late last year, the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at Dragonsteel Nexus, an annual conference organized by his media company. It was titled, “The Hidden Cost of AI Art.” As Sanderson...
View ArticleIs Claude Mythos “Terrifying” or Just Hype?
Last week, millions of New York Times readers were subjected to an alarming column by Thomas Friedman. “Normally right now I would be writing about the geopolitical implications of the war with...
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