BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

  • A glossary for AI cultists vs. us

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    The subhed on that Politico story above gets the election right in crediting “safety hawks, populists, and child-safety advocates” who united to oppose AI companies and their data centers in the midterms. But Politico got the main headline terribly wrong. These are not “AI doomers.” AI doomers are the AI cultists who, paradoxically and illogically, claim their own technology could doom humankind — and that’s why they should be given unfettered control over it.

    The doomers are the bad guys. But Politico’s headline said the bad guys won because that’s how these bad guys skew the language around AI and corrupt discourse about it. The result is that the top AI technologists and investors talk at 180-degree cross-purposes to media, policymakers, and the public. When they say “safety” it’s not how the rest of us define “safety.” Same for “regulation,” “humanity,” “doom,” even “future.”

    Their intent is to confuse public discourse, and it works, making us think that when we say “safety” we’re discussing the same idea. We’re not — witness that Politico headline and too much credulous media coverage of AI.

    So it is time to provide a helpful glossary contrasting the AI boys’ language with ours.

    Future vs. “future”

    What we mean: Next month, next year, next election, maybe next generation — time reasonably understood to be under our influence.

    What the AI cultists mean: Their faux philosophers are no slouches. They work at Oxford — or worked; one of them, Nick Bostrom, was ousted with his Future of Humanity Institute when racist emails in his past were exposed. His fellow traveler, William MacAskill, wrote What We Owe the Future, published by Hachette, a textbook for the ideology they call Longtermism: that the future that matters is whatever affects the 10-to-the-54th future human beings yet to come. Their implication is that what bedevils us in the present — whether injustice or inequity, plague or Holocaust — pales in comparison to anything that would hinder the happiness of all those future beings.

    These technocrats are utilitarians who contend they can calculate and affect total happiness. That is what leads to such noxious thinking as this from one of their number: Here, a New York Times profile of Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei perfectly illustrates the poison fruit of Utilitarianism.

    In a blog post for GiveWell that year, Dr. Amodei discussed a decision to give away $10,000. He was choosing to donate to either the Stop TB Partnership, which focused on preventing adult tuberculosis, or VillageReach, which helped vaccinate children in African villages.

    The Stop TB Partnership, Dr. Amodei wrote, was superior in “cost-effectiveness” because it served adults and “adults are capable of deeper and more meaningful experiences” than infants. “I think an adult death is perhaps 2 or 3 times worse than an infant’s death,” he added.

    He thinks he can judge which humans are more valuable. That is the bridge that connects Utilitarianism and Longtermism to eugenics: the making of the Übermensch.

    Human vs. “human”

    What we mean: Us.

    What the AI cultists mean: They mix the tenets of technology and philosophy, claiming they can use computers to build better humans — that indeed, human and machine will merge and become one in what they call the singularity. That is their doctrine of Singulatarianism.

    Their quest begins with the chips that cultist extraordinaire Elon Musk wants to implant in heads, leads next to the humanoid robots Musk plans to sell (instead of his punchline-on-wheels, the Cybertruck), and ends with the belief that human psyche can be uploaded to machines and live forever and everywhere.

    That encapsulates their belief in Extroprianism: that the mind can transcend the limits of the body. It also speaks to their version of a philosophy called Rationalism: when future humans think not like the base animals we are but instead rationally, like, well, algorithms. When the AI boys build what they call neural networks, some think they are building brains.

    And that is how Bostrom gets to his magic number of 10-with-54-zeroes future human beings. They’re not like us. They’re not us. They are humans as machines, machines as humans, better than us: Übermaschinen.

    Environment vs. “environment”

    What we mean: Our dear Earth.

    What the AI cultists mean: The universe, which they contend they can and will colonize with their human/machines. That is why Musk obsesses about Mars. This is called Cosmism.

    Altruism vs “altruism:

    What we mean: Unselfishly thinking and generously acting on behalf of others’ needs.

    What the AI cultists mean: You’ve no doubt heard of “effective altruism” (EA), another of the AI cultists’ philosophies. This one was made infamous by Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted crypto fraudster and proponent of EA.

    In the beginning, EA sounded reasonable enough, motivating the well-to-do to focus their charitable generosity on acts that will cause the most good. The example always used is buying mosquito nets to save lives. Who can nitpick that?

    Ah, but when you follow this Utilitarian string — maximizing good — to its extreme, mixing in other of these zealous philosophies along the way, you throw out the mosquito nets and the African children saved by them in favor of investments that will benefit Bostrom’s Übermenschen: technologies like superintelligent AI. These effective altruists believe they know best how to invest society’s wealth and so they should have more of it. These altruists aren’t so altruistic after all; they are greedy money-grubbers and this is their wealth gospel.

    Doom vs. “doom”

    What we mean: ’Bye, all.

    What the AI cultists mean: Their machines will become so intelligent, so powerful, so uncontrollable that they can destroy humankind. This is the thesis of Bostrom’s famous paperclip scenario, in which machines told to make nothing but paperclips will turn every resource on earth into paperclips, never mind humans’ needs for energy and oxygen: Clippy’s revenge.

    There’s another variant on Doomerism from its primary prophet, Eliezer Yudkowsky, coauthor of the Doom bible, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI would Kill Us All (also cynically published by Hachette). Cheery fellow. He loves the idea of superhuman AI but fears that if it is built badly and backfires, it could destroy humankind before it serves Bostrom’s future beings. Thus Yudkowsky says all AI should be stopped until we’re ready, else it should be destroyed with thermonuclear weapons so the remaining humans can learn their lesson and pick up work when they’re ready. This he calls safety.

    Safety vs. “safety”

    What we mean: Since the seminal Stochastic Parrots paper in 2021, AI safety has been clearly defined, focusing on harm to the environment (resources and climate), economy (labor and cost), public discourse (bias and disinformation). It is not complicated; so clear AI can grok it. I asked AI (Gemini) to summarize the paper’s definition [its emphasis]: “For the authors, ‘AI safety’ is not about preventing an autonomous AI takeover; it is about preventing real-world harm to human beings — especially marginalized populations — caused by irresponsible data practices, resource consumption, and the uncritical deployment of large-scale statistical models.” Right.

    What the AI cultists mean: If we take all the related isms I’ve mentioned thus far — Transhumanism, Extroprianism, Singulatarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism — and put them together, it spells TESCREAL, an acronym coined by Stochastic Parrots coauthor Timnit Gebru with Émile Torres. Here is their paper that explains these faux philosophies and their roots in eugenics.

    And that is what makes up the foundation of the AI cultists’ definition of safety: managing the all-powerful AI they are building so it does not, one way or another, destroy humankind. Safety to them has nothing to do with environmental damage, childhood safety, or disinformation. It’s all about doom.

    This bit of dictionary disarray comes home to roost in media coverage of AI “safety,” as when The New York Times reports on a gathering hosted by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) that attracted odd bedfellows Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon — without once mentioning that FLI is funded by known doomers and that “safety” went undefined. Through such coverage, the doomers — AI boys of one stripe or another — gain legitimacy.

    The same problem arises when some employee leaves an AI company to supposedly blow the whistle on a lack of attention to safety there. We think they mean safety in our definition and reporters never ask them to define it. If they bothered, they’d find that often these departees are doomers.

    Media and policymakers are blind to the cultists’ dangerous nuttiness because they successfully hide behind virtuous words — safety, altruism, and regulation — whose meanings they have hijacked and mangled.

    Regulation vs. “regulation”

    What we mean: Government intervention in an industry or activity to ensure a mandated level of transparency and accountability to the public good.

    See, for example, Mallory McMorrow’s proposal to regulate AI, calling for transparency and testing, export controls, and humans in charge. We can and should debate the particulars, but that is a sane starting point.

    What the AI cultists mean: The so-called frontier AI companies — Anthropic and OpenAI — say they favor regulation. But in their plan, this means they write the regulations to favor themselves and exclude start-up and open-source (open-weight) competitors. This is classic regulatory capture.

    They also tout their self-regulation, with Anthropic putting forth its “constitution” for AI, asserting that they can make machines (which can’t count the Rs in “strawberry”) operate according to high principles. OpenAI has proposed frankly naive plans for world bodies to oversee AI.

    Some AI boys, led by VC Marc Andreessen, are accelerationists. They believe any regulation hindering the progress of AI is evil. As Andreessen wrote in his breathless techno-optimist manifesto: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential…. We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being…. We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better…. We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone — we are literally making sand think.”

    The serious problem with all the definitional disconnects I’ve outlined here is that without agreement on what harm is to be mitigated, it is impossible to hold a meaningful debate over how to regulate it, how to hold its makers and users accountable while sharing the fruits of this impressive technology.

    Intelligence vs. “intelligence”

    What we mean: Don’t know. That is why the first book I commissioned for the Bloomsbury series I am editing, Intelligence: AI & Humanity, is by Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, who will examine this human construct in the context of history, where it has been used to exclude and has inspired a mania to measure what remains an abstract concept. To my mind, intelligence is that which defines humanity.

    What the AI cultists mean: They think it is easy not only to define intelligence but to build it and set benchmarks for it. Not just that, they think they can build machines that will beat human intelligence by any measure. They call this Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)— general in the sense that it can do anything we can do — or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) — super in the sense that it can do all that better than we can. The frontier companies headed for their trillion-dollar IPOs say they’re nearly there, that their generative AI chat machines will soon be so damned smart they can build and improve on themselves.

    OpenAI’s Sam Altman and others in the field treat intelligence as a commodity their companies can make, own, and sell, as if from a vending machine. That is their utmost dehumanization of us all.

    There are AI people who are not in the cult, thank goodness. One I admire is Yann LeCun, who believes that language-based generative models will take development of AI only so far. He favors real-world models that learn the laws of physics and are built for and limited to specific, controllable functions, rather than becoming the everything machine. He also is an advocate of open-source, open-weight AI to spur competition and innovation. Another proponent of world models is Fei-Fei Li.

    I wish scientists and contrarian builders like LeCun would get more attention in media coverage of AI. I wish scholars like Gebru would be called upon to give audiences context on the outlandish claims of the AI boys. I wish journalists would press those AI boys on definitions inherent in those claims. I wish they would stop allowing the boys to anthropomorphize their machines — as if they have motives and morals — and stop doing so themselves. And when writing about AI, I wish they would discard the AI boys’ dictionary in favor of Webster’s.

    This American election was indeed a repudiation of AI and its data centers. But I say data centers are merely the McGuffins of the drama — that is, tangible symbols of the actual objects of dislike and distrust: the AI oligarchs and billionaires who wield their wealth in our elections, who threaten to destroy humankind (and demand the power to do so), who are generally jerks, and who maim the language to obfuscate their own intent.

    I think AI is an amazing and promising technology whose opportunities we have just begun to explore. I cohost two podcasts about AI (Intelligent Machines and AI Inside) and, as I said, I’m editing a book series to bring the humanities into the discussion about it. But I say the wrong people are in charge of this technology, and those people are conning the journalists and politicians who should see through them to stop them from ruining it for us all. Start with clear language.

    As I finished writing this, I returned to Politico and found that the editors (or A/B testing or AI) thought better of the headline above. This is how a later version read:

  • It’s education, stupid

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    Studying The Times’ stats on the midterms, one conclusion stands out clearly: It was uneducated, white, older, often Southern men who did not ride the blue wave, who continued to back the Trumpists. Out of that, I see two lessons: the need to support a pluralistic society and education.

    It is time to end government and politics built around this stubborn minority of old white men, a demographic that amounts to less than a quarter of the adult population across the country, about 10 percent if one adds the South as a factor. It is time to build government instead around the pluralistic majority that won this election.

    Here, from my book The Gutenberg Parenthesis is sociologist William Kornhauser’s definition of a pluralistic society — apt guidance for us today:

    It is also time for the left in power in states across the country to support and rebuild education. One might argue that the uneducated voted this way because they have harder employment and economic prospects and feel left behind. Maybe. I prefer to think that education itself has salutary effects on citizens, making them less vulnerable to attempts to sway them towIt is also time for the left in power in states across the country to support and rebuild education. One might argue that the uneducated voted this way because they have harder employment and economic prospects and feel left behind. Maybe. I prefer to think that education itself has salutary effects on citizens, making them less vulnerable to attempts to sway them toward fear, bigotry, and hate because of their ignorance. And so the education I support is not just vocational, it emphasizes the humanities and social sciences: education for education’s sake, widening the mind, ennobling the individual.

    Here are the numbers from The Times’ analysis focusing just on voters with no more than a high school education. You will note that every category shifted left. But majorities in many categories of voters still stayed behind, in the red:

    • men by 9 points,
    • white voters by 26 points,
    • white men by 34 points,
    • white women by 17 points,
    • men over age 45 by 7 to 10 points,
    • white men over age 45 by 40 points.
    • white Southerners by 46 points.

    Yes, make gas and groceries cheaper. Get rid of Trump’s tariffs and war if possible. Root out corruption. Release the damned Epstein files. Get ready to expand the Supreme Court. Impeach half the executive branch. All that.

    But first and foremost: Educate, educate, educate.

    Even as I celebrate the emergence — the victory — of our pluralistic society in this election, The Times has twice in a week dismissed “identity politics,” arguing that if candidates don’t say “vote for me because I’m a ____”, it’s dead. This is willful blindness on the part of The Times, a profoundly conservative (not Republican) institution that defends status quo power and institutions such as itself. Still, The Times itself cannot stop covering its vision of identity politics, showing its priorities and worldview. Whom does the #BrokenTimes rush talk to after this great pluralistic election? The great variety of voters who won? No, old white men in the South:

    In deep-red Texas, conservatives are trying to make sense of what just happened to their longtime Republican stronghold. We visited a men’s bible study as they gathered for the first time since the state flipped in the midterm election.

    — The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2026-11-07T18:18:21.929Z

    Let’s be clear about one thing: Black voters saved Democracy’s ass. If the Democrats don’t use their power to assure voting rights and erase the Republicans’ racist policies, they will have every right to say, “Next time’s on you all.”

  • A day in the life of the #BrokenTimes

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    Practically every day on the socials, under the hashtag #BrokenTimes, I bring receipts to my claim that The New York Times is failing us and democracy. I do not wish to join in the cacophony from the Trumpists about “fake news.” To the contrary, I do this hoping to hold The Times to account and make it better. As we approach the critical midterm elections, here are just a few examples of The Times’ failures so far on one day — October 30, 2026.

    In the lamentable tradition of The Times and #ButHerEmails, the paper has been harping this week on its story about two Dan Sullivans in the Alaska senatorial election. Its primary source for the supposed investigation of perfectly legal acts retracted all that she told The Times, but it went ahead with the story anyway. On this day, the Democrat, Mary Peltola, responds to its accusations and says she knew nothing about “tricking voters.” Look at the home-page block above — with a magnifying glass — and you can see how The Times played that: hidden as an also-ran heading under its live blog. By midday, even that small note had fallen off the home page, where earlier in the week the original story was emblazoned all the day long. So determined is The Times to deliver its hatchet job.

    The Times looks at the world through Republican-colored glasses. You can see that on the home page and above in its coverage of the South Carolina senatorial race, covering it from the perspective of Darline Graham rather than that of the opponent that could pull off this upset, Dr. Annie Andrews.

    That is even more the case in The Times’ coverage of my congressional district, NJ-7, where the paper devotes a long puff piece about disappearing nepo-Rep. Tom Kean Jr., even though they could not get an interview — or returned email — from him. The Times calls him “press-shy.” He’s also constituent-shy. His opponent, Rebecca Bennett, is not mentioned until the very end, after much ink about the “esteemed” Kean family’s history starting the nation, about Kean’s “grasp of policy and an instinct to work back channels, if not a mic”, and his “mild, under-the-radar manner.”

    And through whose lens is The Times covering California’s gubernatorial race this day? Through that of the Republican, Steve Hilton.

    In Michigan — as my cohost on our Breaking the News podcast, Julie Roginsky, said today — The Times is setting the Democrats up for a fight or fall by portraying Abdul El-Sayed as the standard-bearer for “the left’s potency heading into the next presidential contest.” This critical race isn’t critical enough, it has to represent something bigger: a trend.

    The big story after election day will be whether elections still stand: whether the Republicans will undermine or refuse to accept the vote. This is where The Times fails us most profoundly: by refusing to recognize the dire gravity of democracy’s fall. Here, it covers the merely “unusual” election-year activity of the Justice Department. It’s far more than unusual. It is election interference, voter disenfranchisement, authoritarianism. But if The Times refuses to call lies lies, it is even more adverse to calling fascism fascism and reporting on it.

    Instead, The Times leaves it to the alien oligarch in our midst, Elon Musk, to declare the risk to democracy if … [checks notes] … Democrats win. Who the hell decided that The Times should give such serious, indeed even-handed coverage of Mr. Musk’s “extensive rationale for his involvement to date” in attempting to buy elections? Editors like to think that their super power is what we call “news judgment.” That is terrible judgment.

    The Times loves polls and predictions. I contend that prediction is not journalism; it does nothing to inform the electorate but could influence elections. And as for polls, I often quote the late Columbia Prof. James Carey, who cautioned that opinion polls preempt the public discourse they are intended to measure. I wrote about that in The Gutenberg Parenthesis:

    Now is prime season for polls. The day before, The Times had Nate Cohn putting forth four predictions for how the Congressional races could turn out, all signifying nothing. And today:

    This would imply that the pollsters do not want to believe polls that do not show Trump winning.

    The real issues that concern voters, the polls tell us, are corruption and prices. On this day, The Times acts as if it is representing the Little People by counting how many millionaires there are in the Senate. Well, if any of them own a home and are lucky enough to have a 401K these days, that might put them over the line to be called millionaires in an inflationary economy. I wonder how many editors at The Times are millionaires.

    Let’s round out this day with The Times with another angle on the news: Melania Trump. It’s not enough that The Times has swallowed her propaganda whole, giving her credit over the Pope for a local cease fire in Ukraine. They wanted another excuse to repeat it over again, so they turned to the reliably cringe-inducing Vanessa Friedman to break the news that Melania’s new coat is not black and white but brown.

    The republic may be teetering on the razor’s edge of fascism, but at least it’s comforting to know that she wasn’t wearing a tan suit.

    And as I write this, The Times’ day is not yet done.

    See also this very good video by journalist Jonathan Katz. We are singing in harmony, in a minor key.

  • They’re covering the wrong AI story

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    At least one New York Times journalist — columnist Michelle Goldberg — has at last begun covering the real AI story: not the technology but the technologists and their cult of faux philosophies that lead them to claim Promethean powers to destroy humanity. With their self-fulfilling prophesies of extinction, the AI boys grab the attention of unwary media and policymakers while distracting from the real costs and dangers — and benefits — of the machines they make.

    The calls of doom have been coming from inside the AI house, though Goldberg notes that coverage of them — which I will critique here — is “incomplete, because it doesn’t account for tech leaders’ messianic dreams.” In recent columns, another Times columnist, Georgetown computer science Professor Cal Newport, has begun to explore the AI boys’ insane philosophies. “This exaggerated grimness,” Newport writes, “makes it easy to overlook the more immediate harms created by these technologies…. The time has come to push back.” He says their nihilistic doom trolling has to stop.

    That’s a start. I wish their coverage would go deeper by citing the work of Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, who catalog the AI cult’s full range of creeds under the acronym TESCREAL — for Transhumanism, Extroprianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Nevermind the specific doctrines. What is worthy of your — and media’s and policymakers’ — attention is that Gebru and Torres show how all these beliefs have their roots in eugenics.

    Goldberg does note that some of their plutocratic adherents quote fascists and Nietzsche. Their goal is to select Übermenschen as they play God, building mythical, supposedly conscious “artificial general intelligence” and “superintelligence;” transforming themselves into man-machines with chips in their heads; using AI to help them live forever; populating Mars and the universe beyond with their progeny; and claiming responsibility for the future, never mind today’s trivial concerns. These überwealthy zealots have the resources — technology, capital, celebrity— and access to power to pursue their fevered, fascist dreams. 

    That is scary shit. But that’s not the scary shit we see covered in news media.

    Instead, news media lap up the AI overlords’ claims of suprahuman power. Right across The Times’ home page from Goldberg and Newport, editors regurgitate whole the doomsters’ pronouncements without bothering with basic reporting, finding other authorities who disagree. Where is bothsidesing when we need it?

    Next, The Times gives unchallenged top-of-homepage prominence to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to slow down AI development. 

    What’s wrong with that? you ask. Much, I say. 

    • First, journalists unquestioningly accept as gospel the doomers’ assertions that their creations are capable of such danger, while there are many who believe these claims are just a perverse form of macho marketing meant to demonstrate to investors how very powerful and valuable they are. 
    • Second, this is classic regulatory capture: The “frontier” AI companies call for regulations that they will help lawmakers draft, which will raise the bar for entry into their market for the open and international startup competition we so badly need to challenge them. 
    • Third, the doom scenarios seduce click-hungry media into giving them free publicity and that lures equally dupable politicians — Bernie Sanders and Ted Lieu leading the pack — to call for simplistic, instant solutions: namely unplug AI. Meanwhile, vestigial pro-business Republicans wait for Trump’s inscrutable instructions. See how The Times practically scolds pols for not panicking enough:

    Out of all this arm-waving, either nothing will happen or Anthropic and OpenAI will succeed in blocking new competitors while getting ultrawealthy on their IPOs. And few pay attention to the real perils these technologies raise for the environment, labor, education, and culture. 

    There’s another critical risk: that we all lose the opportunity to develop and put to use these promising, often impressive technologies in medicine, science, carefully considered educational applications, and daily life. Such is always the peril of moral panic. 

    I am not an AI doomer, as you will surmise. Neither am I an AI accelerationist: “Damn the torpedoes, warp speed ahead.” Having studied the history of technologies related to media in my books, I recognize lessons from the past: that disruptive technologies, especially those related to speech, induce panic at first; that before long the public comes to harness new technologies; that the technologists and their power eventually fade into the background; and that, with fits and missteps, society figures out how to make good use of its machines. We did it with movable type, steam, electricity, and electronics, and I believe we’ll get there with the internet. We can figure out AI, too. 

    AI in its many flavors — large language models are just one limited instance — are proving to be amazing. In some areas — analysis of proteins, possibly theoretical math, perhaps medicine discovery, and certainly coding — they are surpassing human ability. But that by no means is any indication of either general or super intelligence. To me, AGI is just another abbreviation for BS. I hold that artificial general intelligence is a wasteful goal fueled by the hubris of the AI boys. As the sane AI pioneer Yann LeCun instructs, machines programmed and trained to perform specific tasks will be faster and cheaper to build — and control — than some fabled, all-powerful überbrain of Oz.

    I believe we should understand what these technologies can and cannot do and cover them accordingly. That is why I cohost two podcasts — AI Inside and Intelligent Machines — to keep up on the news. This is also why I am editing a series for Bloomsbury Academic — Intelligence: AI & Humanity — to invite scholars and writers from the humanities and social sciences to this critical conversation, for they are not heard enough.

    Our first book in the series will be by Rumman Chowdhury, an expert in AI ethics and governance. She will examine our definitions of intelligence over time. What fascinates me about AI’s entry into public discourse and culture is that its presence forces us to reexamine our own ideas of intelligence, creativity, art, learning, trust, labor, the firm, and even — in the case of the AI cultists who claim deific powers — religion. (See this relevant interview with Inken Prohl in Die Zeit: “With AI, we have created a religion.”)

    Coverage of AI in mainstream media is consistently appalling. It too often accepts the PR of the AI boys — whether utopian or dystopian, accelerationist or doomster — without challenge, skepticism, or balance. When the AI boys talk about “AI safety,” journalists rarely exhibit the sophistication to ask whether that is safety in the common sense (environmental, educational, cultural) or in the AI cultists’ overblown sense (doom and extinction). 

    When we hear of episodes of supposed AI agent “swarms” going “rogue” and “hacking” into systems, journalists use scare words to pump up the drama by attributing malign motives to overgrown calculators. Worse, they give us incomplete reporting. They should be asking what the AI companies fail to tell us. In the case of the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, we need to know what the company told its model to do before we can decide whether it disobeyed those instructions. We also deserve to know how OpenAI let its system go unmonitored for so long. Instead of just accepting the AI CEOs’ versions of the story, we need to demand greater transparency, and that will come only through tougher reporting. 

    Media’s anthropomorphism badly clouds the discussion. Let’s be very clear: AI does not think. It calculates. AI is not conscious or sentient. AI has no sense of meaning. It has no motive and no sense of right or wrong, thus it is not lying or cheating. If it breaks laws or norms, we likely should hold responsible those who programmed or instructed it. 

    We need journalists to do more rigorous and skeptical reporting, to study lessons from the history of technology, and to seek out scholars and experts rather than just taking the word of AI’s CEOs, VCs, and disaffected nerds. The end result is that policymakers and the public are ill-equipped to both use and judge these technologies. 

    And we are using them. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans aged 18–49 say they interact with AI at least once a day — even as they express growing unease unto antipathy toward the technology and the data centers it runs on. The South Korean government will provide AI access to all citizens for free: universal AI as a right. Artificial intelligence is here to stay; there is no turning it off. We deserve the right to have a voice in how AI is developed, governed, and used. 

    To do that, we require well-informed journalism. This is not that:

    That story offers no credible scenario of extinction. It cites the fabled paper-clip hypothesis of the former Oxford philosopher of Effective Altruism, Nick Bostrom, who contended that a machine told to do nothing but make paper clips could monomaniacally make paper clips of us all. Oxford shut down Bostrom’s Elon-Musk-backed Future of Humanity Institute when old email of his was revealed to have said “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word. This is why when discussing the doomster beliefs of AI cultists, the context of eugenics matters. But no mention of that by The Journal

    In that article, while fueling the “freakout” it purports to report on, The Journal waits until ten paragraphs in before labeling extinction prognostication a “fringe opinon.” At least it does that. 

    In this, The Times accepts AI companies’ excuses for why they can’t stop their AI from going rogue, while at the same time accepting their assertions that they can create AI that is “aligned” with human values.

    Well, if you want to worry, here’s the real troubling news: This idea of AI alignment — of guardrails to prevent bad outcomes — is ultimately a fool’s errand, for there is no way for any AI company to predict and prevent every possible malign or accidentally harmful use of AI. That is the reality we need to be discussing. 

    Instead, in that headline, The Washington Post anoints Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and — gulp — Elon Musk as our “top AI leaders.” No, these are the profoundly self-interested CEOs of three companies selling AI, who are given free space to promote their own agendas without proper context. They share one interest: to pull the ladder up after them and make it more difficult for competition — especially Chinese AI companies and more importantly free and open models — to challenge them. Here, The Post is acting as their agent. 

    Can AI be dangerous? Of course, it can. AI has been used by Russia to guide autonomous drones to kill Ukrainians. Perhaps our greatest fear is that AI could be used to craft bioweapons. But The Times concedes that even with instructions, it’s tough to actually make them. 

    The more frightening truth — one that should be on our minds after this anniversary — is that in the wrong hands, any technology can be used as a weapon … even passenger jetliners. We have met the problem, and it is us. 

    I do see the need for wise policy around AI, including:

    • Demand for full transparency from AI companies. Congress would do well to sic expert staffers (not grandstanding pols) on the AI companies to dig into programmers’ and executives’ negligent behavior in cases such as the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident.
    • Support for open-weight models (the closest AI gets to open-source) to provide competition to OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. These frontier companies want to frighten policymakers into banning these upstarts, especially those from China. Do not fall for it. 
    • Support for fundamental, frontier AI research in universities to provide more competition to the IPO-mad frontier companies and to have this work done under the ethical, open, and peer-reviewed standards of the academy. We could also use a modern-day Bell Labs with a public mission to do AI research. 
    • Support study of AI and its impact and implications by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. 

    Are there alternatives sources for good coverage of AI? Not many. Here are a few: If you want to dig down into the rathole of the AI boys’ philosophies, there is no better place to start than Gebru and Torres’ TESCREAL work. If you want to follow the big, big money behind this movement and what it is building on college campuses and many acronymed institutes, follow the investigations of researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt. And for clear — though not simple — explanations of the recent scares over AI, I recommend Newport’s latest podcast, particularly this episode and this. 

    Perhaps journalism’s greatest folly is that it treats the self-serving heads of companies that make AI as experts and even intellectuals, though many of them left college early, which is why their frequent manifestos sound like the work of freeze-dried sophomores. News media need to seek out the expertise of historians, ethicists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, economists, and community leaders to help inform all of us about the opportunities and risks of the age we are entering. 

  • 25 Years

    1 comment on 25 Years
    What I carried that day

    I have written much about my memories of 9/11: My story of surviving the day; recording what I witnessed; a meditation on the Yahrzeit; then five years on; ten; and twenty years and what I recalled still.

    Now twenty-five years after I must write of my regret. 

    All this time, I had convinced myself of the common belief that the trauma of 9/11 brought us together as a nation and showed us a model of what we could be.

    That was myth. I was wrong. 

    After a decade of Trump, of American fascism, of my own profession’s — journalism’s — negligent failures in the face of it, how could I still believe that we are in any way better now than we were before? That the United States has twice elected an incompetent, ignorant, bigoted, dangerous, warmongering, authoritarian to the presidency is evidence that this nation has learned nothing and indeed fails to respect learning. That Germany — of all nations — can see one of its states grant an electoral landslide to right-wing extremists demonstrates that any lesson, no matter how profound, can be forgotten.

    9/11 led to extremism in response to extremism. It elevated a fringe culture of conspiracy theorism to the core of right-wing politics and media. It enabled a security state built on constant suspicion and paranoia. It led to a sense of American victimhood and entitlement, muffling the empathy we should have for the suffering of other nations under attack. It made permissible an interchangeable American bigotry aimed at one group and then any group. 

    I do not mean to sound cynical. But to deny the cynicism that has taken root and spread in this nation in the last twenty-five years would itself be an act of cynicism. 

    If there is a way out of this, it is not through annual incantations of lost unity. It must be through fighting: fighting authoritarianism, ignorance, suspicion, bigotry, terrorism — domestic and foreign — and fascism. That requires that we — beginning with political leaders and journalists — first recognize these palls on the land so we may organize to oppose them. We must specify which institutions are under attack — democracy, education, equality, inclusion — before we can defend each.

    My first emotion after surviving the attack on the World Trade Center was anger, not relief. In the flush of the moment, I at first titled the blog I started a few days after the attack “World War III;” before long, it was Buzzmachine. That was misplaced anger, anger that could be exploited. 

    Anger properly channeled is a powerful force. We who defend democracy must direct our anger at those who threaten it, at those who have exploited 9/11 to seize power. I am angry at institutions — universities, media companies, law firms, civil service — that fail to defend themselves against unjust attack. I am angry at my fellow journalists for succumbing to their reflexive tropes of imagined unity, objectivity, normalcy. 

    After 9/11, we asked when we would return to normal. In the midst of COVID, we asked the same question. But in truth, normalcy is nostalgic fraud: the belief that there is some better day to return to. If you are Black, Latino, an immigrant, disabled, LGBTQ, female, poor, or in any way disenfranchised, that day never existed. The past is nothing to fight for. What we must join together to fight for is a different and better future: progress. 

    Looking back, I see that 9/11 robbed me of dreams. It allowed the forces of the past — of so-called conservatism — to set their agenda of protection, exclusion, and reversion, instead of progress.

    On that beautiful, clear, September day that I shall remember for the rest of my days I witnessed and survived horror. The specific aftermaths in my life — a heart condition, two cancers, PTSD, and burdens on my family — are nothing next to the loss and trauma so many others have experienced, bearing scars still. On that day and to this day I know how fortunate I am. But I am also angry at the progress and potential we have lost. I am angry at myself for not fighting hard enough to regain them. 

    That is how I feel, twenty-five years on.