An Open Letter to Scott Alexander
The dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive.
Steven Pinker
· 8 min read
AI
A collection of 57 posts
AI Doom Is Not Cybersecurity
An OpenAI agent’s breach of a Medicare portal shows that the real danger from AI is a mundane one—and the labs’ fixation on a coming machine god is making it worse.
Zack Korman
· 6 min read
Banning the Horseless Carriage
Bernie Sanders wants to outlaw artificial superintelligence. The risks he points to are real—but the answer to a powerful new technology is regulation, not prohibition, and China has no intention of pausing.
John Aziz
· 10 min read
Myths and Illusions of the Digital Age
The digital revolution is not remaking the world as the industrial one did.
Shalom Lappin
· 13 min read
Zineb Riboua on Islamism, Israel and the West’s New Culture War | Quillette Cetera Episode 72
Political analyst Zineb Riboua discusses Iran’s declining influence, the Houthis, Turkey’s ambitions, Israel’s changing role in the Middle East, Islamist radicalisation in Europe, AI doomerism, third-worldism and the West’s demographic decline.
Zoe Sankey
· 29 min read
AI and the Bioweapon Threat
The knowledge and infrastructure needed to engineer a pandemic pathogen, once confined to a handful of elite military and civilian research institutions, are quietly becoming more accessible.
Henry I. Miller
· 7 min read
Show Us the Prompts
How AI prose exploits the charity that makes reading possible.
Maarten Boudry
· 9 min read
The Modern Mythology of AI
LLMs are incredibly useful, even astonishing. But they aren’t “thinking” about anything.
Peter L. Levin
· 10 min read
Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion
What is consciousness for?
Sean Welsh
· 10 min read
Why AI Is Not About to Go Feral
Worries about AI doom rarely take Darwinian evolution seriously. A new paper argues we should—but we are still further from that scenario than its authors suggest.
Maarten Boudry
· 13 min read
Creators and Destroyers of Worlds
Despite the dangers, we must seize the gifts bequeathed by world-altering technologies, since these amount to life in unprecedented abundance.
Ian Nieves
· 9 min read
Reading Orwell in the Age of AI
Prescient about the possibility of machine-generated writing, George Orwell’s life and work offer a deeper warning about the LLM era.
Matt Johnson
· 24 min read
Move 37 and the Coming Mindhack
What happens when human manipulation arrives at its Claude Mythos moment?
Michael Morgenstern
· 15 min read
AI and the Wiki Wars
The Wikipedia knowledge monopoly is not ready for the Grokipedia threat.
Russell T. Warne
· 16 min read
To Meet a Chatbot
An English professor burns the midnight oil talking to Microsoft Copilot about Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hawthorne, and a play he’s been working on—and comes away deeply impressed by its literary insights.
Matthew M. Davis
· 19 min read