Public Debate

It wasn’t at a conference on AI that I heard the truest sentence about AI in recent weeks. It was on a podcast about rest, listening to a coach talk about ten days on retreat in the Jura mountains. She wasn’t talking about models, or productivity, or transformation. She was talking about everything that doing nothing gives us: rest, silence, the ideas that surface when the mind is finally allowed to settle. And along the way, in two sentences, she said what I’ve been defending for a long time about the place of AI. ...

In short AI doomerism has the structure of a religious movement — but what matters isn’t the discourse, it’s the capture it performs. The very actors brandishing existential risk are building the AI and concentrating decision-making power in a few private hands. The real fault line isn’t fear versus optimism, but power versus democratic governance. ⎙ Imprimer / Télécharger en PDF In response to Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s article, “First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority.” ...