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Berlin, like Washington, has tried to position itself as a concerned friend, intent on ensuring Israel’s long-term security by not allowing it to go so far that it loses even more international backing. But the stakes are high for Germany, too.

The country needs to maintain friendly relations around the world to pursue its own interests, whether Europe is cutting deals with Egypt to curb migration or seeking support for measures to back Ukraine against Russia

this week, Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said she would be sending a delegation to Israel because as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, her country “is obliged to remind all parties of their duty to abide by international humanitarian law.”

The sense of diminishing credibility on human rights is particularly strong in the set of developing or underdeveloped countries sometimes referred to as the Global South, a point brought home during a visit to Berlin this month by Malaysia’s prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim.

“We oppose colonialism, or apartheid, or ethnic cleansing, or dispossession of any country, be it in Ukraine, or in Gaza,” Mr. Ibrahim told journalists as he stood beside Mr. Scholz. “Where have we thrown our humanity? Why this hypocrisy?”

polls by public broadcasters in recent weeks show that nearly 70 percent of Germans surveyed felt Israel’s military actions were not justifiable; just a few weeks earlier, the number was around 50 percent.

On the one hand, she said, Germany was calling on Israel not to invade Rafah. On the other, Germany remained one of Israel’s biggest arms suppliers. “We have to really do something to protect these people.”

there’s little reason to enserf or enslave a worker (not quite the same thing, but let’s leave that aside) if labor is abundant and land is scarce, so that the amount that worker could earn if he ran away barely exceeds the cost of subsistence.

But if land becomes abundant and labor scarce, the ruling class will want to pin workers in place, so they can forcibly extract the difference between the value of what workers can produce — strictly speaking, their marginal product — and the cost of keeping them alive.

Yet serfdom wasn’t reimposed, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. One thought, however, is that holding people captive in order to steal the fruits of their labor isn’t easy.

In fact, the real historical puzzle is why high wages didn’t always lead to widespread slavery or serfdom

serfdom in the West had more or less withered away by around 1300, because Western Europe was overpopulated given the technologies of the time, which in turn meant that landowners didn’t need to worry that their tenants and workers would leave in search of lower rents or higher wages.

But the Black Death caused populations to crash and wages to soar. In fact, for a while, real wages in Britain reached a level they wouldn’t regain until around 1870:

Labor was scarce in pre-Civil War America, so free workers earned high wages by European standards. Here are some estimates of real wages in several countries as a percentage of U.S. levels on the eve of the Civil War:

Indeed, slaveholders and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was a bad thing. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union address, the slave interest in effect demanded that Northerners “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”

Notice that Australia — another land-abundant, labor-scarce nation — more or less matched America; elsewhere, workers earned much less.

Landowners, of course, didn’t want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans came as indentured servants — in effect, temporary serfs

landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: Because they looked different from white settlers, they found it hard to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor whites who might otherwise have realized that they had many interests in common. Of course, white southerners also saw slaves as property, not people, and so the value of slaves factored into the balance sheet of this greed-driven system.

again, the dynamic was one in which greedy slaveholders used and perpetuated racism to sustain their reign of exploitation and terror.

Because U.S. slavery was race-based, however, there was a limited supply of slaves, and it turned out that slaves made more for their masters in Southern agriculture than in other occupations or places

Black people in the North were sold down the river to Southern planters who were willing to pay more for them, so slavery became an institution peculiar to one part of the country.

As such, slaves became a hugely important financial asset to their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they cultivated, and may well have accounted for the majority of Southern wealth.

Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth

Hence the rise of serfdom as Russia expanded east, and the rise of slavery as Europe colonized the New World.

But Northerners wouldn’t do that. There were relatively few Americans pushing for national abolition, but Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery in their own territories

This wasn’t as noble an act as it might have been if they had been confiscating slaveholders’ property, rather than in effect waiting until the slaves had been sold. Still, it’s to voters’ credit that they did find slavery repugnant.

And this posed a problem for the South

Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was about states’ rights should read Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation consisted of free states, so the slave states in effect demanded control over free-state policies.

This should sound familiar. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states that have banned abortion have grown increasingly frantic over the ability of women to travel to states where abortion rights remain; it’s obvious that the right will eventually impose a national abortion ban if it can.

For a long time, the South actually did manage to exercise that kind of national control. But industrialization gradually shifted the balance of power within the United States away from the South to the North:

So did immigration, with very few immigrants moving to slave states.And the war happened because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were not willing to play the role of police for the South” in protecting slavery.

So yes, the Civil War was about slavery — an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom

And there’s no excuse for anyone who pretends that there was anything noble or even defensible about the South’s cause: The Civil War was fought to defend an utterly vile institution.

The alarm is growing louder, but the German public remains unconvinced that the security of Germany and Europe has been fundamentally threatened by a newly aggressive Russia.

Mr. Pistorius’s status as one of the country’s most popular politicians has given him a freedom to speak that others — including his boss, Chancellor Olaf Scholz — do not enjoy.

The prospect of a re-elected Mr. Trump has German officials and many of their fellow NATO counterparts informally discussing whether the nearly 75-year-old alliance structure they are planning to celebrate in Washington this year can survive without the United States at its center. Many German officials say that Mr. Putin’s best strategic hope is NATO’s fracture.

Only a year ago NATO was celebrating a new sense of purpose and a new unity, and many were confidently predicting Mr. Putin was on the run.

now, with an undependable America, an aggressive Russia and a striving China, as well as a seemingly stalemated war in Ukraine and a deeply unpopular conflict in Gaza, German officials are beginning to talk about the emergence of a new, complicated and troubling world, with severe consequences for European and trans-Atlantic security.

some of Mr. Pistorius’s colleagues are warning that if American funding dries up and Russia prevails, its next target will be closer to Berlin.

“If Ukraine were forced to surrender, that would not satisfy Russia’s hunger for power,” the chief of Germany’s intelligence service, Bruno Kahl, said last week. “If the West does not demonstrate a clear readiness to defend, Putin will have no reason not to attack NATO anymore.”

In the decades since the Soviet Union collapsed, most Germans have grown accustomed to the notions that the country’s security would be assured if it worked with Russia, not against it, and that China is a necessary partner with a critical market for German automobiles and equipment.

Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat whose party traditionally sought decent ties with Moscow, seems reluctant to discuss the far more confrontational future with Russia or China that German defense and intelligence chiefs describe so vividly.

few politicians will take on the subject in public. Mr. Scholz is especially careful, tending to Germany’s relationship with the United States and wary of pushing Russia and its unpredictable president too hard.

Mr. Scholz has moved with great caution. He has opposed — along with Mr. Biden — setting a timetable for Ukraine’s eventual entry into the alliance

The most vivid example of his caution is his continued refusal to provide Ukraine a long-range, air-launched cruise missile called the Taurus.

The Taurus has a range of more than 300 miles, meaning Ukraine could use it to strike deep into Russia. And Mr. Scholz is not willing to take that chance — nor is the country’s Bundestag, which voted against a resolution calling for the transfer. While the decision seems to fit German opinion, Mr. Scholz wants to avoid the subject.

Polls show that Germans want to see a more capable German military. But only 38 percent of those surveyed said they wanted their country to be more involved in international crises, the lowest figure since that question began to be asked in 2017, according to the Körber Foundation, which conducted the survey. Of that group, 76 percent said the engagement should be primarily diplomatic, and 71 percent were against a military leadership role for Germany in Europe.

German military officials recently set off a small outcry when they suggested that the country must be “kriegstüchtig,” which roughly translates to the ability to fight and win a war.

Norbert Röttgen, an opposition legislator and a foreign policy expert with the Christian Democrats, said the term was regarded as “rhetorical overreach” and quickly dropped.

“Scholz has always said that ‘Ukraine must not lose but Russia must not win,’ which indicated that he’s always thought of an impasse that would lead to a diplomatic process,” Mr. Röttgen said. “He thinks of Russia as more important than all the countries between us and them, and he lacks a European sense and of his possible role as a European leader.”

Mr. Scholz clearly feels most comfortable relying heavily on Washington, and senior German officials say he especially mistrusts Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, who has argued for European “strategic autonomy.” Mr. Macron has found few followers on the continent.

Even Mr. Scholz’s main European defense initiative, a coordinated ground-based air defense against ballistic missiles known as Sky Shield, depends on a mix of American, American-Israeli and German missile systems.

Mr. Scholz’s ambitions are also hamstrung by his increasingly weak economy. It shrank 0.3 percent last year, and roughly the same is expected in 2024. The cost of the Ukraine war and China’s economic problems — which have hit the auto and manufacturing sectors hardest — have exacerbated the problem.

While Mr. Scholz acknowledges that the world has changed, “he is not saying that we must change with it,” said Ulrich Speck, a German analyst.

“He is saying that the world has changed and that we will protect you,”

Germans, and even the Social Democrats, “have come to the realization that Germany lives in the real world and that hard power matters,”

“At the same time,” he said, “there’s still this hope that this is all just a bad dream, and Germans will wake up and be back in the old world.”

The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law

universities should protect the rights of students and faculty on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.

That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities

Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.

Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space.

Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences.

In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness

reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.

Administrators and faculty members will often abandon any pretense of institutional neutralit

For many administrators, the very idea of neutrality is repugnant. It represents a form of complicity in injustice that they simply can’t and won’t stomach. So they nurture and support one side. They scorn the opposition, adopting a de facto posture that says, “To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.

But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline; three were expelled; and one was suspended.

The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”

For the first time since the first World Happiness Report was published in 2012, the United States fell out of the Top 20 and dropped to 23rd, pushed down by cratering attitudes of Americans under 30.

Americans have long been an unhappy bunch. They have never ranked in the Top 10 of the World Happiness Report, which is based on how respondents in different countries rate their own happiness.

cited the disruptions to life brought about by the coronavirus pandemic as a chief cause of mental health challenges among younger Americans.

The happiest young people are in Lithuania, while the unhappiest are in Afghanistan.

“I have never seen such an extreme change,” John Helliwell, an economist and a co-author of the report, said in an interview, referring to the drop in happiness among younger people. “This has all happened in the last 10 years, and it’s mainly in the English-language countries. There isn’t this drop in the world as a whole.”

Respondents were asked — among other prompts — to think of their life as a ladder and to rate it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best possible life.

this was the first time that the consortium separated results by age, finding disparities in the views of younger and older Americans. Among the 143 countries surveyed, the United States ranked 10th for people 60 and older, but 62nd for people under 30.

Jade Song, a 27-year-old novelist, counted herself among those who had become increasingly unhappy in recent years.

“Many of the things that would have normally taken place for people, particularly high school young adults, did not take place,” he added. “And that is still occurring.”

“It’s mostly because as an adult you suddenly become aware of all the world news and you pay attention more to what you can control, and you realize that there is so little you can control,” Ms. Song, who was not part of the study, said in an interview. “Even if you’re going to protests or paying your rent and bills all on time, it’s so difficult, especially now, to break free from how you’re living your life when you realize how little impact your actions actually have on a broader level.”

There is a silver lining, though

In 2022, a Harvard University study showed that well-being among young adults in the United States had declined in the previous 20 years. Young people — those between the ages of 18 and 25 — reported the lowest levels of happiness compared with other age groups, as well as the poorest mental and physical health, sense of purpose, character, virtue, close social relationships and financial stability

Similar findings have emerged in Britain and Canada.

“One factor, which we’re all thinking about, is social media,” said Dr. Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development

“Because there’s been some research that shows that depending on how we use social media, it lowers well-being, it increases rates of depression and anxiety, particularly among young girls and women, teenage girls.”

In addition, Dr. Waldinger said, the negative feedback loop from news consumption has become a contributing factor.

“There’s also a lot of anxiety about the state of the world,” he said. “About climate change. About all of the polarization that we’re seeing.”

in some other countries, such as Croatia, Switzerland and Austria, the World Happiness Report shows that young people are becoming happier.

“Part of the problem is that we have this huge expectation of happiness in America,” said Eric Weiner, the author of “The Geography of Bliss,” and so we suffer partly from the unhappiness of not being happy and the expectation that we should be happy. And not every country in the world has that.”

“There’s an assumption that if you’re American, you’re wealthy and you’re high tech and you’re successful; you should be happy,” he said. “There’s a lot of data that shows that the greater your expectations, the less you’re happy.”

The expectations for young people like Ms. Song, the novelist, said have shifted.

“We have less to look forward to,” she said. “Because in the future, there’s going to be climate change that will affect the way we live. I think there’s less of a clear-cut trajectory for our life paths, because for so long, it was so easy just to know that you could go get married and have your 2.5 kids, and then pay for your house. But now that path is a lot more closed.”

“The literature is clear in practice — the effect that this had on socialization, pro-social behavior, if you will, and the ability for people to feel connected and have a community,”

“A, this angst is very local and, B, it’s very recent, which means, C, it’s not fundamental and going to last forever,” he said. “If it has been created that quickly, it could be removed that quickly.”

That’s because real people — and yes, even professional economists — tend to process the parallel rise of prices and wages in quite different ways.

In brief, researchers have found that we tend to internalize the gains due to inflation and externalize the losses. These different processes yield different emotional responses.

Let’s start with higher prices. Sticker shock hurts. Even as someone who closely studies the inflation statistics, I’m still often surprised by higher prices. They feel unfair. They undermine my spending power, and my sense of control and order.

younger folks — anyone under 60 — had never experienced sustained inflation rates greater than 5 percent in their adult lives. And I think this explains why they’re so angry about today’s inflation.

Even though wages tend to rise hand-in-hand with prices, we tell ourselves a different story, in which the wage rises we get have nothing to do with price rises that cause them.

But then my economist brain took over, and slowly it sunk in that my raise wasn’t a reward for hard work, but rather a cost-of-living adjustment

Internalizing the gain and externalizing the cost of inflation protects you from this deflating realization. But it also distorts your sense of reality.

The reason so many Americans feel that inflation is stealing their purchasing power is that they give themselves unearned credit for the offsetting wage rises that actually restore it.

in reality, higher prices are only the first act of the inflationary play. It’s a play that economists have seen before. In episode after episode, surges in prices have led to — or been preceded by — a proportional surge in wages.

While older Americans understood that the pain of inflation is transitory, younger folks aren’t so sure. Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet.

Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes.

More generally, being an economist makes me an optimist. Social media is awash with (false) claims that we’re in a “silent depression,” and those who want to make American great again are certain it was once so much better.

in reality, our economy this year is larger, more productive and will yield higher average incomes than in any prior year on record in American history

And because the United States is the world’s richest major economy, we can now say that we are almost certainly part of the richest large society in its richest year in the history of humanity.

The income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years. And so when my kids are my age, average income will be roughly double what it is today. Far from being fearful for my kids, I’m envious of the extraordinary riches their generation will enjoy.

Psychologists describe anxiety disorders as occurring when the panic you feel is out of proportion to the danger you face. By this definition, we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.

He is concerned that masters of the A.I. universes are developing systems that will expand chasms of inequality. He fears the transition to A.I. will be so abrupt that entire professional fields will be left doing menial jobs, or nothing, stripping people of dignity and unleashing floods of “despair.”

Father Benanti, who does not believe in the industry’s ability to self-regulate and thinks some rules of the road are required in a world where deep fakes and disinformation can erode democracy.

He shares his insights with Pope Francis, who in his annual World Day of Peace message on Jan. 1 called for a global treaty to ensure the ethical development and use of AI to prevent a world devoid of human mercy, where inscrutable algorithms decide who is granted asylum, who gets a mortgage, or who, on the battlefield, lives or dies.

all the time he applies his perspective about what it means to be alive, and to be human, when machines seem more alive and human. “This is a spiritual question,” he said.

raises enormous questions about redistributing wealth in an A.I. dominant universe.

he pursued an engineering degree at Sapienza University in Rome. It wasn’t enough.“I started to feel that something was missing,” he said, explaining that his advancement as an engineering student erased the mystique machines held for him. “I simply broke the magic.”

He left Rome to study in Assisi, the home of St. Francis, and over the next decade, took his final vows as a friar, was ordained as a priest and defended his dissertation on human enhancement and cyborgs. He got his job at the Gregorian, and eventually as the Vatican’s IT ethics guy.

In 2017, Cardinal Ravasi organized an event at the Italian embassy to the Holy See where Father Benanti gave a talk on the ethics of A.I. Microsoft officials in attendance were impressed and asked to stay in touch. That same year, the Italian government asked him to contribute to A.I. policy documents and the next year he successfully applied to sit on its commission for developing a national A.I. strategy.

Francis, he said, didn’t at first realize what Microsoft really did, but liked that Mr. Smith took out of his pocket one of the pope’s speeches on social media and showed the pontiff the concerns the business executive had highlighted and shared.

e said, arguing that as ancient Roman augurs turned to the flight of birds for direction, A.I., with its enormous grasp of our physical, emotional and preferential data, could be the new oracles, determining decisions, and replacing God with false idols.

“It’s something old that probably we think that we left behind,” the friar said, “but that is coming back.”

a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.

Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible

What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.

As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism

Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted

As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.

“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.”

F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s aptly: “Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”

Many of the same fears that keep A.I. engineers up at night — calibrating thinking machines to human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and even trepidation about a robot takeover — made their debut in the early 20th century.

The popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s 1921 political treatise, “Social Decay and Regeneration,” warned that our reliance on new technologies was driving our species toward degradation and even annihilation

Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change

There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions

It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years

We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires

That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.”

At some point they will be able to, for example, suggest recipes for novel cyberattacks or biological attacks—all based on publicly available knowledge.

But as models become more sophisticated, this approach may prove insufficient. Some models are beginning to exhibit polymathic behavior: They appear to know more than just what is in their training data and can link concepts across fields, languages, and geographies.

We need to adopt new approaches to AI safety that track the complexity and innovation speed of the core models themselves.

What’s much harder to test for is what’s known as “capability overhang”—meaning not just the model’s current knowledge, but the derived knowledge it could potentially generate on its own.

Red teams have so far shown some promise in predicting models’ capabilities, but upcoming technologies could break our current approach to safety in AI. For one, “recursive self-improvement” is a feature that allows AI systems to collect data and get feedback on their own and incorporate it to update their own parameters, thus enabling the models to train themselves

This could result in, say, an AI that can build complex system applications (e.g., a simple search engine or a new game) from scratch. But, the full scope of the potential new capabilities that could be enabled by recursive self-improvement is not known.

Another example would be “multi-agent systems,” where multiple independent AI systems are able to coordinate with each other to build something new.

This so-called “combinatorial innovation,” where systems are merged to build something new, will be a threat simply because the number of combinations will quickly exceed the capacity of human oversight.

Short of pulling the plug on the computers doing this work, it will likely be very difficult to monitor such technologies once these breakthroughs occur

Current regulatory approaches are based on individual model size and training effort, and are based on passing increasingly rigorous tests, but these techniques will break down as the systems become orders of magnitude more powerful and potentially elusive

AI regulatory approaches will need to evolve to identify and govern the new emergent capabilities and the scaling of those capabilities.

But the AI Act has already fallen behind the frontier of innovation, as open-source AI models—which are largely exempt from the legislation—expand in scope and number

Europe has so far attempted the most ambitious regulatory regime with its AI Act,

both Biden’s order and Europe’s AI Act lack intrinsic mechanisms to rapidly adapt to an AI landscape that will continue to change quickly and often.

a gathering in Palo Alto organized by the Rand Corp. and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where key technical leaders in AI converged on an idea: The best way to solve these problems is to create a new set of testing companies that will be incentivized to out-innovate each other—in short, a robust economy of testing

To check the most powerful AI systems, their testers will also themselves have to be powerful AI systems, precisely trained and refined to excel at the single task of identifying safety concerns and problem areas in the world’s most advanced models.

To be trustworthy and yet agile, these testing companies should be checked and certified by government regulators but developed and funded in the private market, with possible support by philanthropy organizations

The field is moving too quickly and the stakes are too high for exclusive reliance on typical government processes and timeframes.

One way this can unfold is for government regulators to require AI models exceeding a certain level of capability to be evaluated by government-certified private testing companies (from startups to university labs to nonprofit research organizations), with model builders paying for this testing and certification so as to meet safety requirements.

As AI models proliferate, growing demand for testing would create a big enough market. Testing companies could specialize in certifying submitted models across different safety regimes, such as the ability to self-proliferate, create new bio or cyber weapons, or manipulate or deceive their human creators

Much ink has been spilled over presumed threats of AI. Advanced AI systems could end up misaligned with human values and interests, able to cause chaos and catastrophe either deliberately or (often) despite efforts to make them safe. And as they advance, the threats we face today will only expand as new systems learn to self-improve, collaborate and potentially resist human oversight.

If we can bring about an ecosystem of nimble, sophisticated, independent testing companies who continuously develop and improve their skill evaluating AI testing, we can help bring about a future in which society benefits from the incredible power of AI tools while maintaining meaningful safeguards against destructive outcomes.

there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.

countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.

There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them — and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed

Slovenia, upon becoming an independent country in 1992, “erased” over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions, and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.

The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921, as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant.

In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election.

As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation, and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history, or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.

Decades later Operation Infektion — a Soviet disinformation campaign — used forged documents to spread the idea that the United States had invented H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, as a biological weapon.

Fortunately, a path forward has been laid by the same companies that created the risk.

In indexing a large share of the world’s digital media to train their models, the A.I. companies have effectively created systems and databases that will soon contain all of humankind’s digitally recorded content, or at least a meaningful approximation of it.

They could start work today to record watermarked versions of these primary documents, which include newspaper archives and a wide range of other sources, so that subsequent forgeries are instantly detectable.

many of the intellectual property concerns around providing a searchable online archive do not apply to creating watermarked and time-stamped versions of documents, because those versions need not be made publicly available to serve their purpose. One can compare a claimed document to the recorded archive by using a mathematical transformation of the document known as a “hash,” the same technique the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, uses to help companies screen for known terrorist content.

creating verified records of historical documents can be valuable for the large A.I. companies. New research suggests that when A.I. models are trained on A.I.-generated data, their performance quickly degrades. Thus separating what is actually part of the historical record from newly created “facts” may be critical.

Preserving the past will also mean preserving the training data, the associated tools that operate on it and even the environment that the tools were run in.

Such a vellum will be a powerful tool. It can help companies to build better models, by enabling them to analyze what data to include to get the best content, and help regulators to audit bias and harmful content in the models

the red-blue divide is perhaps less illuminating than the gap between engaged and disengaged Americans, in which an exhausted majority encounters the highly polarized activist wings of both parties and shrinks back from the fray

The wings aren’t changing each other’s minds — hard-core Democrats aren’t going to persuade hard-core Republicans — but they’re also not reaching sufficient numbers of persuadable voters to break America’s partisan deadlock.

In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds.

It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality.

Our heart connects with our mind in such a way that the heart demands that the mind conform to its deepest desires

When a partisan encounters negative information, it can often trigger the emotional equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. This applies not just to negative arguments but also to negative facts. To deal with the emotional response, we seek different arguments and alternative facts.

If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized.

When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved.

allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”

You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.

ask why people are checking out, and one reason is that partisans make it so very difficult to engage.

The problem is most pronounced (and often overtly threatening) on the MAGA right, but it’s endemic to our partisan wings

as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side.

If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?

I have some rules to help temper my worst partisan impulses.

Expose yourself to the best of the other side’s point of view — including the best essays, podcasts and books.

when you encounter a new idea, learn about it from its proponents before you read its opponents.

when you encounter bad news about a cause that you hold dear — whether it’s a presidential campaign, an international conflict or even a claim against a person you admire, take a close and careful look at the evidence

Before the pandemic, a number of variables were statistically significant indicators for consumer sentiment in our model; in particular, the most salient variables appear to be vehicle sales, gas prices, median household income, the federal funds effective rate, personal savings and household expenditures (excluding food and energy).

During the pandemic, the personal savings rate soared. In April 2020, the metric was nearly double its previous high, recorded in May 1975.

All this taken together meant Americans were flush with cash but had nowhere to spend it. So despite the fact that the savings rate went way up, consumers still weren't feeling positively about the economy — contrary to the relationship between these two variables we saw in the decades before the pandemic.

Fast forward to 2024, and the personal savings rate has dropped to one of its lowest levels ever (the only time the savings rate was lower was in the years surrounding the Great Recession)

during and after the pandemic, Americans saw some of the highest rates of inflation the country has had in decades, and in a very short period of time. These sudden spikes naturally shocked many people who had been blissfully enjoying slow, steady price growth their entire adult lives. And it has taken a while for that shock to wear off, even as inflation has cre

the numbers align with our intuitive sense of how consumers process suddenly having their grocery store bill jump, as well as the findings from our model. In simple terms: Even if inflation is getting better, Americans aren't done being ticked off that it was bad to begin with.

surprisingly, our pre-pandemic model didn't find a notable relationship between housing prices and consumer sentiment

However, in our post-pandemic data, when we examined how correlated consumer sentiment was with each indicator we considered, consumer sentiment and median housing prices had the strongest correlation of all****** (a negative one, meaning higher prices were associated with lower consumer sentiment)

during the pandemic, low interest rates, high savings rates and changes in working patterns — namely, many workers' newfound ability to work from home — helped overheat the homebuying market, and buyers ran headlong into an enduring supply shortage. There simply weren't enough houses to buy, which drove up the costs of the ones that were for sale.

That's true even if a family has been able to save enough for a down payment, already a difficult task when rents remain high as well. Fewer people are able to cover their current housing costs while saving enough to make a down payment.

Low-income households are still the most likely to be burdened with high rents, but they're not the only ones affected anymore. High rents have also begun to affect those at middle-income levels as well.

In short, there was already a housing affordability crisis before the pandemic. Now it's worse, locking a wider array of people, at higher and higher income levels, out of the home-buying market

People who are renting but want to buy are stuck. People who live in starter homes and want to move to bigger homes are stuck. The conditions have frustrated a fundamental element of the American dream

In our pre-pandemic model, total vehicle sales had a strong positive relationship with consumer sentiment: If people were buying cars, you could pretty reasonably bet that they felt good about the economy. This feels intuitive — who buys a car if they think the economy

Cox Automotive also tracks vehicle affordability by calculating the estimated number of weeks' worth of median income needed to purchase the average new vehicle, and while that number has improved over the last two years, it remains high compared to pre-pandemic levels. In April, the most recent month with data, it took 37.7 weeks of median income to purchase a car, compared with fewer than 35 weeks at the end of 2019.

"Right before the pandemic, the typical average transaction price was around $38,000 for a new car. By 2023, it was $48,000," Schirmer said. This could all be contributing to the break in the relationship between car sales and sentiment, he noted. Basically, people might be buying cars, but they aren't necessarily happy about it.

Inspired by our model of economic indicators and sentiment from 1987 to 2019, we tried to train a similar linear regression model on the same data from 2021 to 2024 to more directly compare how things changed after the pandemic. While we were able to get a pretty good fit for this post-pandemic model,******* something interesting happened: Not a single variable showed up as a statistically significant predictor of consumer sentiment.

This suggests there's something much more complicated going on behind the scenes: Interactions between these variables are probably driving the prediction, and there's too much noise in this small post-pandemic data set for the model to disentangle i

Changes in the kinds of purchases we've discussed — homes, cars and everyday items like groceries — have fundamentally shifted the way Americans view how affordable their lives are and how they measure their quality of life.

Even though some indicators may be improving, Americans are simply weighing the factors differently than they used to, and that gives folks more than enough reason to have the economic blues.

The Israeli military relies on reservist soldiers, some of whom have described growing exhaustion as Israel manages conflicts for months on end on multiple fronts, including the border with Lebanon and in the West Bank. An end to fighting in Gaza would give Israeli forces a respite that analysts say is needed, especially if fighting with Hezbollah escalates further.

Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general and veteran of multiple wars, said tensions between the Israeli military and security establishment and Netanyahu are at a record high.“The IDF feels and the security echelon feels that we exhausted the purpose of the war. We reached the maximum tactical peak that we can achieve,” he said. “As long as Rafah was there, they could say finish the job. OK it’s finished now.”

Netanyahu has rejected a series of proposals for possible alternatives to Hamas, including an American plan to bring in the Palestinian Authority and Arab calls for a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas. Some military analysts and former Israeli officials have questioned whether installing a new government in Gaza was ever possible, given that Hamas has managed to survive the Israeli military assault.

“We need to make a decision,” said Ziv. “Even a bad decision, that’s OK. Let’s say [we] occupy Gaza in the next few years because we need to clear up the last few terrorists. OK, it’s a bad decision, but it’s a decision. The military needs to know.”

The dispute between Netanyahu and the military centers in part on how officials define a defeat of Hamas. An Israeli military official said the army considers a battalion “dismantled” not when all its fighters are killed, but when its command structure and ability to carry out organized attacks are eliminated. 

Military analysts say that Hamas’s militia forces are likely to survive the Israeli military operation even in Rafah, in part because the Israeli army’s approach leaves many lower-ranking Hamas fighters in place. Hamas’s top leadership in the enclave, including its leader, Yahya Sinwar, have also eluded Israeli forces throughout the war.

“Hamas is preserving its forces in Rafah rather than engaging the Israel Defense Forces, likely because Hamas does not believe Israel’s Rafah operation will be decisive,” said an assessment this week from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.

AIs like ChatGPT rapidly got better in their early days, but what we’ve seen in the past 14-and-a-half months are only incremental gains, says Marcus. “The truth is, the core capabilities of these systems have either reached a plateau, or at least have slowed down in their improvement,” he adds.

the gaps between the performance of various AI models are closing. All of the best proprietary AI models are converging on about the same scores on tests of their abilities, and even free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are catching up.

models work by digesting huge volumes of text, and it’s undeniable that up to now, simply adding more has led to better capabilities. But a major barrier to continuing down this path is that companies have already trained their AIs on more or less the entire internet, and are running out of additional data to hoover up. There aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.

A mature technology is one where everyone knows how to build it. Absent profound breakthroughs—which become exceedingly rare—no one has an edge in performance

companies look for efficiencies, and whoever is winning shifts from who is in the lead to who can cut costs to the bone. The last major technology this happened with was electric vehicles, and now it appears to be happening to AI.

the future for AI startups—like OpenAI and Anthropic—could be dim.

Microsoft and Google will be able to entice enough users to make their AI investments worthwhile, doing so will require spending vast amounts of money over a long period of time, leaving even the best-funded AI startups—with their comparatively paltry warchests—unable to compete.

Many other AI startups, even well-funded ones, are apparently in talks to sell themselves.

the bottom line is that for a popular service that relies on generative AI, the costs of running it far exceed the already eye-watering cost of training it.

That difference is alarming, but what really matters to the long-term health of the industry is how much it costs to run AIs. 

Changing people’s mindsets and habits will be among the biggest barriers to swift adoption of AI. That is a remarkably consistent pattern across the rollout of all new technologies.

the industry spent $50 billion on chips from Nvidia to train AI in 2023, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue.

For an almost entirely ad-supported company like Google, which is now offering AI-generated summaries across billions of search results, analysts believe delivering AI answers on those searches will eat into the company’s margins

Google, Microsoft and others said their revenue from cloud services went up, which they attributed in part to those services powering other company’s AIs. But sustaining that revenue depends on other companies and startups getting enough value out of AI to justify continuing to fork over billions of dollars to train and run those systems

three in four white-collar workers now use AI at work. Another survey, from corporate expense-management and tracking company Ramp, shows about a third of companies pay for at least one AI tool, up from 21% a year ago.

OpenAI doesn’t disclose its annual revenue, but the Financial Times reported in December that it was at least $2 billion, and that the company thought it could double that amount by 2025. 

That is still a far cry from the revenue needed to justify OpenAI’s now nearly $90 billion valuation

the company excels at generating interest and attention, but it’s unclear how many of those users will stick around. 

AI isn’t nearly the productivity booster it has been touted as

While these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them. This means they are unlikely to help companies save on payroll. He compares it to the way that self-driving trucks have been slow to arrive, in part because it turns out that driving a truck is just one part of a truck driver’s job.

Add in the myriad challenges of using AI at work. For example, AIs still make up fake information,

getting the most out of open-ended chatbots isn’t intuitive, and workers will need significant training and time to adjust.

That’s because AI has to think anew every single time something is asked of it, and the resources that AI uses when it generates an answer are far larger than what it takes to, say, return a conventional search result

None of this is to say that today’s AI won’t, in the long run, transform all sorts of jobs and industries. The problem is that the current level of investment—in startups and by big companies—seems to be predicated on the idea that AI is going to get so much better, so fast, and be adopted so quickly that its impact on our lives and the economy is hard to comprehend. 

Mounting evidence suggests that won’t be the case.

Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.

Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.

Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.

The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways

if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.

Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing

its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.

Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.

As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.

The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.

But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.

decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.

And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty

One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.

Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.

Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.

An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control

Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.

That willingness is not reassuring. For example, it is not far-fetched to imagine insurers wanting to get their hands on this type of medical information in order to hike premiums. Data brokers of all kinds will be similarly keen to obtain people’s real-time health-chat records. Altman made a point to say that this theoretical product would not trick people into sharing information.

. Neither Altman nor Huffington had an answer to my most basic question—What would the product actually look like? Would it be a smartwatch app, a chatbot? A Siri-like audio assistant?—but Huffington suggested that Thrive’s AI platform would be “available through every possible mode,” that “it could be through your workplace, like Microsoft Teams or Slack.

This led me to propose a hypothetical scenario in which a company collects this information and stores it inappropriately or uses it against employees. What safeguards might the company apply then? Altman’s rebuttal was philosophical. “Maybe society will decide there’s some version of AI privilege,” he said. “When you talk to a doctor or a lawyer, there’s medical privileges, legal privileges. There’s no current concept of that when you talk to an AI, but maybe there should be.”

So much seems to come down to: How much do you want to believe in a future mediated by intelligent machines that act like humans? And: Do you trust these people?

A fundamental question has loomed over the world of AI since the concept cohered in the 1950s: How do you talk about a technology whose most consequential effects are always just on the horizon, never in the present? Whatever is built today is judged partially on its own merits, but also—perhaps even more important—on what it might presage about what is coming next.

the models “just want to learn”—a quote attributed to the OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever that means, essentially, that if you throw enough money, computing power, and raw data into these networks, the models will become capable of making ever more impressive inferences. True believers argue that this is a path toward creating actual intelligence (many others strongly disagree). In this framework, the AI people become something like evangelists for a technology rooted in faith: Judge us not by what you see, but by what we imagine.

I found it outlandish to invoke America’s expensive, inequitable, and inarguably broken health-care infrastructure when hyping a for-profit product that is so nonexistent that its founders could not tell me whether it would be an app or not.

Thrive AI Health is profoundly emblematic of this AI moment precisely because it is nothing, yet it demands that we entertain it as something profound.

you don’t have to get apocalyptic to see the way that AI’s potential is always muddying people’s ability to evaluate its present. For the past two years, shortcomings in generative-AI products—hallucinations; slow, wonky interfaces; stilted prose; images that showed too many teeth or couldn’t render fingers; chatbots going rogue—have been dismissed by AI companies as kinks that will eventually be worked out

Faith is not a bad thing. We need faith as a powerful motivating force for progress and a way to expand our vision of what is possible. But faith, in the wrong context, is dangerous, especially when it is blind. An industry powered by blind faith seems particularly troubling.

The greatest trick of a faith-based industry is that it effortlessly and constantly moves the goal posts, resisting evaluation and sidestepping criticism. The promise of something glorious, just out of reach, continues to string unwitting people along. All while half-baked visions promise salvation that may never come.