![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/5fb27925-7542-4854-9148-3781dadd6cdf_1320.png\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nLast week, when he announced that The Free Press would be the new home of his writing, Ross Douthat said he hopes to help readers \u201cunderstand our strange-and-getting-stranger century.\u201d In his debut column today, he\u2019s confronting perhaps the most rapidly changing strange thing in the world today. Surrounded by scary stories about how artificial intelligence is going to kill us all\u2014or at least steal our jobs\u2014it\u2019s tempting to bury one\u2019s head in the sand, especially if you\u2019re not an especially technologically minded person. When the engineers at the frontier labs say the product they\u2019re building could wipe us out in 10 years, and the president says all the worry is a \u201cHOAX\u201d\u2014what\u2019s a sensible American, especially one who never studied computer science, supposed to think? Read on to find out. And to read Ross in The Free Press each week, become a paying subscriber today. \u2014The Editors<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There are two paths to worrying about an artificial intelligence takeover. One runs through the worldviews that have shaped the AI industry\u2019s mix of breakneck competition and existential dread: the quasi-religious dream of the singularity, the eccentric subcultures of rationalism and effective altruism, the special focus on existential risk.<\/p>\n
The other runs through storytelling and myth. Never mind the precise p(doom) calculations: We should worry about the invention of a powerful nonhuman form of intelligence because we\u2019re familiar with the legends of genies and golems, with the works of Mary Shelley and Samuel Butler and Isaac Asimov, with The Matrix or Terminator 2 or even The Mitchells vs. The Machines. The effective altruists have only rediscovered territory that the poets and artists claimed long ago.<\/p>\n
My own worries about the robot apocalypse belong naturally to this more literary and cinematic path. As a scientific amateur, I am ill-equipped to assess competing predictions about recursive self-improvement. As a busy journalist and father, nothing can induce me to wade through the entire intellectual corpus of the doomer prophet Eliezer Yudkowsky. As a religious believer, I will never share the materialist philosophical premises that inform much (though not quite all) of AI-world thinking.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m happy to hear a gripping yarn about the kind of futures that AI doomers fear. Narrative is still a place where human art exceeds machine technique, true prophecy is still a mystic gift that can\u2019t be generated through raw compute alone, and if the doomers have glimpsed a realistic danger through the veil, by their stories we will know it.<\/p>\n
So in the last few weeks I\u2019ve been reading and rereading them: the famous ones, drawn from the \u201cAI 2027\u201d project<\/a> and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies<\/a>, the book that Yudkowsky recently co-authored with Nate Soares, and a number of other online exercises in narrating the apocalypse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, when he announced that The Free Press would be the new home of his writing, Ross…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":884161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-884160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}