Douthat: So do you fear a plausible future where A.I., in a way, becomes itself stagnationist? That it’s highly intelligent, creative in a conformist way. That it’s like the Netflix algorithm: It makes infinite OK movies that people watch. It generates infinite OK ideas. It puts a bunch of people out of work and makes them obsolete. But it deepens ... See more

Our discomfort with this indifference manifests in a predictable pattern: we try to turn AI into a comprehensible villain. In reference to Girard, every society is built, in part, on the ritual of scapegoating, a mechanism by which collective anxieties, rivalries, and fears are projected onto a villain or outcast, thereby restoring temporary order ... See more

In a digitally decentralized world where generative AI can lower the barriers of creation even farther than ever before, and bots can be trained under the perspective of your choosing, an already fractured reality becomes at risk for disintegration. Or, as science-fiction writer and professional futurist Madeline Ashby told us in a recent interview... See more