Claims extracted
15
sentences that state something as happening or true
Uncertain
7%
1 of 15 hedged
("reportedly", "may", "according to")
Leaning
Leans left
of the writing, not the subject · beta estimate
Publisher signals
97/100
The Free Press's corrections and
hedging, across everything collected from it. Not a measure of accuracy.
Outlets on this story
1
Technology
Same framing elsewhere
1
articles that frame the event the way this one does
Last week, when he announced that The Free Press would be the new home of his writing, Ross Douthat said he hopes to help readers “understand our strange-and-getting-stranger century.”
asserted
readers → announce → century
In his debut column today, he’s confronting perhaps the most rapidly changing strange thing in the world today.
asserted
he → confront → world
Surrounded by scary stories about how artificial intelligence is going to kill us all—or at least steal our jobs—it’s tempting to bury one’s head in the sand, especially if you’re not an especially technologically minded person.
asserted
you → surround → sand
When the engineers at the frontier labs say the product they’re building could wipe us out in 10 years, and the president says all the worry is a “HOAX”—what’s a sensible American, especially one who never studied computer science, supposed to think?
uncertain
who → say → science
One runs through the worldviews that have shaped the AI industry’s 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.
asserted
that → run → risk
The other runs through storytelling and myth.
asserted
other → run → storytelling
Never mind the precise p(doom) calculations: We should worry about the invention of a powerful nonhuman form of intelligence because we’re 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.
asserted
we → mind → Machines
The effective altruists have only rediscovered territory that the poets and artists claimed long ago.
asserted
poets → rediscover → that
My own worries about the robot apocalypse belong naturally to this more literary and cinematic path.
asserted
worries → belong → path
As a scientific amateur, I am ill-equipped to assess competing predictions about recursive self-improvement.
asserted
I → equip → improvement
As a busy journalist and father, nothing can induce me to wade through the entire intellectual corpus of the doomer prophet Eliezer Yudkowsky.
asserted
nothing → induce → prophet
As a religious believer, I will never share the materialist philosophical premises that inform much (though not quite all) of AI-world thinking.
asserted
that → share → thinking
But I’m happy to hear a gripping yarn about the kind of futures that AI doomers fear.
asserted
doomers → ’m → that
Narrative is still a place where human art exceeds machine technique, true prophecy is still a mystic gift that can’t 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.
asserted
we → exceed → it
So in the last few weeks I’ve been reading and rereading them: the famous ones, drawn from the “AI 2027” project and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the book that Yudkowsky recently co-authored with Nate Soares, and a number of other online exercises in narrating the apocalypse.
asserted
Yudkowsky → read → apocalypse
The Aporia
