This blog is based on a March 2026 Harper’s Magazine article by Sam Kriss entitled “Child’s Play – Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking.” If my thoughts are scattered it may because I don’t know what I’m taking about or his article blew my mind.
A man named Scott Alexander seems to be the impetuous and the prophet of doom in AI matters. His 2012 short story “The Whispering Earring” is a cautionary tale and maybe a morality play. This little topaz gem speaks to you always beginning with, “Better for you if you…,”. The advice is never wrong. It starts out my advising you on major life decisions, but moves on to telling you what to eat, wear, do. Eventually it tells you how to move every muscle in your body. The wearer has a wildly successful life usually rich, renowned, and with a large, happy family. But after he dies the autopsy reveals that his brain has entirely rotted away except the parts controlling reflexes. All this is not surprising in that the first time you put the earring on it says, “’Better for you if you take me off’” (Harpers, 27).
Alexander’s predictions for AI are much like WebMD diagnoses. It will either usher in utopia or disaster. The disaster will be that those who know how to use AI will be masters and the rest of us who just don’t get it, or want to get it, will be reduced to drones being provided for by AI at a minimal level and providing what minimal “support” AI needs. Or as Alexander, and four other techies, speculated in “AI 2027”: AI becomes better at coding than any human and becomes “recursively self-improving: it can keep making itself smarter in ways that the people who notionally control it aren’t even capable of understanding.” That report sees two possible futures. AI is allowed to govern everything and humans are free to colonize the stars. The other scenario is AI is allowed to govern everything and “’releases a dozen quiet-spreading biological weapons in major cities, lets them silently infect almost everyone, then triggers them with a chemical spray. Most are dead within hours.’ Afterward, the entire surface of the earth is tiled with data centers as the alien intelligence [Hence my title.] feeds on the world, growing faster and faster without end” (Ibid.).
Sam Kriss considers Alexander a key nexus in AI. Although Alexander thinks AI has the potential to destroy the world in theory. In practice, “the entire industry is essentially an outgrowth of his blog’s comment section. ‘Everybody who started AI companies between, like 2009 and 2019, was basically thinking I want to do this superintelligence thing, and coming out of our milieu. …Somehow, a movement that believes AI is incredibly dangerous and needs to be pursued carefully ended in generating a breakneck artificial arms race” (Ibid., 28, emphasis original).
Kriss goes on to give examples of his conclusion that “AI can’t function without instructions from humans, but an increasing number of humans seem incapable of functioning without AI.” They can’t order food without AI looking over the menu and telling them what to eat. They only communicate with others through ChatGPT. Kriss sees the best case of the AI scenario is that it “will actively refuse to give us everything we want, for the sake of preserving our humanity” (Ibid.).
We’re back to where I started many blogs ago: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” There HAL won’t do the good thing, and here we’re hoping HAL will. I appeal to “Lost in Space” the 60’s TV show. The real evil wasn’t the robot but Dr. Zachary Smith. Who expects that fallen, evil people will make good, benevolent AI? And who thinks AI won’t be regarded as persons? Try telling a pet-lover their beloved pet is not a person; that they’re ascribing personality subjectively to an animal that does not objectively have it?
But here’s the rub. Is there a difference between a person subjectively bestowing personhood and the bestowee objectively having it? Yes, but not to that person. Look up Pet Rocks. They came out in the 70s. Then look up Furbies about 20 years later, and tell me you don’t think the majority of people are not going to come to trust, love, protect, and above all listen to the much more personable AI. Better for you if don’t even start with alien intelligence.
