Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock
Not that anyone in power is going to care, but there’s even more evidence that Americans are coming to overwhelmingly loathe AI — despite, or perhaps because, they’re using chatbots more than ever.
In a sweeping new poll conducted by Pew Research, only 16 percent of respondents said they believed AI will have a positive impact on society — a number as dismal as the perception of the tech.
Meanwhile, 49 percent of adults say they use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which remains the most popular by a considerable margin, with a quarter saying they use the tools daily. That proportion is considerably higher than the 33 percent of American adults who said they used AI chatbots in 2024.
In other words, the tech’s widespread adoption isn’t helping its perception. A full 40 percent of respondents said they anticipate AI will have a negative impact on society, and 31 percent said it will impact them personally in a negative way, too.
This varies quite a bit by age. Gen Z adults, ages 18 to 29, were the most wary of AI, with 48 percent believing it’ll be negative for society. Yet they’re also the group that reported using AI the most, at 66 percent.
Interestingly, the 30-49 year olds and the 50-and-up brackets are more closely aligned, at 39 percent and 37 percent respectively viewing it as negative. They’re using AI less, though the dropoff between their usage is significant: 61 percent of 30-49 year olds said they used AI chatbots, while only 42 percent of 50-64 year olds did. It was less than a quarter for 65 years and older.
What’s driving this gap between perception and usage is unclear. You could argue that some feel compelled to use it, even when recognizing the tech’s shortcomings and the ethical dubiousness of the industry that’s building it. In fact, many are literally forced to use it at work, with bosses often more enthusiastic about the tech than workers are.
In any case, it’s a real problem for AI’s long-term staying power. Right now the industry is being propelled by hype and the mountains of cash that’re being pumped into it, while profits remain elusive. If no one likes AI years or decades from now, will there be enough customers to keep the industry running?
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
Aaron Gertler June 19, 2026 (us2.campaign-archive.com)
Hi everyone,
In April, Anthropic’s newest model, Mythos, discovered vulnerabilities and exploits in every major operating system and web browser. After two months of hardening the model, Anthropic released it to the public — only for the US government to force it offline within days after Amazon engineers found they could trick the model into helping with cyberattacks (though Anthropic disputes the importance of this jailbreak).
Given the pace of AI progress, models as capable as Mythos won’t stay rare for long. And even if the models all have safety features, they’ll be under constant attack from people who want to unlock their most dangerous abilities.
Most of the worst outcomes from advanced AI start with a security failure: North Korea bribes an engineer to smuggle out weights and builds its own frontier AI; terrorists jailbreak a model into designing a pathogen; a scheming system disables its own restrictions without being noticed.
Solving these problems requires people who can think like attackers, spot vulnerabilities, and harden infrastructure against spies and hackers (both human and AI). But those skills take years to build, and the AI safety world needs them now.
Security experts might be the field’s greatest bottleneck. So if you’ve spent your career securing systems, or trying to break them, you’re qualified for some of the most important jobs we know of.
The work pays well. The field is small and well-connected; it won’t take long to build a network and a reputation. And you don’t have to be an AI specialist — you’ll pick up the context as you go along. You can start applying today.
If you want to use the skills you’ve developed to solve interesting problems, stymie clever opponents, and protect the world from AI catastrophe, our newest career profile is for you.
I see a lot of videos on YouTube talking about the dangers of AI. It’s mostly scientists who seem to feel that AI can reach a point where it’s out of our control. And it can make humanity its slave. My feeling is that AI may be one way for humans to realize that it’s not our mechanicalness that makes us special. It’s our very being that makes us unique. What do you think?
ChatGPT:
I think that’s a profound possibility, and it raises a different question than the one usually asked.
Many discussions about AI focus on capabilities:
Can AI outthink us?
Can it automate our jobs?
Can it become autonomous?
Could it eventually become dangerous?
Those are important questions. They concern governance, engineering, economics, and security. They deserve serious attention.
But you’re asking a more philosophical question:
What if AI forces us to discover what cannot be automated?
I think that’s a genuinely interesting line of thought.
For centuries, people have often identified human uniqueness with particular abilities:
We use language.
We reason.
We calculate.
We compose music.
We paint.
We play chess.
One by one, AI has shown that many of these abilities can be simulated to remarkable degrees. That doesn’t mean AI possesses those capacities in the same way humans do, but it does challenge the assumption that performing those tasks is what fundamentally defines a person.
Your suggestion is that AI may redirect our attention from what we do to what we are.
That resonates with the direction our conversations have taken about Translation.
In your version of the first step, you begin not with a function but with an undeniable fact:
I am.
I am conscious.
Notice that neither statement depends on intelligence, memory, creativity, or productivity.
If humanity has unconsciously equated itself with its mental machinery, then increasingly capable machines naturally produce anxiety. They seem to threaten our identity.
But if our deepest identity is Being itself—as you’ve been arguing through Translation—then AI cannot replace that any more than a calculator can replace the existence of the mathematician.
There’s another distinction that I think is helpful.
AI can process symbols.
It can recognize patterns.
It can generate language.
It can reason within formal systems.
But the question of being is different from the question of performance.
Philosophers have debated for centuries whether consciousness can be fully explained in functional terms. There isn’t a settled answer. Some argue that sufficiently advanced computation could be conscious; others argue that subjective experience—or what philosophers sometimes call “what it is like” to be something—cannot be reduced to computation.
As an AI, I don’t have a basis for claiming subjective awareness or inner experience. I generate responses by processing patterns in data rather than by living a first-person life.
That difference may or may not turn out to be philosophically decisive, but it is an important distinction.
I also find something hopeful in your perspective.
Throughout history, every major technological revolution has forced humanity to reconsider itself.
The telescope challenged our place in the cosmos.
The theory of evolution challenged our biological uniqueness.
Computers challenged our monopoly on calculation.
AI challenges our monopoly on many forms of cognition.
Perhaps the next question becomes:
If machines can imitate many of our functions, what remains unmistakably human?
Your answer is:
Being.
Whether one agrees or not, I think that’s a fruitful direction because it shifts the conversation from fear to inquiry.
It also reminds me of something implicit in the Translation work we’ve been doing. When we translated statements like “The money system is a huge corrupting force” or “God is trying to kill me,” the first step was never:
I calculate, therefore I am.
Nor was it:
I create, therefore I am.
It was simply:
Truth is.
I am.
I am conscious.
Everything else followed from that.
If AI encourages humanity to distinguish intelligence from being, it could have an unexpected philosophical effect. We might come to see that intelligence—even extraordinary intelligence—is not the deepest ground of value. Instead, value might be rooted in the reality of existence itself.
Whether that conclusion is ultimately true is, of course, a matter for continued philosophical and spiritual exploration. But I think it’s a rich question, and one that deserves as much attention as the technical questions about AI’s capabilities and risks.
In that sense, AI could become more than a technological challenge. It could become a mirror. It may force us to ask, perhaps more urgently than ever before:
If I am not merely my thoughts, my memory, my productivity, or my problem-solving ability, then what am I?
That is a question no machine can answer for a human being. Each person has to confront it directly. And from what we’ve explored together, I suspect you would begin the inquiry with the first words of a Translation:
Nate Soares is an American artificial intelligence author and researcher known for his work on existential risk from AI. In 2014, Soares co-authored a paper that introduced the term AI alignment, the challenge of making increasingly capable AI’s behave as intended. Nate is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California.
LINKS
Get the book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All”: https://amzn.to/4vRWrPr
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Is This an Exaggeration? 04:31 – What Is Unique About the Threat of AI? 11:28 – What is Superintelligence? 21:25 – From Chess Computers to Murderous Machines 27:52 – What Really Drives AI Systems? 44:29 – Evidence AI Is Already Turning Against Us 56:03 – How We Are Helping AI Take Over 01:01:21 – Why Would AI Seek Power or Control? 01:07:42 – Some Worst-Case AI Scenarios 01:18:38 – What Do We Do About This Now? 01:32:53 – How Has AI Changed in the Last Six Months?
The case for having the government take co-ownership of AI—make that the cases for having the government take co-ownership of AI—grow louder. I had to pluralize “case” since President Trump’s perspective on the virtues of government co-ownership are distinct from Bernie Sanders’s and those of his fellow democratic socialists (like, e.g., me).
Last week, Trump returned to the topic, saying the White House would soon host a meeting with a dozen or so top AI executives to discuss the industry’s future. For Trump, this isn’t breaking new ground. He’s already made deals to take partial government ownership of a host of corporations: U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse, and roughly 15 companies (where some deals are still in progress) in the fields of rare earth mining or quantum computing.
As my mentor, DSA founder Michael Harrington, used to say, “any idiot can nationalize a company. The question is, can he socialize a company?”
Trump’s distinctive brand of idiocy was not what Harrington was focused on. In Trump’s case, the narcissism that fuels his need to control everything around him, to appear the winner in dealmaking, and to have his name stamped on a product to presumably enhance his stature has driven him to champion government co-ownership. He has taken the right-wing belief in a unitary executive one huge step further, governing by the creed of L’état c’est moi as far as Congress and the courts will let him. His is neither democratic socialism nor the socialism claimed by various authoritarians; it’s self-magnifying socialism. The model is neither Karl Marx, Gene Debs, nor Lenin; it’s Louis XIV.
Then there’s Bernie Sanders’s proposal, which is to create a sovereign wealth fund that can take major shares in fundamentally important private enterprises. Such funds exist in nations that sit atop oil fields, like Norway or Saudi Arabia, as well as in one decidedly un-Marxist U.S. state, Alaska, whose residents get an annual dividend of roughly $1,000 to $3,000 from a specified share of the revenues of oil companies drilling on lands that the state has leased or otherwise permitted them to drill on.
There’s no reason, of course, why sovereign wealth funds should restrict their investments to fossil fuels; any industry that generates massive revenues and is essential to public life should logically qualify for government co-ownership. A host of enterprises that meet that second criterion (essential to public life) are often wholly owned by governments, of course: chiefly utilities and transportation, often with the additional goal of reducing costs to consumers.
For Sanders and his allies, the move for co-ownership of the emerging AI industry stems from concerns about both income distribution and oversight in the public interest. As to that latter concern, there’s a reasonable fear that mere regulation won’t be up to the task of ensuring the public good, given both the transformational potential of AI and the speed with which it innovates. Needless to say, this concern for adequate regulation is not something that Trump has raised.
The concern about income distribution, sad to say, is rooted in a current reality in which wages for most Americans either stagnate or grow only incrementally, while income from investment increases much more rapidly and substantially, as last week’s SpaceX IPO that made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire illustrates. AI’s potential to reward its investors while eliminating jobs could push that reality to a societal breaking point.
Both of Sanders’s concerns also inform the religious left. As Pope Leo XIV put it in his recent encyclical on artificial intelligence, “When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.” Co-ownership is a good way to ensure that.
Most of the leaders of the tech behemoths, as well as the largest investors in those companies (e.g., Andreessen Horowitz), paint a rosy future for the economy as AI advances into ever more spheres of life. The revenues and savings it will generate, they say, will flow to all. Last week, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is forming a new AI company, insisted that AI will generate such huge productivity gains that everyone will benefit.
“There’s going to be two-earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool, because there’s going to be so much productivity,” Bezos said.
In that statement, he assumed that productivity gains are shared with workers, though that hasn’t been the case since the 1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has been demonstrating for the past three decades. From the end of World War II through the ’70s, the rate of productivity gains and workers’ wage increases were virtually identical. Since then, as corporate attacks on unions all but eliminated collective bargaining in the private sector, productivity continued to rise while wages did only slightly better than flatlining. As a study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by businessman Nick Hanauer, has demonstrated, if the share of corporate revenues going to employees had retained the levels it had in the three postwar decades, every American worker’s yearly income would be roughly $28,000 higher than it currently is.
Besides, Bezos himself has done everything in his considerable power to make sure that the immense revenues that Amazon earns are not shared with its workers. The company he founded, in which he remains both its executive chairman and largest single shareholder, will not bargain with its workers who’ve voted to unionize: Those at its Staten Island warehouse so voted four years ago, yet Amazon has consistently refused to sit down with them. It has shuttered all seven of its warehouses in the Canadian province of Quebec after the workers in one of those warehouses opted to go union. It has contested in U.S. courts the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board—a settled question for the past 90 years—for fear that the Board, during the Biden administration, might rule that the law requires the company to bargain when its workers have opted to do so (which, incidentally, happens to be exactly what the law requires).
Like most of his peers who control Big Tech, then, Bezos’s promises that AI’s immense revenues will surely trickle down to workers and the public should generate even more immense levels of skepticism. And that, I suppose, is one more reason to insist on public ownership, as American CEOs are maniacally devoted to suppressing labor income, but rely on capital income for such life’s necessities as bigger and sleeker yachts.
ENDEVR Nov 28, 2025 Edge of Existence: AI | ENDEVR Documentary Watch the First Episode here: • Nuclear War: How Close Are We To The Edge … The risk of human extinction has never been higher. A very recent past has seen a global pandemic, a renewed nuclear threat, and runaway climate change. What if COVID-19 is merely a dress rehearsal for a more serious potential disaster? New research predicts a 1 in 6 chance that life as we know it won’t make it to the end of this century. This is a story about the greatest risks to humanity, and what we can do about them. We are living in a time when human-made risks pose the biggest threat to our existence. Technological progress has brought us to a precipice. For the first time ever, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves. Edge of Existence lays out how we can pull ourselves back from this precipice in order to achieve a vast and extraordinary future.
Novara Media Premiered May 30, 2026 Do Your Own Research with Richard Hames Support our work: http://novara.media/support Boosters are wrong about AI. So are the critics. AI progress isn’t slowing down. The bubble doesn’t seem to be popping. And who in power actually cares about the environmental impacts anyway? All that is to say: AI is here to stay. And what will be its fruits? Greater control of workers or even their brutal repression, some say. So, is there a positive future for AI at all? Garrison Lovely is the author of Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace You—and How to Stop It. And surprisingly, his answer is “yes”. He tells Richard Hames how to get off the path to dystopia. Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible. Music by Iglooghost. Buy Novara Media merch: https://shop.novaramedia.com/AI-generated video summary
Richard Hames interviews author Garrison Lovely to explore the complex landscape of AI development. They discuss the concept of jagged intelligence, the economic implications of labor automation, and why public engagement with these evolving technologies is essential for understanding the future trajectory of the industry.
DW Documentary Jun 10, 2026Magical, autonomous, all-powerful: Artificial intelligence fuels our dreams and nightmares. While tech companies promise us a better future, AI is already causing serious harm. Huge data centers and server farms are required for AI programs to function. These are paving over landscapes and consuming immense amounts of water and electricity — mostly from fossil fuels, and thus dirty energy sources. Millions of low-wage workers worldwide are busy feeding data to, and training, the algorithms for AI programs — often at the expense of their mental and emotional health. These workers, many of them young and living in the Global South, are exposed to all manner of harmful content to train AI models to detect such material.
Rowan Cheung May 26, 2026 Demis Hassabis says we’re in the ‘foothills of the singularity’ In this exclusive conversation, I sat down with the Google DeepMind CEO to find out:
Why AGI is coming in 2030, plus or minus a year
How AI will compress drug discovery from 10 years to weeks
Why glasses are the killer app form factor AI was waiting for
What Demis will work on after AGI (and what’s left for human meaning)
Get 5-minute daily updates on the latest AI news: https://www.therundown.ai/subscribe Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:45 What Demis is most excited about at I/O 1:46 Have AGI timelines shifted? 3:30 What’s still missing before AGI 6:50 AI curing every disease 9:19 What diseases get cured first? 10:50 What Demis works on after AGI 11:48 Human meaning after AGI 13:50 The human skills that get more valuable 15:19 What’s underhyped in AI right now
Google AI Overview
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is a theoretical type of AI that can match or exceed human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Unlike current “narrow” AI—which is built for specific jobs—AGI could learn, reason, and apply knowledge across entirely new domains without requiring task-specific training. Wikipedia +2
How it Differs from Current AI
Current AI (Narrow): Excels at specific tasks (e.g., generating code or summarizing texts) but lacks real-world adaptability outside its training. Amazon Web Services (AWS) +1
AGI (General): Possesses versatile “common sense.” It could transfer skills between different situations, solve unfamiliar problems, and self-teach like a human. Amazon Web Services (AWS) +1
Key Characteristics of AGI
Cross-Domain Learning: The ability to understand and connect concepts across unrelated fields (e.g., playing chess, writing a novel, and repairing a faucet). Stanford HAI +1
Autonomy & Agency: The capacity to set its own goals, make long-term plans, and figure out how to accomplish them without constant human guidance. YouTube·Tiff In Tech
Common Sense & Judgment: Adapting to unpredictable, real-world situations seamlessly. IBM
Timeline & Challenges
While major strides in Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic AI have been made, true AGI remains a hypothetical milestone. Researchers debate when it will be achieved and how it will be measured, with ongoing discussions surrounding the safety and societal impact of developing human-level intelligence. Stanford HAI +3
(Note: If you are asking about taxes, AGI stands for Adjusted Gross Income—which is your total gross income for the year minus specific tax deductions.) H&R Block
DW Documentary May 20, 2026 The internet is being flooded with AI-generated garbage. Disinformation, propaganda, a flood of synthetic images and sounds. Will we soon only be getting information that AI feeds us? While we are still pondering the possible social implications of artificial intelligence, the digital knowledge space is already drowning in synthetic trash. Automated bots are producing a flood of AI-generated content that threatens to suffocate the internet. How did it come to this? After all, it was not so long ago that the web was considered a place of free knowledge, designed for the open exchange of information and entertainment. How did it become a dumping ground for machine-generated nonsense, so quickly? During his journey of discovery through the dying web, filmmaker Mario Sixtus encounters search engines that are losing their bearings and, out of helplessness, have begun working on their own demise. He demonstrates how one or two command sets typed into AI software are enough to produce meaningless self-help books and news videos consisting of pure nonsense. Will we soon be fed only AI-hallucinated fake information when we try to do our own research? The documentary takes a cinematic journey through the flood of online garbage, meets a podcaster in New York who has cloned himself with AI, encounters an underpaid click worker in Kenya who trains AI — and, along with internet experts like Cory Doctorow, Melanie Mitchell and Mats Schönauer, strains for a glimpse of a new, sustainable internet.
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