I almost titled this blog posting, "Take Five: The AI Threat Seems All Too Real." In fact, my recent reading in The Wall Street Journal found that this newspaper, which is renowned as a reliable source of information, especially vital to those engaged in business - and particularly to those who are engaged in the business of using money to make money - is taking very seriously the idea that A.I. poses a genuine threat not only to our economy, but to the continued existence of life on Planet Earth.
"Take Five"? Well, here are links to five articles that led me to the conclusion that The Journal is not "kidding" as it reports that A.I. must be seen as a danger to our human existence (not to mention to the continuation of that business of using money to make money):
Just to be fair to that other newspaper of national renown - a newspaper that I also read daily, as I read The Wall Street Journal each day - here is an editorial statement published in The New York Times on Sunday, September 13, 2026. It has a similar message:
I assume that anyone reading this blog posting has probably read articles like the ones I have just linked above - articles you can read even if you do not subscribe to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. Just click the links; no paywall should prevent you from getting access.
Having done all the reading just outlined above, I wanted to put down my own thoughts. I believe that what we are calling "Artificial Intelligence" is, indeed, "dangerous." It is primarily dangerous, as I see it, because the existence of A.I., as it is being understood, comes with a claim that we should defer to it, and treat it as an authority, even though that so-called "Artificial Intelligence" is a purely a human creation.
Since when do we defer to our own human creations as though they were superior to us - even though we created them? Well, you might want to check out my recent blog posting on "Our Golden Calf." It's true that we do, sometimes, defer to, or even "worship," something that is a product of our own activity, and begin to treat one of our own creations as if it were greater than we ourselves. When we do that, we start losing contact with the power inherent in our human freedom. We lose our ability to act, to change whatever exists, and to conjure possibility into reality.
Disasters (like 911) can make us aware of how great and important each individual human being really is. I wrote on that topic, too, quite recently. Subordinating our lives and freedoms to a human creation is terribly dangerous, in that we lose the sense that each one of us, individually, and that all of us, together, actually create the world in which we most immediately live.
The "Agentic" nature of A.I., as it is being developed, makes things worse. When we remove humans from control over the processes of life, and turn that control over to one of our own creations, treating that creation as an "agent" working for us, as though it were a "new species," we set ourselves up for potential disaster.
That's what The Times and The Wall Street Journal are talking about. Well, can we stop it? Yeah! Duh! We can.
But to change the world, we need to act, and we (ordinary people, like those who died on 911) can be in charge of making the world conform to what we, collectively, decide we want it to be. Overall, I keep trying to alert us all to the possibilities we have before us as we create the "Political World" in which we most immediately live.
If we let others create the "Political World," and if "ordinary" people let the billionaires and the tech-bros take charge, we are in the kind of trouble that those newspaper articles point out.
There is absolutely nothing "inevitable" about that. But if we act as though we are "spectators," and "observers," as opposed to those who join together to refashion and create the kind of world we want, we may well go down in the sort of disaster that those newspaper articles so clearly demonstrate is a genuine threat. There is no shortcut that will excuse us from taking action ourselves. Me? I'm thinking maybe I should run for president. At least to present some alternatives to the kind of world we seem to be creating now. I did "major in Utopia" at college you know!
Could I persuade you that this "utopian" approach to politics should be a qualification, not a disqualification? I'd like to think so, and that our future should come from all of us, not some self-selected so-called leader.
Let's make it a joint project!
Image Credit:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-may-become-the-third-superpower-1f7700dc
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