Boom Boxed

“Even as more than half of Americans have tried large language models (and virtually everyone who has done anything online has inadvertently used A.I.), studies show that people are far more worried than they are excited. According to Pew, 61 percent of respondents to a 2025 survey said they wished they had more control over how A.I. was used in their own life.” NYT (Gift Article): People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much. On one hand, this makes perfect sense. The dot com boom threatened to give you pet food delivery and streaming movies. The AI boom is threatening to take your job. But I think there’s more to it than that. People are worried about the AI boom in part because they don’t trust (and in some cases, deeply hate) the messengers who are leading and promoting the revolution. The companies are too big. The CEOs are too rich and too powerful. Some have already proven they don’t care about our privacy. Others have repeatedly bent the knee to our current AI regulation hating-regime. Some heil in public. It’s not just the tech we don’t trust. It’s the technologists.

+ Elon Musk’s makeshift AI power plant generates sound and fury in Mississippi.

+ Of course, whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay, and it will play a bigger and bigger role in our lives. As rabid is the race for consumer adoption, the race to win the war to fight future wars is even more extreme. And more dangerous. Bloomberg (Gift Article): Anthropic’s Pentagon Showdown Is About More Than AI Guardrails. “The confrontation has exposed the Defense Department’s reliance on Anthropic in a head-to-head military rivalry with US adversaries including China. Yet the battle also amplifies the tension between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon over who controls the future of AI as a tool of war and surveillance, including whether the rapidly evolving technology can be used in a lawful manner.”