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Jay Shackford
Welcome to the
Voyage of the Damned
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times/Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington
When President Trump vitiated scientific facts on Thursday, helping fossil fuel fat cats by eliminating the government’s ability to regulate treacherous gases, a reporter asked what he says to people worried about the very real hazards of a hotter planet.
“I tell them don’t worry about it,” he shot back.
The administration has even coined a word to denigrate those who push back on Trump’s rash policies: “panican,” as in one who panics.
In a world steeped in violence and menace, we are constantly being told by the people in charge not to worry.
Don’t worry about a sweltering Earth. Don’t worry about all those powerful creeps getting away with abusing young women exploited by Jeffrey Epstein; instead, just behold the beauty of the rising Dow, as the abrasive, evasive Pam Bondi suggested at a congressional hearing Wednesday.
Don’t worry about the Trump family’s unethical get-rich-quick schemes. Don’t worry about an economy increasingly catering to the well connected. Don’t worry about the president threatening to unilaterally set the rules for state elections — Congress be damned.
The pueri aeterni of Silicon Valley have greased the palm of our King Joffrey in the White House. And now we are told not to worry about safeguards for A.I., the most spine-tingling technology ever created.
I interviewed Elon Musk in 2017, when he still cared about A.I. safety as much as he once cared about going to the wildest party on Epstein’s island and now cares about constantly sharing deranged posts about race on X. He told me that the fate of humanity depends on not allowing the algorithms to be concealed and concentrated in the hands of tech and government elites.
“It’s great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius,” Musk said then. “It’s not so great when the emperor is Caligula.”
Let’s just say that our man in the White House is no Marcus Aurelius.
When I reported in Silicon Valley back then, the debate was whether A.I. would jump to the dark side once it got smarter than us.
But since then, even the tech gods who once had good intentions have gone to the dark side, seduced by the billions to be made on A.I., including on erotica. These geniuses who were supposed to escort us into a better, safer future turned out to be the biggest sellouts of all time.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has welcomed erotica, or “adult mode,” as it’s called, saying he wants to “treat adult users like adults.”
Once Musk put up an A.I.-generated picture of himself in a bikini to demonstrate his A.I. model’s new feature, people used it to manipulate pictures of women online, stripping off their clothes.
The tech bros are thrilled with their ability to buy influence in Trump world. (Yes, Jeff Bezos, I’m talking about “Melania.”)
As Wired reported, the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, was one of Trump’s biggest individual donors in 2025, to the tune of $25 million. Another $25 million is on the way to a PAC that fights politicians who favor regulating A.I. OpenAI’s original mission was to protect humanity, but where’s the money in that?
The tech universe shuddered this week at alarms from several Paul Reveres.
An urgent post on X titled “Something Big Is Happening,” by Matt Shumer, the C.E.O. of two small tech companies, went viral. He warned that A.I. is leaping ahead faster than we think.
“The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies … Open AI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind,” he wrote, adding: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job … I tell the A.I. what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself.” Now, he wrote, OpenAI’s newest model is showing judgment, and it knows how to make the right call on its own.
On Monday, an Anthropic A.I. safety researcher, Mrinank Sharma, quit his job, posting an apocalyptic warning on X that the “world is in peril” from A.I., bioweapons and cascading crises.
Anthropic’s C.E.O., Dario Amodei, has been the most responsible tech executive in acknowledging the awesome, hair-curling power of A.I., saying it will “test who we are as a species” and reveal whether humanity has the maturity to handle this “almost unimaginable power.” (The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the company’s A.I. tool, Claude, had helped the American military capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.)
Sharma is not sure if humanity has the maturity to handle A.I. “I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” he wrote.
He said he will disappear to England and pursue a poetry degree, signing off with a William Stafford poem containing a line that augured A.I. dominance: “Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.”
Zoë Hitzig, a researcher at OpenAI, also quit on Monday. In a guest essay for The New York Times, she said she had lost faith that OpenAI still wanted to back her work on the two outcomes she fears most: “a technology that manipulates the people who use it at no cost and one that exclusively benefits the few who can afford to use it.”
Another OpenAI executive, Ryan Beiermeister, lost her job in the safety division after complaining about ChatGPT’s rollout of A.I. erotica, The Journal disclosed.
Beiermeister, The Journal said, did not think the company had enough guardrails in place to stop child-exploitation content and wall off adult content from teens.
OpenAI claimed Beiermeister’s departure was due to sexual discrimination against a male colleague. She adamantly denied that to The Journal.
Despite the smarmy reassurances of the tech lords, some A.I. insiders are alarmed by what they’re seeing.
The people in charge tell us not to worry. But we should worry. It’s getting scary out there. There’s nothing artificial about that.
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