A deeply unsettling New Yorker investigation into Sam Altman's operation prompted one journalist to actually test the technology itself. The experience left her more rattled than reassured.
Emma Brockes, a Guardian columnist, admits she has largely avoided the AI anxiety gripping others. But a recent feature by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz describing the rise of artificial general intelligence cracked her composure. The reporting was sobering enough to drive her to ChatGPT with a personal question: Will I end up in a permanent underclass?
Her search reflected a broader pattern of misaligned priorities. Google's top trending search in the US last year was "Charlie Kirk," with multiple queries about Donald Trump's political threat ranking high, even as artificial intelligence arguably posed a more fundamental danger. Similar disconnects have marked recent decades. Since the 1970s, public anxiety fixated on inflation and geopolitical tensions while climate change, a more existential threat, languished in the background.
The difficulty lies in distinguishing genuine catastrophic risks from background noise. A common saying tells us not to sweat small stuff. The unstated logic: we should sweat big stuff instead. But identifying which problems deserve that energy remains surprisingly hard.
Brockes' own pivot from AI skeptic to worried observer signals a shift in how seriously the technology's trajectory is being taken beyond Silicon Valley cheerleading. The New Yorker piece on Altman apparently succeeded in its most important function: making readers confront questions they had been able to avoid.
Whether consulting an AI system about AI's future actually provided comfort remains unclear from her account. The framing suggests it did not.
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