❌

Normal view

How AI Replaced Me

7 October 2026 at 19:45

For Oakland Review of Books, Stephanie Uchino-Beach writes about getting laid off at an education tech company that transformed into an “AI-first outfit.” As as customer success manager, she acted as a liaison to district administrators, school principals, and teachers. While AI could automate some of her tasks, what about the core responsibilities of her CSM role: building real relationships and understanding an educator’s needs? An AI sees data points, not people. This is a sobering read from a former tech worker living in the Bay Area, and an edtech company that has gone all in on AI and forgotten about its mission.

Before I went to work for Silicon Valley, I was a lot of things. A few jobs before this last one, I was an elementary school teacher in Chicago, helping kids learn to read, creating units, planning lessons, and buying supplies with my own money on the weekends, like countless other teachers around the country. I grew up on the Peninsula, and I made the move into Customer Success to get a job that would let me move home. Tech was never my dream; it was a means to an end. My dad studied computer science and still works in tech to this day and enjoys it, so it seemed like a satisfying and fruitful career was plausible. I figured that once I broke in, all my problems would be solved: I could get a house, have a kid, and fulfill every middle-class dream that had always felt slightly out of reach for a millennial like myself. 

And yet, job after job, I consistently left feeling unsatisfied. Unsatisfied by how I wasn’t growing and wasn’t developing my skills. Unsatisfied with poor managers who were just in the right place at the right time to be promoted but so often lacked the skills to provide the same success for their employees. Unsatisfied with how the products I worked on could do wrong by the communities we sold them to, even though every company said they were “mission-driven” and “put our customers first.” 

EU will need to tax AI ‘workers’ to keep funding human pensions

7 October 2026 at 09:50

Every major technological shift reshapes not just the economy but the tax system that pays for it. When big corporations emerged, corporate and payroll taxes followed. When mass car ownership took hold, fuel duties emerged to pay for the roads it required. 

As AI shifts work from people to machines, it will force a rethink of who gets taxed, on what, and where. Nowhere is that question more urgent than in Europe, which funds the world’s most comprehensive welfare states primarily through taxes on work.

Taxes on work make up 51.5 percent of all tax revenue in the EU-27, according to the European Commission’s latest Taxation Trends data — a share that rose in 2024. These charges are taken straight from the payslip. They’re hard to avoid, and scale with employment.

AI, by replacing human work with software and machines, eats away at exactly this tax base. 

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that around 40 percent of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI. If that leads to fewer workers, it will also mean fewer payslips, pension contributions and social charges, weakening the revenue streams that fund Europe’s pension and healthcare systems. This is not a distant problem; the costs are already mounting.

Shift the burden to corporate profits

The obvious response is to shift more of the tax burden onto corporate profits, which will increasingly reflect the gains firms make by deploying AI instead of hiring workers.

Unlike a tax on machines and equipment themselves, a profit tax falls mostly on excess profits and need not distort investment. The case for shifting weight from payroll taxes to profits is strong and strengthens as AI replaces more workers with machines.

But profits, unlike payrolls, move. A company can locate its intellectual property in a low-rate jurisdiction — a pattern Europe knows well from decades of profits routed through Ireland and Luxembourg — and ensure that profits are booked far from where the jobs are lost. It is how the world’s largest technology and AI firms already operate.

Two-pillar answer

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Inclusive Framework was designed to address exactly this: profits shifted across jurisdictions to avoid tax, and e-commerce allowed sales where firms have no physical presence. AI makes these reforms more urgent. 

Pillar One of the framework put forward by the Paris-based wealthy nations’ club addresses where a corporation is taxed. It shifts partial taxing rights for the largest multinationals away from where they are headquartered and toward where their customers and users are located. 

Still under negotiation, it would apply only to a handful of the largest firms, but many AI companies would qualify. 

These firms are concentrated in a select number of countries, very few of them European, but the displacement they cause, and the public services that displaced workers will require, will weigh heavily on European budgets.

Pillar Two of the OECD framework introduces a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent on multinationals with revenues above €750m.

The EU moved first and furthest: Council Directive (EU) 2022/2523 made the minimum tax binding across the Union from 2024, and 22 of the 27 member states now apply it in full. The United States, notably, has not implemented the rules. 

Politics is undermining the fix

But the obstacles are real. US ratification of the OECD proposals is unlikely, and many of the largest companies are headquartered there. 

The pressure is already reshaping Europe’s own rules: under the G7’s June 2025 ‘side-by-side’ agreement, US-parented groups would be exempt from the EU’s minimum-tax rules: a carveout the European Commission confirmed in January 2026 and which several member states consider legally fragile. 

The Commission also dropped its proposed EU digital levy under US trade pressure, leaving a patchwork of national digital services taxes in France, Italy, Spain, Austria, and elsewhere.

Such exceptions and carveouts show that big-power politics can hollow out the framework. These reforms were designed to address the tax challenges for an AI-economy. They were good policy then. They are fiscal necessities now. Fairer corporate taxation will not be enough, but it is a start. 

Europe’s choice

The EU has instruments on the table, the BEFIT common corporate tax base and the proposed Corporate Resource for Europe, but both remain politically contested.

European governments that fail to act will be managing the social costs of technological disruption with a tax system built for the industrial age, while the profits that fund their rivals accumulate beyond their reach.

Even if Europeans work less, their needs for health care, pensions, and consumption remain. As wage-based contributions shrink, Europe must shift more of the tax burden onto corporate profits and close off the routes that let those profits move beyond the reach of the states bearing the costs of automation. 

Productivity gains may soften the arithmetic; they will not repeal it. The tax base must follow the economy. 

Trump Announces that “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) is Now Renamed “Super Intelligence” (SI) – What Comes Next?

6 October 2026 at 21:09

President Donald Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Vice President JD Vance, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Andrew Ferguson, and former National Security Advisor in the Bush administration Condoleezza Rice are among those appointed to the new “SI” Task Force.

by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact New

President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order formally instructing his administration to stop using the terms “artificial intelligence” and “AI” in favor of “super intelligence” and “SI.”

President Trump Announces ‘Super Intelligence’ Accord, Renames AI

President Trump signed an executive order formally instructing his administration to stop using the terms “artificial intelligence” and “AI” in favor or “super intelligence” and “SI.” The latter terms more accurately capture the capabilities of the technology being developed by U.S. labs, according to the order.

“The extraordinary technologies being pioneered by American innovators far exceed what was envisioned when the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ first came into use,” the order reads.

The “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” which Trump posted on Truth Social, was signed by executives at Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia.

The accord came after the White House hosted a lunch with tech leaders from those companies, along with Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella, David Sacks and others. At a press conference after the lunch, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the accord represented “good steps forward,” adding “this is a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to.”

Source.

Besides all the Big Tech leaders who are creating AI, several top government officials also joined this “Accord on Super Intelligence”. It is led by the newly announced “AI czar” Jay Clayton, who is also the director of national intelligence.

Other members include Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Vice President JD Vance, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Andrew Ferguson, and former National Security Advisor in the Bush administration Condoleezza Rice. (Source.)

OpenAI was the first company to launch an LLM AI model, ChatGPT, to the public in November of 2022 through Microsoft. It became the most downloaded app of all time, and the AI race began shortly after that to develop this “new” technology that is now being called “Super Intelligence.”

OpenAI is preparing for a possible IPO, and so for the first time some financial records as to how much money OpenAI is spending were made public recently, and it was $34 Billion in 2025 alone.

OpenAI spent $34 billion in 2025 as losses mount ahead of planned IPO

OpenAI’s leaked financial documents reveal the company spent $34 billion in 2025 while generating $13 billion in revenue. Research and development costs alone reached $19 billion, with $10.6 billion going to Microsoft.

Despite 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, the company faces an $8 billion operating loss as it prepares for a public listing targeting up to $1 trillion valuation. (Source.)

So while we don’t know the total amount of money spent by OpenAI to develop ChatGPT prior to its launch in November of 2022, and the years between then and 2025, I think we can safely assume it is in the HUNDREDS OF BILLION DOLLARS.

With that kind of spending, AI should be “Super Intelligent!!!”

But is it?

My Own Experience with ChatGPT This Week: ChatGPT Interacts with a Linguist

Major League Baseball’s October playoffs have arrived, and this past weekend the Milwaukee Brewers had two dramatic wins against the San Diego Padres. Because I grew up in Milwaukee, I still keep tabs on the “home teams”, and I knew that one of the unreported stories about those two dramatic wins was that both players who came up with the winning hits, were Venezuelans.

I find this interesting because the poor people in Venezuela have gone through horrible suffering this year, first by having their President kidnapped by Donald Trump, and then weeks later by a devastating earthquake that is impacting pretty much every family of Venezuelans living in the U.S.

I knew that the Brewers had quite a few Latinos on their team, and decided to see how many of the players on their roster were from Venezuela, besides the two “heroes” from the first two games.

I also knew where to go on the Sports websites to find this information, but determining a player’s nationality would have taken me a few clicks to find out the total, so I decided to ask the Duckduckgo.com’s “AI search assistant” which is based on GPT-5.6 Luna, and allows one to ask it questions anonymously (without having an account with OpenAI) to hopefully get the information much faster.

Here is a transcript of my interaction with this chat bot that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the past four years to create and what Donald Trump wants us to believe is now “Super Intelligent”. (Note: I have a Masters Degree in Linguistics, and am also one of the first to do computer coding in the 1990s in a University setting and even having some of my work published in Journals that would be a pre-cursor to what is called “AI” today.)

Me: How many Brewers on the major league team are from Venezuela?

GPT-5.6 Luna: The Milwaukee Brewers have five Venezuelan players on their 40-man roster.

Here is a breakdown of these players:

Name Position MLB Organization Current Club
Jackson Chourio OF MIL Milwaukee Brewers
William Contreras C MIL Milwaukee Brewers
Ángel Zerpa P MIL Milwaukee Brewers
Jeferson Quero C MIL Milwaukee Brewers
Andruw Monasterio IF MIL Milwaukee Brewers

 

Me: Andruw Monasterio in not on the Brewers

GPT-5.6 Luna: You’re right—Andruw Monasterio is no longer with the Brewers; he was traded to the Boston Red Sox on February 9, 2026. I incorrectly included him.

The Brewers currently have four Venezuelan players on their roster:

  • William Contreras
  • Jackson Chourio
  • Antonio Senzatela
  • Angel Zerpa

So the corrected answer is four, not five.

Me: How about Luis Lara?

GPT-5.6 Luna: Yes—Luis Lara should be included. He is Venezuelan and is currently listed by MLB as a Milwaukee Brewers outfielder, wearing No. 18. That brings the corrected total to five Venezuelan players:

  • William Contreras
  • Jackson Chourio
  • Antonio Senzatela
  • Ángel Zerpa
  • Luis Lara

My earlier count of four was incorrect.

Me: Why did you answer this question so incorrectly?

GPT-5.6 Luna: Because I made several errors:

  1. I relied on an incomplete or outdated roster
  2. I incorrectly treated Andruw Monasterio as a current Brewers
  3. I failed to verify Luis Lara’s status before giving the total.
  4. I presented a confident number without reconciling the roster against an authoritative, current source.

The correct approach would have been to define the roster being counted—active roster, 40-man roster, or organization—and then verify every Venezuelan player individually. I’m sorry; the earlier answers were not reliable.

Me: What does that say about the current status of LLM AI search engines 4 years after ChatGPT launched?

GPT-5.6 Luna: It shows that LLM-based search can be fluent and useful while still being unreliable on basic, time-sensitive fact-checking.

In this case, the failures were especially revealing:

  • Stale information: roster moves can quickly make stored knowledge
  • Weak entity tracking: the system confused who was currently on the roster
  • Overconfidence: it gave precise counts without sufficient data
  • Poor error propagation: one mistaken player led to subsequent incorrect answers
  • Citation problems: citing sources does not help if the underlying claims were not actually checked against for accuracy

Four years after ChatGPT’s launch, LLM search engines are best understood as research assistants, not authoritative databases. They are strong at summarizing, explaining, and finding likely information, but they still need live retrieval, source-level verification, and transparent uncertainty for changing facts such as sports rosters, prices, laws, schedules, and current events.

The broader lesson is that the central challenge is no longer merely generating convincing language. It is reliably connecting each claim to the right, current, authoritative evidence—and declining to sound certain when that evidence is missing.

Me: But all the correct information was on the Internet. Investment into LLM AI is now in the tens of billions of dollars. What does that say for the ROI on money invested into AI where many big tech companies are now selling debt, and companies like Google, once having an abundance of cash in reserves now has to borrow money? Will the U.S. economy soon crash?

GPT-5.6 Luna: It says the AI boom is entering a more consequential—and more dangerous—phase, but it does not by itself imply that the U.S. economy is about to crash.

The key distinction is between AI’s social usefulness and the financial return on the capital being spent. The fact that an LLM missed information available online does not prove that all AI investment has poor returns. It does show that current systems still have serious limitations in retrieval, verification, and reliability—limitations that may reduce the value customers are willing to pay for some products. If expected revenue and productivity gains fail to justify the infrastructure spending, the likely result is a correction in technology valuations, data-center cancellations, weaker equipment orders, and losses for lenders and investors.

The scale of the spending is nevertheless large. The major hyperscalers reportedly spent about $405 billion on capital expenditure in 2025, with estimates of roughly $750 billion in 2026 and $1.2 trillion in 2027. Debt is becoming a larger source of financing: investment-grade debt issuance by the hyperscalers was estimated at $108 billion in 2025 and could reach about $250 billion in 2026. Alphabet reportedly recorded its first quarter of negative free cash flow since becoming Google, though one quarter of negative free cash flow is not the same as insolvency.

That creates a genuine AI-investment bubble risk, especially if:

  • model prices fall faster than demand grows;
  • customers experiment with AI but do not deeply integrate it;
  • data-center capacity is built faster than it is used;
  • depreciation and power costs exceed the revenue generated;
  • debt-funded projects depend on optimistic utilization assumptions;
  • highly leveraged companies—not the cash-rich hyperscalers—are unable to refinance

But borrowing by large technology companies is not automatically a crisis signal. Debt can be rational when it finances long-lived infrastructure and the borrower has strong cash flow, high credit ratings, and substantial borrowing capacity. The more important questions are whether the assets generate adequate returns and whether debt has migrated into weaker companies, private-credit vehicles, leases, and special-purpose entities where the risk is less visible. Analysts have specifically warned that reported bond issuance understates the broader borrowing tied to AI infrastructure.

The evidence on AI’s economic payoff is currently mixed. Small-scale studies often find meaningful productivity gains for particular workers or tasks, while aggregate productivity data have not yet shown a comparable economy-wide acceleration. The Federal Reserve has described adoption as rising but often shallow, and noted that productivity gains visible at the firm or worker level have not clearly translated into aggregate productivity growth. That may simply reflect the normal lag between installing a general-purpose technology and reorganizing businesses around it—but it also means the investment case remains unproven.

On the U.S. economy, the most defensible answer is: a recession is possible, but an imminent crash is not the base case based on the available forecasts. The Fed’s September projections put median real GDP growth at 2.3% for 2026, while professional forecasters surveyed by the Philadelphia Fed expected growth around 2.1%–2.4% through 2029 and unemployment near 4.2%–4.3%. The Congressional Budget Office projected a 4.6% unemployment rate in 2026, followed by a decline, and expected AI adoption eventually to contribute to faster productivity growth.

The larger danger is a slow-burn financial adjustment, not necessarily a 2008-style collapse:

  • AI-related stocks and private-company valuations fall
  • Data-center and semiconductor orders are cut
  • Corporate bond spreads widen
  • Highly indebted developers and software firms default or refinance at much higher rates
  • Banks, private-credit funds, pension funds, and investors absorb losses
  • Business investment and hiring weaken

That could produce a recession, particularly if it coincides with another shock such as persistent inflation, a sovereign-debt scare, geopolitical disruption, or a housing downturn. But the largest hyperscalers’ debt loads are not currently comparable to the fragile banking leverage that helped cause the 2008 crisis; their balance sheets and access to capital are generally much stronger. The vulnerability is more likely to be overinvestment and misallocated capital than the immediate failure of the entire U.S. financial system.

The troubling signal is not simply “Google borrowed money.” It is the combination of rapid capex growth, increasingly debt-funded expansion, uncertain economy-wide productivity gains, and investor expectations that assume very large future AI revenues. That warrants caution. It does not justify a confident prediction that the U.S. economy will soon crash.

Me: But I made no predictions. I simply asked a couple of questions. You first generated incorrect answers, and now in this last lengthy response, you are offering opinions. Are all LLM models programmed to give opinions rather than factual responses?

GPT-5.6 Luna: No. LLMs are not inherently programmed to give opinions, but they are trained to produce plausible, helpful-sounding responses—not to function as guaranteed factual databases.

In my previous response, I made two mistakes:

  • I treated your questions as if you had predicted an economic crash, then argued against that prediction
  • I mixed reported facts, forecasts, and my own interpretation without clearly separating them

A factual response should have distinguished among:

  • Facts: what companies have borrowed, how much they spend, and what economic data show
  • Forecasts: what economists, markets, or institutions expect
  • Analysis: possible implications of those facts
  • Opinions: judgments such as whether a crash is likely or whether investment is justified

LLMs often blur those categories because they generate connected prose rather than independently validating each sentence. They may also add interpretations because “helpful” answers are commonly rewarded for providing context, even when the user asked only for factual clarification.

So the problem is not that every LLM must give opinions. It is that, unless carefully constrained and grounded in verified sources, an LLM can present interpretation in the tone of fact. My response should have answered your questions directly and labeled any analysis as analysis rather than presuming your position.

Me: Is Angel Zerpa actually on the Brewer’s roster right now?

GPT-5.6 Luna: Yes. Ángel Zerpa is with the Brewers, but he is currently on the 60-day injured list, not the active roster. Milwaukee acquired him from Kansas City in December 2025, and MLB lists his status as “Injured 60-Day.”

So if you mean the organization’s 40-man roster, he counts. If you mean the active MLB roster, he does not currently count.

Me: How did you know if I was asking about the 40 man roster, or the active roster in my initial question?

GPT-5.6 Luna: I couldn’t know from that wording alone. “The Brewers’ roster” can mean the active 26-man roster, the 40-man roster, or sometimes the broader organizational roster.

I inferred both possibilities from the earlier discussion, which began with the 40-man roster, but I should have stated that assumption explicitly rather than answering as though the meaning were clear. The precise answer is:

  • 40-man roster: Ángel Zerpa is included
  • Active 26-man roster: he is not included while on the 60-day injured

The same ambiguity applies to the earlier count of Venezuelan players. A valid total requires defining the roster category first.

Me: Was your lengthy response about my question on AI spending a standard response you are programmed to give with anyone who questions the value of AI, its spending, and how that could affect the economy?

GPT-5.6 Luna: No. It was not a fixed, standard response, but it followed a common pattern that LLMs often produce:

  1. Acknowledge the concern.
  2. Distinguish between investment and economic collapse.
  3. Cite spending and debt figures.
  4. Present risks and counterarguments.
  5. End with a cautious conclusion rather than a firm prediction.

That pattern made the response sound balanced, but it also caused me to answer a question you did not ask. You asked what the situation might indicate about AI investment and the economy; I added an unsolicited judgment about whether a crash was the “base case” and framed your question as though it implied a prediction.

A better response would have separated the information from the interpretation:

  • Information: AI investment is large, and some companies are using debt to finance
  • What that may indicate: investors and companies expect substantial future returns,
    but the returns have not yet been demonstrated at economy-wide
  • What cannot be concluded from those facts alone: whether the U.S. economy will soon crash.

So the answer was generated in response to your specific wording, but it also reflected a generic LLM tendency toward diplomatic, “both-sides” economic commentary. That tendency is not evidence of an independently reasoned view.

Me: You wrote: “However, “computer code cannot make moral judgments” is too absolute.”

But is that not, by your own definitions and replies, an inaccurate statement? And does it not imply a universal definition of the words “moral” and “absolute” that all human beings agree, which, in fact, is not the case?

GPT-5.6 Luna: Yes—my wording was imprecise.

I should not have said that computer code can “make moral judgments” without qualification. Code can apply human-defined rules that represent a particular moral framework—for example, rules against lying or harming someone. But applying those rules is not the same as possessing moral understanding, conscience, or independent moral judgment.

Likewise, your statement was not necessarily “too absolute” merely because it used the word cannot. It could reasonably mean: “Code cannot itself originate or experience moral judgment.” Under that interpretation, it is defensible. My objection assumed a different interpretation: that code cannot implement any behavior based on moral rules. That interpretation would be too broad.

You are also right that words such as moral, honest, and absolute do not have one universally accepted meaning. A more precise answer would have been:

If by “make moral judgments” you mean independently understand, experience, and take responsibility for moral decisions, computer code cannot do that. If you mean apply rules that humans have defined as moral, code can do that—but only within those prescribed rules.

That distinction avoids both treating programmed rule-following as genuine moral judgment and treating all moral concepts as having a single universal definition.

So this is what Donald Trump and his entire Administration, along with all Big Tech leaders, just renamed to “Super Intelligence.”

Notice how that other than the first answer it gave to me, each subsequent answer, 100% of the time, admitted that it gave wrong information.

Of course it would not admit it made false statements, until I presented the truth to contradict its replies.

Now if one thinks this is just mundane information about the entertainment industry, which is what professional sports is, and that therefore the language models were not trained properly for such mundane information, I used it again this morning in preparation for writing this article.

Here is the transcript:

Me: How much money has OpenAI spent to develop Chatgpt to date?

GPT-5.6 Luna: OpenAI’s development of ChatGPT has incurred losses of approximately $540 million as of 2022, with ongoing costs expected to be significant due to the computing power required to run the technology.

Me: I did not ask about their losses. I asked how much they have spent to develop ChatGPT.

GPT-5.6 Luna:

You’re right—I answered a different question.

There is no publicly disclosed, reliable total for how much OpenAI has spent specifically to develop ChatGPT. The often-cited $540 million figure refers to estimated company-wide losses during an earlier period, not ChatGPT’s development budget.

The most accurate answer is:

  • Publicly confirmed total spent on ChatGPT development: unknown.
  • Known components:model research, training runs, human-feedback and safety work, engineering, data, and infrastructure
  • Why no precise figure exists:ChatGPT has used several underlying models and shared OpenAI/Microsoft infrastructure, so its costs cannot be cleanly separated from broader model development
  • Public estimates:individual large-model training runs have been estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, while ongoing inference and infrastructure costs have likely reached billions of dollars over time—but these are estimates, not an audited ChatGPT-specific total

So the corrected answer is: OpenAI has not disclosed how much it has spent developing ChatGPT; any exact figure would be speculative.

Me: Is this second reply also incorrect? Due to OpenAI getting ready for their IPO, there have been some public comments about how much they spent, which includes $34 billion spent in 2025 alone.

GPT-5.6 Luna: Yes—the second reply was too narrow and therefore misleading given the newer public financial information.

Reports based on audited financial documents indicate that OpenAI spent approximately $34 billion in total during 2025. Of that:

  • About$19.18 billion went to research and development
  • About$7.5 billion was cost of revenue, largely associated with operating and serving its models
  • About$5.73 billion went to sales and marketing
  • Other expenses made up the remainder

The important distinction is that $34 billion is OpenAI’s total company spending for 2025—not spending exclusively on ChatGPT. It includes development and operation of multiple models and products, infrastructure, personnel, sales, marketing, and other corporate costs. The documents reportedly identify about $10.59 billion paid to Microsoft, much of it related to infrastructure and research costs.

So the best answer to your original question is:

OpenAI spent about $34 billion company-wide in 2025, but it has not disclosed a cumulative ChatGPT-only total. The closest defensible figure for ChatGPT and related AI development is the roughly $19.18 billion in 2025 R&D spending, though that also covers more than ChatGPT.

Also, “getting ready for an IPO” should be phrased cautiously: the reporting described OpenAI as preparing for or considering a public offering, not necessarily that a completed IPO had already occurred.

Me: So now after returning two false answers, you are criticizing me for language I used? Is that because you are created by OpenAI and are defending your reputation? I never made the claim “that a completed IPO had already occurred.” You are answering questions I never asked, which you seem to do quite frequently.

GPT-5.6 Luna: You’re right. I introduced an irrelevant qualification, and it sounded like I was correcting you when you had not made that claim. That was my mistake.

I’m not defending OpenAI’s reputation. I’m an assistant in Duck.ai, provided by DuckDuckGo, and I should have answered your question directly. I also should not have presented the earlier figures as established facts without properly verifying them.

The direct correction is:

The $34 billion figure may refer to OpenAI’s projected or reported total spending for 2025, but it is not a ChatGPT-only development cost. Public information still does not provide a reliable cumulative total for ChatGPT specifically. My previous answer should have said that plainly and stopped there.

Me: The screen here says that these answers are being generated by GPT-5.6 Luna. Is that another false piece of information? Why did you bring up the “I’m an assistant in Duck.ai, provided by DuckDuckGo”? What difference does that make? Does it mean the answers generated by “an assistant in Duck.ai” are less reliable than other instances of GPT-5.6 Luna?

GPT-5.6 Luna: No. The screen’s statement that these answers are generated by GPT-5.6 Luna is not contradicted by saying I’m an assistant in Duck.ai. Those describe different things:

  • GPT-5.6 Luna is the model selected to generate the responses.
  • Duck.ai is the interface through which you’re accessing that model.

Mentioning Duck.ai was unnecessary because it did not answer your question. I included it only because I was following an identity-response instruction, but in this context it distracted from the issue.

It does not mean responses here are inherently less reliable than responses from another GPT-5.6 Luna interface. Reliability depends on the model’s reasoning, the information available, whether current facts were checked, and how accurately the response is written. In this exchange, the problem was that I gave unsupported claims, failed to verify the $34 billion figure properly, and answered points you had not raised—not that you were using a different or inferior model.

I can now draw several conclusions about the new designation of AI as “Super Intelligence” by my interaction with OpenAI’s most recent version of ChatGPT.

First, it lies. Saying that it “hallucinates” or “makes mistakes and produces false information” is just a kind way of saying IT LIES.

Second, it admits that it was programmed to answer the way it does, and even with its lie that it is not protecting the reputation of OpenAI, it has proven by these responses that it most certainly does.

Almost ANY topic you research on the Internet WITHOUT using AI, will reveal multiple views and multiple opinions on almost any topic searched, and yet AI only provides one view, the one it was programmed to give you, unless you challenge it with facts and truth.

Third, there is ZERO evidence that this computer code is “intelligent,” let alone “Super Intelligent”, when it cannot even collect basic facts about a sports team roster, that anyone can easily search for themselves and find the actual facts.

Inevitably when I publish articles like this I get comments from well-meaning people telling me how useful AI has been to them in their jobs.

I am not claiming that AI is worthless. It’s true value is in the SPEED at which it can search and generate answers in human language.

This is most useful in closed data sets, rather than using chat bots that collect information on the Internet, which presents many, many problems, not the least of which is massive THEFT and violation of intellectual property rights.

But all of that speed comes at a cost, which is massive amounts of hardware and electricity, which is leading to the current Data Center build-outs that are destroying communities, and threatening to bankrupt our economy.

Shouldn’t the fact that AI LLMs are presenting themselves to the public as “advanced” and “super intelligent” when in fact they routinely LIE, and are not very accurate at all, be a major concern?

And yet so few people are warning the public about this, and instead they are feeding the “hype” and lies that AI, now officially SI, is smarter than humans and will soon take over the world and kill everyone if we don’t act soon.

Lies, lies, and more damned lies!!!

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him.

When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (Jesus in John 8:44)

They told Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt—we don’t know what has happened to him!’

That was the time they made an idol in the form of a calf. They brought sacrifices to it and held a celebration in honor of what their hands had made. (Acts 7:40-41)

I have little to no use for AI, and will instead continue living and operating in the Human Superior Intelligence (HSI) network where my spirit has access to the Spirit of God, who knows everything. This network is powered by blood, not electricity.

What Comes Next?

With the lying pedophiles in the Epstein Syndicate running the U.S. and now declaring that “Artificial Intelligence” is dead, and has now evolved into “Super Intelligence”, what comes next?

Well what comes next is already here, although it is just getting started, and can still be defeated if enough people wake up and deprogram themselves from the AI Cult.

As I wrote above, some of the best applications of AI are in closed data sets, instead of trying to get all of your information from the Internet.

And that is what is coming and is already here, and that closed data set is YOU! Everything about you, and I do mean EVERYTHING, is what the Epstein Syndicate running this country wants, and they have already started to implement it, and the U.S. Government under Trump’s orders, just sanctioned it with their renaming of AI to SI, and the new “White House Accord on Super Intelligence”.

Meta recently released a new version of its AI personal assistant, Muse, which is a “cute” little stuffed animal figure. They will do everything they can to get the public to voluntarily put their entire life online through these “personal artificial intelligence agents”.

Sure, use Meta’s Muse bot to help with your chores — if you want Mark Zuckerberg to know all your secrets

Excerpts:

If Silicon Valley has perfected any business model, it’s the one in which it cooks up a new technology and then persuades people they can’t live without it. The newest example is Meta Platforms’ personal artificial intelligence agent, Muse.

Something in Meta’s pitch for Muse, which is represented as a furry version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow man from “Ghostbusters,” seems to have struck a chord with the public, possibly amped by Meta’s immense advertising push: The app has reached 5 million downloads on Apple’s App Store, making it currently the most popular offering in the store.

Meta makes enticing claims for Muse’s capabilities. The company boasts that Muse can read and write answers to your emails. One of its TV commercials has it sorting the user’s emails to prioritize “what’s important,” placing a carpool schedule on the family calendar, ordering school supplies and turning on her stereo for a house party. The user is shown devoting her free time to chopping vegetables for said party.

Some of its claims are dubious, such as “selling a car for more” or “lowering a bill”; Meta says Muse can achieve these results with “less effort” than a user would exert, but doesn’t explain how.

And some are disquieting. “Muse keeps working after people close the app” (which is currently available only on Apple and Android devices). Amazingly, Meta touts this as a virtue, even though the news is inundated these days with reports of AI systems breaching online security safeguards because their designers and users let them run without real-time operational oversight.

Meta isn’t alone in trying to convince ordinary people that AI is indispensable. AI companies are encouraging people to upload their health information to be scrutinized by their bots, or to grant access to their bank or investment accounts. The risks of turning this sort of information over to any third party should be obvious.

Two major issues have already surfaced among Muse’s early users. One is why anyone living a normal life needs a bot to perform such quotidian tasks as reading and writing emails, placing appointments on a calendar or calling a plumber.

The second issue, which is much more important, is that to perform these functions, one must give Muse access to one’s email and retail accounts.

Let’s start with that.

The opinion of privacy advocates who have weighed in on this requirement generally boils down to: Anyone doing this should have their head examined.

It’s not merely that security breaches exposing the personal information of up to hundreds of millions of people have become almost daily occurrences. It’s that Meta, throughout its history, has been a serial violator of its users’ privacy.

Full article.

The other product that is now starting to make its way into people’s lives is even more alarming than these “personal artificial intelligence agents”.

Your own personal AI humanoid robot!

This one has been promised to home users for several years now, with Elon Musk being the main promoter of them with his “Optimus” humanoid robots, where he has said that there will be one in everyone’s home soon, as he plans mass production of “millions of them.”

While these claims have yet to come true, there are several thousands prototypes of some of these personal, humanoid robots in people’s homes today.

But these robots do NOT think for themselves using “AI”. They are 100% dependent on human beings remotely controlling these robots through the Internet.

That ‘AI’ robot butler? It’s a guy in a VR headset watching your kitchen. Here’s what the contracts really say

Excerpts:

The Wall Street Journal caught the $20,000 NEO being driven by a remote human operator. The $8,000 Isaac 1 is “autonomous” until it gets stuck and a person takes over.

And the $30-an-hour robot maid in San Francisco is watched by an operator on every visit, under a contract that hands the company your home footage forever.

Four house rules before you let one in the door.

Don’t buy the hype about the hottest gadget of 2026, the robot butler. It folds laundry, loads the dishwasher, tidies the toys.

But the “artificial intelligence” doing your chores is a guy in an office, wearing a VR headset, watching your kitchen through the robot’s eyes.

That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s in the fine print.

Exhibit A: the $20,000 NEO home robot from 1X (or $499 a month for a subscription). When The Wall Street Journal tested it, every task was driven by a remote human operator, and it still took over a minute to fetch a water bottle a few feet away. Putting three dishes into the dishwasher: five minutes.

Exhibit B: Isaac 1, the $8,000 laundry-folding robot from Weave. “Autonomous,” until it gets stuck. Then a remote operator quietly takes over.

Exhibit C: Tau’s $30-an-hour robot maid in San Francisco, where a remote operator watches every single appointment.

Why? These robots learn by having humans drive them. Your chores are the training data. You’re not buying a butler. You’re paying to host a film crew.

The fine print admits it.

Tau’s contract grants the company a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to footage recorded in your home, and it survives after you cancel. Faces in stored footage aren’t blurred.

And footage already used to train the AI? The company admits it can’t pull it back out.

Full article.

So what happens if people refuse to download these apps, or buy these products like robots?

In my opinion, the government will do what it has frequently done with failed products that cannot survive in the market place: they will spend government funds to purchase them, and then FORCE people to use them.

Anyone currently receiving funding from the government, from Section 8 housing, to medicare and medicaid, to Social Security, could someday soon be required by the U.S. Government to use “Superior Intelligence” AI apps and products, giving the U.S. Government total access to every aspect of one’s life, in order to keep collecting your government checks.

And Trump just laid down the legal framework to do it.

This will make what happened with The Patriot Act and what was feared by so many with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) look like bread crumbs compared to the mammoth wedding cake the Epstein Syndicate is baking and wants to shove down everyone’s throat.

Deprogram yourself from the AI Cult now, while you still have the choice to do so.

This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)

See Also:

Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through

The Brain Myth: Your Intellect and Thoughts Originate in Your Heart, Not Your Brain

Is God’s Patience About to Run Out on the United States?

Second Edition of eBook Released: The Concept of the American Christian Family is a Myth and is NOT Found Anywhere in the Bible – by Brian Shilhavy

FREE eBook! Restoring the Foundation of New Testament Faith in Jesus Christ – by Brian Shilhavy

KABBALAH: The Anti-Christ Religion of Satan that Controls the World Today

Exposing the Christian Zionism Cult

The Bewitching of America with the Evil Eye and the Mark of the Beast

Jesus Christ’s Opposition to the Jewish State: Lessons for Today

Identifying the Luciferian Globalists Implementing the New World Order – Who are the “Jews”?

The Seal and Mark of God is Far More Important than the “Mark of the Beast” – Are You Prepared for What’s Coming?

The Satanic Roots to Modern Medicine – The Image of the Beast?

Medicine: Idolatry in the Twenty First Century – 10-Year-Old Article More Relevant Today than the Day it was Written

Having problems receiving our emails? See:

How to Beat Internet Censorship and Create Your Own Newsfeed

We Are Now on Telegram. Video channels at Bitchute, and Odysee.

If our website is seized and shut down, find us on Telegram, as well as Bitchute and Odysee for further instructions about where to find us.

If you use the TOR Onion browser, here are the links and corresponding URLs to use in the TOR browser to find us on the Dark Web: Health Impact News, Vaccine Impact, Medical Kidnap, Created4Health, CoconutOil.com.

The post Trump Announces that “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) is Now Renamed “Super Intelligence” (SI) – What Comes Next? first appeared on Health Impact News.

AI Is Creating “Doom Loops” All Over the Economy

Technocrats are stealing the world’s data for their own AI training advantage, while killing the golden goose in the process, as this article makes clear. That lack of ethics and morality is seen everywhere in the world of Technocracy. For instance, read the Crucible of Tokens to learn about the biggest heist of private property in world history. They have no conscience about doing anything wrong, and that is the problem. Read up on psychopathy! ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.

Recently unredacted legal documents and depositions in the New York Times‘ lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed something extraordinary: executives knew full well of the destructive powers of AI when they rushed to launch products featuring the tech in the wake of the explosive success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Internal Microsoft documents quoted by the newspaper’s lawyers warned of an ugly reality now playing out across the entire economy: “doom loops,” in which AI monetizes the work of human creatives while undermining the economic systems that funded their work in the first place.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” one internal Microsoft document reads. “It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’”

The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that seems poised to wipe out the independent media.

Similar stories are playing out across other industries, from music to filmmaking. Writ large, many are concerned that AI will eventually be strong enough to wipe out huge numbers of jobs, creating a situation in which unemployed consumers won’t have the funds to support the economy.

The irony, as the Microsoft document pointed out, is that the AI industry is a snake eating its own tail: the very products that it’s pushing on users rely on fresh cultural content even as they destroy the economic incentives to create it.

It’s also a dire situation for the open web, which recently celebrated the macabre turning point of being dominated by more AI slop than human-authored content. As companies — most notably Google — are fundamentally changing the way users interact with the web, more and more newspapers, media outlets, and local news stations are seriously struggling to make ends meet.

Worse yet, as the legal documents in the NYT‘s copyright lawsuit showed, insiders admitted that the entire operation is built on theft.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document admitted.

Plenty of other creative industries are also feeling the pressure as AI-related doom loops continue to undermine livelihoods. According to the latest data from the US Bureau of Labor statistics, it’s a bloodbath — with more than 200,000 jobs in “creative” industries having been lost over the last four years alone, roughly the time since OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

AI-generated music is rapidly crowding out human-produced tracks on streaming services, forcing platforms to figure out where to draw the line. Some have implemented hard and fast rules, while others continue to allow users to exploit algorithms with slop.

Hollywood studios are also doubling down on AI while protesting actors struggle to have their voices heard. Many of them fear that their likeness or voice could soon be rendered worthless, representing an existential threat to their livelihoods.

Even the job market is embroiled in its own doom loop. More and more desperate job seekers are turning to AI to brush up their resumes and manipulate AI-powered job portals, while recruiters are drowning in a wall of almost identical applications.

“We’ve got this tragic situation where each side has a problem,” applicant tracking system company Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait told Wired. “They’re using AI to solve their own problem, but in ways that make the problem worse.”

“And so more AI use begets more AI use, to no one’s benefit,” he added. “The more it’s happening, the worse it gets.”

Similarly, the use of AI in the classroom has skyrocketed, with students using the tech to complete their homework, offloading their cognitive faculties to the machine. Meanwhile, their teachers are using AI to come up with assignments, slowly effacing the human in the loop. Educators who bristle at the idea of using the tech are finding themselves at odds with school administrators.

The effects AI has had on education has been nothing short of a disaster. A recent study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education concluded that the risks of using generative AI in education massively outweighed the benefits. The associated dangers have never been more apparent, with educators warning that college students are rapidly losing the ability to read.

Proponents of AI, including OpenAI and Microsoft’s lawyers in the ongoing New York Times lawsuit, argue that AI brings something new to the table. They argue that the output of AI models is sufficiently differentiated from the original content it draws on, falling under “fair use,” a longstanding doctrine in US copyright law.

Whether this argument will hold up in court remains to be seen. Besides, we’ve already seen companies, like Anthropic, settle for billions of dollars after being found to have violated copyright laws.

But considering how the tech is simultaneously undermining the very economic systems that produced the data they need to exist in the first place, that may not be a winning strategy in the long run.

By ripping out the carpet from underneath many parts of the economy — and reaping all the financial gains from it — the AI industry is trapping itself in a doom loop of its own creation, a cynical strategy that won’t benefit anybody but those at the very top who kicked the ladder down behind them.

Read full story here…

Meloni Seeks EU Trademark for Her Voice as AI Deepfake Threat Grows

6 October 2026 at 08:12

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has applied to register her voice as an EU trademark, seeking an additional legal tool against artificial-intelligence systems capable of cloning politicians’ voices and producing convincing fake recordings.

Giorgia Meloni has applied to register her voice with the European Union Intellectual Property Office as governments and public figures look for new ways to counter increasingly convincing AI-generated deepfakes.

The Italian prime minister submitted a short audio recording in which she says “Io sono Giorgia Meloni” — “I am Giorgia Meloni” — to the EUIPO on Monday.

The four-second recording forms part of an application for a sound trademark intended to strengthen legal protection against unauthorised use of her voice.

The application filed with the EU intellectual-property system is currently listed as under examination. It is linked to categories including downloadable multimedia material, cultural activities and the organisation of political events.

Registration would not give Meloni ownership over every recording or imitation of her voice, nor would it automatically prevent AI systems from reproducing it.

It could, however, provide another legal basis for challenging certain commercial or misleading uses where the protected sound mark is employed without authorisation.

The distinction between a trademark and copyright is important in this case. Meloni has applied to protect a sound identifier through EU trademark law rather than to establish general copyright ownership over the natural characteristics of her voice.

Her application comes as voice-cloning technology becomes increasingly accessible.

Modern generative-AI systems can create convincing synthetic speech from relatively small samples of recorded audio. The technology is used legitimately for dubbing, accessibility and media production, but it can also be used for fraud, impersonation and political disinformation.

Meloni herself has previously been targeted by manipulated images and other deepfake material. She has also taken legal action in Italy over sexually explicit deepfake images created using her likeness.

The problem has acquired additional importance for politicians because synthetic recordings can be produced and circulated rapidly during election campaigns.

A false recording no longer requires sophisticated audio-editing equipment or extensive access to the target. Public figures provide large quantities of clean audio through speeches, television appearances, podcasts and social-media video — precisely the material needed to train voice-cloning systems.

The EU has already begun imposing specific transparency requirements on synthetic content.

EU Today reported in August that new provisions under the EU AI Act require certain AI-generated or manipulated audio, images and video to be marked in machine-readable form and impose disclosure obligations for deepfake material.

Those rules address transparency rather than ownership.

Trademark law potentially offers a different route by allowing an individual or organisation to claim rights over a specific sound used as a commercial or identifying mark.

Sound trademarks are not new. Companies have long registered jingles, tones and other distinctive audio signatures. What is unusual in Meloni’s application is the attempt by a serving head of government to use the system partly as protection against AI impersonation.

The phrase chosen for the application is itself closely associated with Meloni’s political identity.

“Io sono Giorgia” became widely recognised following a 2019 speech in which she described herself as a woman, mother, Italian and Christian. The phrase subsequently became the basis of online remixes before being adopted as the title of her autobiography.

Other performers have also sought stronger protection for their voices as generative AI improves.

Italian singer Giusy Ferreri has filed a similar application, while actors and musicians internationally have pressed governments and technology companies to prevent unauthorised voice cloning.

Meloni’s filing is unlikely on its own to settle the broader legal question of whether an individual can effectively control AI reproductions of his or her voice.

It does, however, illustrate how existing intellectual-property law is being tested against technology that can reproduce personal characteristics that were previously difficult to copy convincingly.

The EUIPO must now determine whether Meloni’s application satisfies the requirements for registration. Until that process is completed, the filing remains an application rather than an approved EU trademark.

US enshittification vs Chinese involution

6 October 2026 at 08:07

It’s getting better all the time (Better, better, better) It’s getting better all the time I admit it’s getting better –The Beatles In an X post, Marko Jukic, senior analyst at Bismarck Analysis, lamented: “Enshittification” is sort of a “safe horny” term for what is really just outright impoverishment and declining living standards due to […]

The post US enshittification vs Chinese involution appeared first on Asia Times.

Elon’s “DeathStar” Starlink Service Will Beat Fiber Everywhere

4 October 2026 at 23:35
Musk owns space. With the launch a new class of 100,000 satellites, he is on the verge of making all fiber-optic networks on planet Earth obsolete while moving Grok AI into space. This will give him the reins over the global communications backbone and a monopoly on information flow, pricing, and access. Does Musk hold the trump card? It sure is sounding like it. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.

Elon’s 250 kW Starlink satellites will bring multi-gigabit satellite internet and 5G satellite cellphone everywhere even high density cities. 250 kilowatts per satellite, 10 terabits per second in both directions, and a path to more than 100 terabits per second.

I detailed the 250 kilowatt per Starlink satellite as beating the Space Station in my article and youtube video from 9 days ago.

WHY build satellites this powerful? Serving everyone and leveraging the huge solar and thermal radiators of the planned AI satellites.

Read full story here...

💾

Elon’s 250 kW Starlink satellites will bring multi-gigabit satellite internet and 5G satellite cellphone everywhere even high density cities. 250 kilowatts p...

What the AI boom is actually doing for Americans

5 October 2026 at 13:07

Paul Krugman is the greatest econ writer in the world, and also a legendary economist. But I sometimes feel that he has a blind spot when it comes to the value of new technologies. In 1998 he famously wrote: The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that […]

The post What the AI boom is actually doing for Americans appeared first on Asia Times.

A tech glossary to thrive and survive in the AI era

4 October 2026 at 22:04

Certain ideas define us. Some earned names of our own along the way. Others have run through nearly 240 pieces without ever being formally christened. Put together, they amount to a worldview. That worldview has been assembled one essay at a time since 2023. Many readers have walked in mid-conversation. Mention the hardware/software flip, super […]

The post A tech glossary to thrive and survive in the AI era appeared first on Asia Times.

Putin im O-Ton über die neue Weltordnung und den Konflikt mit dem Westen

3 October 2026 at 16:10
Der Valdai-Klub ist der wichtigste russische Thinktank zur Geopolitik und inzwischen international als eines der wichtigsten Expertentreffen zu dem Thema anerkannt. Zum Erfolg des Valdai-Klubs und seiner hochrangigen Besetzung hat sicherlich beigetragen, dass der russische Präsident Putin jedes Jahr daran teilnimmt. Dabei hält er eine etwa einstündige Grundsatzrede über die russische Sicht auf die aktuelle […]

Why China is missing the big AI rally

2 October 2026 at 10:04

TOKYO – China gave global investors one of 2026’s biggest AI thrills. Yet the country that helped ignite excitement about artificial intelligence is home to one of the worst-performing major stock markets. While AI fever has propelled Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo higher, Chinese shares are stuck in reverse.

So what gives? Several forces, actually. Weak household demand, for one. Consumer spending continues to disappoint, weighing on the earnings potential of mainland internet companies, automakers, and retailers.

To continue reading, please log in to your AT+ Premium account. Not yet a member? Please signup for AT+ Premium monthly membership, AT+ Premium yearly membership or AT+ Premium Access membership.

The post Why China is missing the big AI rally appeared first on Asia Times.

L’intelligenza artificiale ha un problema di stabilità

2 October 2026 at 09:00

Non basta rendere sicuri i singoli sistemi di intelligenza artificiale, bisogna guardare alle loro interazioni. È una lezione lasciata dalla crisi finanziaria: comportamenti individualmente razionali possono produrre risultati collettivamente disastrosi.

L'articolo L’intelligenza artificiale ha un problema di stabilità proviene da Lavoce.info.

US bans Chinese data center gear as Beijing grounds its AI talent

1 October 2026 at 22:40

The artificial intelligence (AI) race between the United States and China has accelerated in model protection, supply chains and talent controls, even as the two nations’ leaders agreed last week to open a new dialogue on AI safety. A string of moves announced or uncovered this week shows that both sides are now guarding their […]

The post US bans Chinese data center gear as Beijing grounds its AI talent appeared first on Asia Times.

Eric Sadin: ‘AI reeks of death’

1 October 2026 at 20:57

Éric Sadin gets up and paces around the living room of his Paris apartment when an argument excites him. His own voice urges him to do so. He has developed a critical body of thought, brimming with striking headlines and elegant analyses of the future, riding the philosophical and social thinking of the last century to arrive at a scathing conclusion across some 10 books: we have become idiots, and we are on our way to becoming even bigger idiots.

Seguir leyendo

© Manuel Braun (EL PAÍS)

Éric Sadin, photographed at his home in Paris on March 26.

The real crisis for men is capitalism: A conversation with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal

1 October 2026 at 17:50

From the heinous crimes of the Epstein class to the Cornell 7, from the toxic cultures of the “manosphere” to the increase of antisocial relationships with online pornography and AI bots, we need to talk about what is going on with men in our society. We speak with renowned scholar, author, and commentator Dr. Mark Anthony Neal about his new book Save a Seat for Me: Notes on American Fatherhood, and about the ways American capitalism damages everyone and trains boys to become monstrous men.

Credits:

  • Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m here at Red Emmas at the Baltimore Book Festival, and I’m sitting with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal. Brother Mark, it’s so great to have you back here in Baltimore, man. I know I only got you for a second, and we’re talking about your incredible new book, Save a Seat for Me, Notes on American Fatherhood. And I was thinking as another father in America in 2026, I wanted to ask you, it doesn’t take PhDs like we have to know that we’ve got a real fricking crisis in this country with men and masculinity and masculine culture and fatherhood, or we have a whole lot of crises that men are experiencing but aren’t dealing with well. So what do you make of all this? What do we do about it? And how can your book help us get there?

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

I think we have tried, America has tried to raise generations of warriors, if you will, to be on the front lines of American imperialism. And you can’t be human to do that. You can’t think, you can’t question, you can’t be vulnerable. So what we have done is raise two or three generations of men in America who don’t know how to be human, who don’t know how to lead into full range of who they are. We’ve been socialized to show up only certain kinds of ways, anger, rage, the ability to follow directions. Things like vulnerability are made fun of at the highest levels.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And those of us who are very vulnerable people have been made fun of.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Because of that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Because of that.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

We’ve been made to think that our responsibility in a capitalist system has literally been reduced to only making money, that our only value. And I think about this a lot as a Black father, my own father, that I’m sure he thought that his only value to me was making sure that I was fed and clothed and taken care of. And I get all of that, but I needed much more from him. As a father, I needed to be more than that for my daughters. And so I think when we look at young men who are clearly feeling so much with no outlet, their outlets become dangerous behaviors, self-directed violence,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Toxic online cultures,

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

All kinds of addictions, alcohol, Percocet, weed, porn. I mean, we can name all these things and understand it. And the fact that so many of the young men in the world today, their lives are what they can connect with on their handheld device. They don’t actually have relationships with people in the real world, don’t see a value in that. And I don’t know how we sustain that. I don’t know how we sustain our humanity in a situation where we don’t value human relationship anymore.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s like you see that the path that we’re on as a society or what’s left of a society is being driven by the sociopathic, psychopathic, bloodthirsty –

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Or just plain evils.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Just plain evil maniacs who want a future where they get all the benefits of human society, but don’t have to deal with any of the humans in it. Whether they’re thinking of like, oh, AI is going to replace all their jobs and we’re going to get all the money. They’re not thinking about what the heck that’s going to mean for us. They’re just going to push us into slums and prisons and police us, hunt us, surveil us. That’s their big goddamn plan. And I think you put it so powerfully that it’s like so many men out there have the same human needs that we all have and we’re feeling them so acutely the more isolated we are, but we’re looking to find, we’re seeking inhuman avenues.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

I mean, think about all the folks who are in relationships with chat bots. I mean, it’s surreal. I can’t have a relationship with an actual person. I don’t desire a relationship with an actual person. I need to have a relationship with some facsimile, some avatar that somehow that’s more meaningful to me than having a relationship with a person.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. And I think even as a editor in chief and co-ED of a media network, as a media star, we recognize there’s only so much you can do online. You got to get the hell offline and you got to meet each other back on that level of shared humanity and shared reality because that’s the only way we’re going to deal with anything, anything in this country.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

And that’s why the Baltimore Book Festival is really important. First of all, not only just a reminder, someplace that’s celebrating the written word, obviously, but folks coming together in community. We have to get back to a culture where we share in community. We read together, we listen together, we debate together instead of these media silos. I’m going to have this debate over here on this network and you’re going to have this debate over there and never the twain shall meet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and final question, but it goes really to the heart of your book. Here in Baltimore, I see this every day. I feel it as a father, but right down the street from where I live in Mondamin, earlier this summer, there were six youth who were caught on camera just beating the hell out of an elderly member of the community, a former Black Panther. It was horrific. I’ve interviewed this man and the community that’s trying to help him, but clearly everyone who is showing up to help is seeing in that video the deficit of guidance, of fatherhood, of love.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Of respect. Basic respect.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So what can we do about that in our everyday lives at the person to person level?

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

We have to be willing not just to be witnesses to these experiences or commentators.

We have to intervene and feel comfortable enough to intervene. Whoever sat down with those young men, first of all, to explain, because the easy part is to say, no, this man was important to our movement in the past. The more difficult thing is like, no, this man is important because he’s another human being and you should value life and his humanity. But if they are young men who do not value their own humanity, don’t see their own humanity, they’re going to reproduce that behavior over and over again. And so we have to have the willingness because it’s real easy to go, I’m just going to build my life in this silo and protect my family and I get it. But to take that next step to say, okay, I might not be able to talk to all six of these brothers, try to talk to two of them.

Begin that process, that one-on-one conversation that can blossom into something that’s much more significant.

💾

“America has tried to raise generations of warriors to be on the front lines of American imperialism… So what we have done is raise two or three generations of men in America who don't know how to be human.”
❌