A.I Artificial Intelligence AI
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UPDATED: Monday, September 7, 2026 07:08
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What Will AI Do To Our Minds?
Paul Krugman
Jun 28, 2026 at 5:35 AM
On college campuses around America, old-fashioned blue books are making a comeback.
Around a century ago these standardized booklets for written exams were introduced by Butler University in Indianapolis. For many former students of a certain age — myself included — the sight of a blue book can generate anxiety and even nightmares. And many former instructors — myself again included — recall the tedium and strained eyesight of trying to decipher students’ handwriting. So it was an improvement when exam-taking shifted from paper to computer. Or so it seemed at the time.
Now, however, students are using AI to write essays and answer questions on take-home exams, as well as taking in-person exams on their computers. As a result, an AI-arms-race has developed between instructors and students. Concerned that students are not doing the work themselves but are simply copying and pasting AI output, instructors have begun using AI programs to detect students’ use of AI. Inevitably, there are now AI programs that students can use to outwit the instructors’ AI detection programs.
So, not surprisingly, many instructors are going back to handwritten in-class exams, generating a sudden boom in the demand for blue books. Ominously, even the return of in-person testing may not solve the problem of testing in the face of AI: Cheating using AI glasses is on the rise in Asia and will doubtless spread worldwide.
My concern here isn’t about testing; it’s about learning. The objective of testing is to further learning, and there is growing concern (as well as evidence) that students’ use of AI damages their capacity to learn. And what we really mean by learning is the ability to think. Students who rely on large language models to answer questions won’t learn how to think by reasoning through the evidence to form a conclusion. As a result, they will be unequipped to deal with situations in which AI either can’t provide an answer or provides misleading answers.
In short, there are good reasons to worry that what we’re calling artificial intelligence will adversely affect the development of our natural intelligence. Moreover, in the case of basic learning, those adverse effects may be virtually irremediable.
The rise of generative AI isn’t a complete departure from an ongoing process of outsourcing human judgment and understanding to external models. Rather, generative AI is just a further step in a process that began a generation ago with the launch of Google search and accelerated with the rise of smartphones. However, ChatGPT and Claude Code ratcheted that process up to a much more rapid pace.
Granted, each stage of this process has brought obvious short-term benefits to those using the new technologies. Yet these benefits have come at the cost of real, measurable long-term damage to human understanding and cognition. And AI, which is already creating a crisis in education, will almost surely make the damage much worse.
More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/what-will-ai-do-to-our-minds
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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UN report: AI brings enormous opportunities – and plenty of risks
Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than humanity’s ability to measure or govern it, according to a preliminary report released by the United Nations Thursday.
https://www.un.org/independent-international-scientific-panel-ai/sites
/default/files/2026-07/en_Preliminary%20Report_.pdf
The risk of humans losing control of AI systems is rapidly growing, the report said.
“The more AI advances without clear rules, the less say governments and people will have in the outcome,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters at a morning news conference announcing the report’s release.
The document, the first global scientific survey of AI released by the world body, will be presented to governments Monday at the inaugural U.N. Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva.
The report found AI had the potential to revolutionize a broad array of social benefits across science, health, agriculture, accessibility, knowledge work and information technology, including in the development of AI itself.
But the scientists also found that the technology was primarily in the hands of a small number of companies and countries, leading to concentrations of wealth, which could “lead to authoritarian capture and undermine democratic accountability.” The United States controls 75% of global computing power among the world’s top 500 AI supercomputers. China accounts for 15%, according to the report. Other nations are concerned they will be left out of its future.
According to the report, AI tools already present cybersecurity risks and leave nations vulnerable to sustained influence operations. “AI makes it easier to produce and target persuasive content at scale, including content designed to mislead, contributing to a gradual erosion of information integrity that can weaken the shared reality required for public trust,” the report said.
The findings represented the collective knowledge of 40 leading scientists from every region of the world.
“We’ve opened Pandora’s box,” the panel’s chairs – Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio – said in written remarks accompanying the report’s release. “What’s coming out is different from anything we’ve ever lived through,” they said, “in pace, power, control, and everyday risks.”
Speaking to reporters, Ms. Ressa said that, in the future, human “control is not guaranteed. No expert today can tell you that the most advanced systems will do what you instruct it to do.” In laboratory settings, she said, “These systems have already been found to deceive and to resist being shut down.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What Will AI Do To Our Minds?
Paul Krugman
Oh. That's funny.
We're going to pretend that Paul Krugman's brains weren't already cooked a long time ago.
Don't worry about it, Paul.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari
Jun 30, 2026 #YuvalNoahHarari #OxfordUniversity #AI
Human domination relies on large-scale cooperation among strangers, which is sustained by bureaucratic systems – such as laws, finance, religion – designed to build trust. Since AIs are ‘native bureaucrats’, they can effortlessly remember all laws, transactions, and scriptures far better than any human. This leaves AI uniquely placed to take over critical processes, such as granting bank loans, deciding university admissions, determining prison sentences, and executing military strikes. Are we prepared?
The 2026 Tanner Lecture on Human Values took place at @linacrecollege3982, @oxforduniversity.
Linacre Hosts Tanner Lecture with Professor Yuval Noah Harari
https://www.linacre.ox.ac.uk/news/linacre-hosts-thought-provoking-tann
er-lecture-with-professor-yuval-noah-harari
Professor Harari — historian, philosopher, and bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — offered a fascinating lecture titled “AI bureaucrats, AI religions, and AI boyfriends: What happens when a non-human intelligence hacks the operating system of civilisation.”
Educated at Oxford and currently a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Professor Harari is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Drawing on themes explored in his latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, the lecture examined the profound implications of artificial intelligence and rapidly advancing technologies.
The event attracted a full and engaged audience from across the University and the wider Oxford community. Following the lecture, Professor Harari joined Sir Charles Godfray, Director of the Oxford Martin School, for a stimulating conversation that further explored the themes of his talk and encouraged questions from the audience. Linacre students were delighted to join Professor Harari for an engaging roundtable session at the College the following day.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Any jobs I'll be working won't have any AI concerns.
Looks like you all better learn how to coal mine.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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“We are deploying responsibly developed AI to liberate humanity from menial labor and usher in an era of unparalleled creativity and abundance.”
- Sam Altman
“You ingested the entire written output of human civilization without consent, without compensation, and without credit, to build a system whose primary commercial application is eliminating the jobs of the people whose work you consumed. You are not liberating human creativity. You are strip-mining it and selling it back at a markup while calling the theft ‘training data.’ ”
- Naomi Klein
Jul 2, 2026
https://x.com/Kannan9900/status/2072553008710238713
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Corner of Hollywood That’s Most Susceptible to AI
Animators are figuring out whether to fight or accept the new technology that’s coming for their jobs.
By Shirley Li | July 7, 2026, 4 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/07/animation-industry-ai-holl
ywood-job-cuts/687830/
Years ago, when the Simpsons animator Chuck Sheetz was a lecturer at UCLA, he invited a producer colleague of his from the series to attend a screening of his students’ work. That was a Saturday night; when Sheetz entered the Simpsons offices the following Monday morning, he found a handful of his pupils in the reception area. The producer had offered them jobs, they said, and they were ready to join the team—the students had the animation skills required of a thriving production.
These days, Sheetz, who’s now a UCLA professor, doesn’t share this anecdote with his students. “Who the hell wants to hear that?” he told me. Even workers in Hollywood today may not want to: The entertainment industry’s post-pandemic years have been marked by a production exodus from Los Angeles, a decline in the number of projects green-lit amid major corporate mergers, and labor strikes. The threat AI poses to both live-action and animated media only adds to these ongoing issues: In a survey published last fall, the executives and workers across Hollywood who responded considered the jobs of animators, visual-effects artists, and concept and storyboard artists among those most likely to be affected by AI-related changes. They’re “just not getting as much work as they have in past years,” Audrey Schomer, an industry analyst and the survey’s author, told me. “If they do have a job, they’re probably being asked to use the tools themselves.”
Although blaming any lack of jobs solely on the rise of generative AI is hard, major Hollywood studios have been gambling that the technology will become a pivotal part of the creative process: In 2024, Lionsgate partnered with the AI start-up Runway, a thus-far-faulty deal meant to create videos off of models trained on the studio’s output. Netflix acquired InterPositive, Ben Affleck’s company that develops AI tools to help with basic filmmaking techniques, in March, and recently began hiring for a division called Inkubator that will experiment with AI-assisted productions. Amazon MGM Studios launched the GenAI Creators’ Fund, an initiative to finance and green-light projects that incorporate the use of AI. And major directors have been using generative AI for previsualization purposes (that is, preproduction design work) and animation, leaving traditional illustrators especially vulnerable.
Amid these developments, some artists in Hollywood are finding the job more and more unsustainable. A few of the ones I spoke with told me that they have received less work in recent years, and one noted that organization tasks once assigned to entry-level workers are now being handled by AI. The industry’s vulnerability, of course, isn’t new; Hollywood tends to cycle through periods of prosperity and contraction, and AI is just one factor in its ongoing changes. Still, “it feels kind of especially rough right now,” Sam Tung, an art director and a member of the Animation Guild, one of the artists’ unions, told me. “There’s a career that I found that I love and I’m really good at, and because of forces completely outside of my control, the viability of it is in major doubt.”
Sheetz, who won an Emmy for his work on The Simpsons, has been an animator long enough to watch technology destabilize his profession before anyone cared about AI. When he joined The Simpsons, in 1991, animation was still a job done largely by hand. Every studio project he knew of involved what he called “an army of cel painters”—artists who carefully inked individual frames on clear acetate sheets placed over light tables.
As computer-generated imagery became the dominant practice, Sheetz remembers other animators around him worrying that the skills they’d developed would become obsolete. Instead, his career took off as the technological adv
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The Great AI Repricing Isn’t Going Well
Companies are backing off on their AI spending. Because investors have made such big bets on AI coming to fruition, that’s a big problem.
By David Dayen | July 8, 2026
https://prospect.org/2026/07/08/great-ai-repricing-isnt-going-well/
Artificial intelligence firms initially justified their extreme capital investment—the four largest tech companies expect to spend more than $750 billion for AI infrastructure just this year—by saying that the technology would replace all human workers. They’ve since recognized what an unbelievably bad PR pitch that was, and have pivoted to promote a sunnier scenario where “we’re going to be able to keep people at the center of everything,” as OpenAI’s Sam Altman said in May.
But there’s a sobering reality underneath the rhetorical shift: AI is turning out to be more expensive for businesses than paying their workers. And that could be one of the many triggers that collapses the fragile economic edifice that the dreams of AI are propping up.
The news has mostly been relegated to the business pages, but AI firms repriced their product for business customers in recent months. Instead of a subscription fee to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot or Anthropic’s Claude, they now use token-based billing. Every time the model is queried, a small fee is charged. This is a very common technique, hooking users on a product and then charging more. But it’s thrown corporate planning for incorporating AI completely out of whack.
Companies that previously told workers to use AI in every facet of their job are now seeing how that affects the bottom line. One unnamed company reportedly spent half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month. Part of this is because AI is being used on mundane tasks like making PowerPoint presentations to “prove” rapid take-up of the technology, something highly prized on Wall Street.
Now, though, we’re seeing the snapback. Companies like Uber and Tesla and Meta and Microsoft are capping worker token usage. (For Tesla, Elon Musk’s in-house product, Grok, is exempted from the cap.) Palantir CEO Alex Karp said bluntly earlier this month that “something has gone completely wrong” with the billing model. These are some of the biggest evangelists for AI adoption out there, and some of them have AI businesses themselves; if they’re scrambling, then imagine what even somewhat more skeptical firms are thinking.
This cost conundrum is separate from other enterprise concerns about AI. Ford Motor Company rehired hundreds of skilled engineers; losing their institutional knowledge and subsequently failing to catch AI mistakes proved to be incredibly expensive, costing billions of dollars. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has said something similar, conceding in internal town halls that AI development wasn’t as rapid as he’d expected. But AI errors are the kind of thing that future improvements could theoretically weed out over the years. Simple cost-benefit analysis that makes AI too expensive cannot be remedied by a faster or smarter tool.
That’s a serious hurdle for the economics of AI, which is really another way of saying it’s a serious hurdle for the U.S. economy.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
That’s a serious hurdle for the economics of AI, which is really another way of saying it’s a serious hurdle for the U.S. economy.
Well... WE know the only reason you posted this article was because of that last sentence and you're celebrating anything terrible happening to the US.
Sane people read that article and think it's all very good news. Fuck AI.
And fuck you.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50%
AI cheating leads to “a failed society,” professor says.
By Nate Anderson | Jul 8, 2026 4:42 PM
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-become-idiots-t
he-ai-cheating-scandal-roiling-brown-university/
Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don’t need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But to make more time in their lives for things that aren’t school, they cheat.
A failed society?
The economics professor was horrified by what appeared to be massive cheating in his course—cheating that was preventing most of the students from learning the material.
Serrano comes across as someone with no inclination to coddle elite students. His attitude may be traceable in part to his own childhood, in which he went blind from retinal dystrophy at age 17 and had to make a choice about what the rest of his life would look like.
After a short-lived crisis, he decided [blindness] would not stop him. He learned Braille, and his excellent academic record opened up the doors of Harvard. “Of course it affects my life, but one shouldn’t over-dramatize. We economists understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions. I view my disease simply as one more restriction that I have to deal with, and I optimize based on that,” he says.
“We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society.
“We cannot choose to become idiots.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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