Thomas Chatterton Williams:

In the past week, consulting virtually any major news source—not to mention social media—has meant confronting the prospect of an AI apocalypse. Using AI has already diminished many people’s capacity to focus, work, and think; worrying about AI is making the problem worse. I’m no exception.

Until recently, I could quiet my fears, if not silence them. Now apocalyptic discourse is almost impossible to ignore. On social media, seemingly the entire literate world is contributing to an unceasing clamor. Respected theorists and experts compete for attention with self-interested oligarchs and accelerationists who want to hasten humanity’s demise. The most dire hypotheticals seem only more plausible every time I’m reminded of how profoundly unprepared our political leadership is. Most distressing of all is the underlying realization that our shared future is being determined largely by a tiny, unconstrained cadre of billionaires who do not fully understand the technologies they’re unloosing. I’m not paralyzed by this; I still wake up, care for my kids, do my work. But I also sense my energy and interest ebbing. The world around me is beginning to look disenchanted.

Ah, the Atlantic, the masthead that launched a thousand SSRI prescriptions, the anti-serenity prayer journal, where we make rumination feel like moral seriousness. If you’re frightened enough, informed enough, anguished enough, then somehow you’re responding appropriately to the gravity of the situation. But the emotion accomplishes nothing. It affects nothing meaningful in the world. It does not prepare you to take meaningful action, even if you had a clue what that might be. Telling yourself that “the entire literate world” is contributing to the clamor is a good example of what Rao was getting at with the “vast negative space.” The entire literate world plainly isn’t doing this. Millions upon millions of literate people spent this week grading papers, fixing transmissions, reading novels, arguing with spouses, taking children to soccer practice, lifting weights, balancing accounts, and wondering what to make for dinner. Williams means something more like, the portion of the information environment to which I am currently exposing myself is saturated with this subject. Yes. That is the problem. You’re just making excuses to contribute your own pointless chatter to the din. You might want to reflect on why being “informed” is not the same thing as “having perspective.”