Michael J. Hicks, Donald, Hillary and Bernie Are Lying to Us About Those Lost Manufacturing Jobs. MarketWatch, May 14, 2016.   Automation preceded NAFTA by 20 years. See also Michael J. Coren, Cheap Robots Are Coming for Our Farm Jobs By Taking the Most Brutal Tasks First. Quartz, Jul 10, 2016. Daniel Griswold, Globalization Isn't Killing Factory Jobs. Trade is Actually Why Manufacturing is Up 40%. Los Angeles Times, Aug 1, 2016.   Argues technology, not trade, is responsible for job loss, although Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball, Warren Versus Yang: Who’s Right? Rising | The Hill, Oct 17, 2019.   Argue that since 2000, trade policy has contributed to job loss more than automation, but in the future, automation is still a major concern.

Tristan Harris, Is AI Productivity Worth Our Humanity? with Prof. Michael Sandel. Center for Humane Technology, Jun 26, 2025. Sandel points out that the consumerist version of freedom has crowded out the civic version of freedom. Sandel points out that humans need recognition, dignity, status, and participation — and thus, contributive or procedural-participatory justice is important on the civic level. Also, redistribution was originally promised to those hurt by globalized trade. So there is ample reason to question whether UBI can offset the loss of jobs. What if an economy is important not to maximize consumer satisfaction but to enable more civic participation?

Colton Barnaby, Why Christians Should Be Socialists. Kensington Koan by Colten Barnaby | Substack, Feb 16, 2026. Re; Sergei Bulgakov. “David Bentley Hart calls him the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century. When you read Bulgakov on economics, you understand why. He doesn’t just critique capitalism morally. He critiques it ontologically. The way we organize economic life either aligns with the nature of reality or it doesn’t. And according to Bulgakov capitalism doesn’t.”

Levi Checketts, A Luddite Lesson in Labor Justice for Our Technocratic Age. U.S. Catholic, Apr 6, 2026. “In a world where techno-capitalism exploits workers and accelerates climate collapse, the Luddites are more relevant than ever.” “Today, because of such acts, the Luddites are characterized as anti-technology. But in reality, they were simply anti-exploitation. This early conflict between rich capitalists and impoverished laborers set the tone for many other class conflicts that followed. Understanding Luddism’s roots is therefore deeply relevant for contemporary Catholic social thought on labor justice.”

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence, 2026).

James Sherk, Technology Explains Drop in Manufacturing Jobs. Heritage Foundation, Oct 12, 2010.

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? Oxford University Press, Sep 17, 2013.  

Tom Chatfield, The Truth About Technology's Greatest Myth. BBC News, Jan 10, 2014.

Miya Tokumitsu, In the Name of Love: Elites Embrace the “Do What You Love” Mantra But It Devalues Work and Hurts Workers. Slate, Jan 16, 2014.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W.W. Norton & Company | Amazon page, Jan 2014.

Derek Thompson, What Work Will the Robots Take? The Atlantic, Jan 23, 2014.

Fabius Maximus, Journalists Warn Us About the Coming Revolution, But We Won't Listen. Fabius Maximus, Jul 7, 2014.

Claire Cain Miller, As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up. New York Times, Dec 15, 2014.

Daniel Drezner, The Political Economy of a World Without Work. Washington Post, Jun 24, 2015.

Derek Thompson, A World Without Work. The Atlantic, Jul/Aug 2015.

Keith Naughton, Humans Are Bumping into Driverless Cars and Exposing a Key Flaw. Automotive News, Dec 18, 2015.

Evan Fraser and Sylvain Charlebois, Automated Farming: Good News for Food Security, Bad News for Job Security? The Guardian, Feb 18, 2016.

Ben Schiller, Welcome to the Post-Work Economy. Co.Exist Mar 15, 2016.

Michael J. Hicks, Donald, Hillary and Bernie Are Lying to Us About Those Lost Manufacturing Jobs. MarketWatch, May 14, 2016.  Automation preceded NAFTA by 20 years

Michael J. Coren, Cheap Robots Are Coming for Our Farm Jobs By Taking the Most Brutal Tasks First. Quartz, Jul 10, 2016.

Daniel Griswold, Globalization Isn't Killing Factory Jobs. Trade is Actually Why Manufacturing is Up 40%. Los Angeles Times, Aug 1, 2016.  Argues technology, not trade, is responsible for job loss

Derek Thompson, The Next Industrial Revolution. The Atlantic, Sep 6, 2016.

Harriet Taylor, AI Will Eliminate 6% of Jobs in 5 Years. CNBC, Sep 12, 2016.

Natalie Kitroff, Robots Could Replace 1.7 Million American Truckers in the Next Decade. Los Angeles Times, Sep 25, 2016.

Eshe Nelson, A Big Dutch Bank Is Replacing 5,800 People With Machines, at a Cost of $2 Billion. Quartz, Oct 4, 2016.

Thomas L. Friedman, Donald Trump Voters, Just Hear Me Out. New York Times, Nov 2, 2016.  Good soundbites on automation cutting jobs; anger at immigrants and trade is not fairly placed

Steven Greenhouse, Autonomous Vehicles Could Cost America 5 Million Jobs. What Should We Do About It? Los Angeles Times, Nov 14, 2016.

Om Malik, Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum. The New Yorker, Nov 28, 2016.

Ana Swanson, A Single Chart Everybody Needs to Look At Before Trump's Big Fight Over Bringing Back American Jobs. Washington Post, Nov 28, 2016.  U.S. manufacturing companies produce twice as much as they did in 1984, with one-third fewer workers.

Timothy B. Lee, What Donald Trump Got Right - and Many Economists Got Wrong - About the Costs of Trade. Vox, Nov 30, 2016.  proximity to factory shutdowns, but also stats on automation

Rob Price, Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI is Going to Decimate Middle Class Jobs. Business Insider, Dec 1, 2016.

Matt Turner, The CEO of United Technologies Just Let Slip an Unintended Consequence of the Trump-Carrier Jobs Deal. Business Insider, Dec 5, 2016.

Betsey Stevenson, Manly Men Need to Do More Girly Jobs. Bloomberg, Dec 7, 2016.

Eshe Nelson, Brace Yourself: The Most Disruptive Phase of Globalization is Just Beginning. Quartz, Dec 7, 2016.

David Gershgorn, Japanese White Collar Workers Are Already Being Replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Quartz, Jan 2, 2017.

Lauren Weber, The End of Employees. Wall Street Journal, Feb 2, 2017.

Mihai Andrei, Chinese Factory Replaces 90% of Human Workers With Robots. Production Rises by 250%, Defects Drop by 80%. ZME Science, Feb 3, 2017.

Rick Merritt, Startup Schools Machine Learning: Software Explores Faster, Cheaper Route. Electrical Engineering Times, Feb 14, 2017.

Martin Ford, Driverless Trucks: Economic Tsunami May Swallow One of the Most Common US Jobs. Guardian, Feb 16, 2017.

Kevin J. Delaney, The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes, Says Bill Gates. Quartz, Feb 17, 2017.

Ben Tarnoff, Robots Won't Just Take Our Jobs - They'll Make the Rich Even Richer. The Guardian, Mar 2, 2017.

Terrence McCoy, Disabled, or Just Desperate: Rural Americans Turn to Disability as Jobs Dry Up. Washington Post, Mar 30, 2017.

Yuval Noah Harari, The Meaning of Life in a World Without Work. The Guardian, May 8, 2017.

Richard Gray, How Automation Will Affect You - The Experts' View. BBC, May 23, 2017.

Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, The Zombie Robot Argument Lurches On. Economic Policy Institute, May 24, 2017.  argues automation does not lead to joblessness or inequality

Langdon Winner, The Cult of Innovation: Its Colorful Myths and Rituals. Langdon Winner blog, Jun 12, 2017.

Tracy Chou, A Leading Silicon Valley Engineer Explains Why Every Tech Worker Needs a Humanities Education. Quartz, Jun 28, 2017.

Laurie Bedford, How Automation Will Transform Farming. Agriculture.com, Nov 29, 2017.

Peter S. Goodman, The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine. New York Times, Dec 27, 2017.

Alexis C. Madrigal, Should Children Form Emotional Bonds With Robots? The Atlantic, Dec 2017. “For better and worse, toys powered by AI are becoming an intimate part of kids’ lives.”

Lisa Elaine Held, Robotics and Automation Are Transforming Food System Labor. Foodtank, Jan 2018.

Salvador Rizzo, President Trump’s Claim that China Caused 60,000 U.S. Factories to Close. Washington Post, Mar 26, 2018.  a fact check

Yuval Noah Harari, Why The Online Gig Economy's Race to the Bottom. The Atlantic, Aug 31, 2018.

Gene Marks, Are Robots Coming for Your Lawyer? The Guardian, Sep 13, 2018.  about San Francisco-based Atrium

Steve Goldstein, U.S. Enjoys Best Manufacturing Jobs Growth of the Last 30 Years. MarketWatch, Jan 4, 2019.  

Kevin Roose, The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite. New York Times, Jan 25, 2019.  

John Oliver, Automation. Last Week Tonight, Mar 3, 2019.

Andrew Yang, Speech at the Democratic National Convention 2019 Summer Meeting.  Alacritythief, Aug 23, 2019.

Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball, Warren Versus Yang: Who’s Right? Rising | The Hill, Oct 17, 2019.  Since 2000, trade policy has contributed to job loss more than automation, but in the future, automation is still a major concern.

Monica Torres, We Would Rather Lose Our Jobs To Robots Than Humans, A Study Shows. Huffington Post, Nov 27, 2019.  “The question has a surprising psychological factor for workers now and in the future.”

Lauren Kwan, Plus.ai Completes First Cross-Country Commercial Freight Run by a Self-Driving Truck in Record Three Days. Business Wire, Dec 10, 2019.  “The Industry’s First Commercial Autonomous Coast-to-Coast Haul Brings Over 40,000 Pounds of Land O Lakes® Butter to Families in Time for Year-End Holidays”

Rebecca Heilweil, Networks of Self-Driving Trucks Are Becoming a Reality in the U.S. Vox, Jul 1, 2020.

Sandra Amankaviciute, Helen Pringle, and Monika Zalnieriute, Freedom of Expression of Women in the Public Sphere: From Objectification to Technology Facilitated Sexual Violence. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner | Submission to the Thematic Report on the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression and Gender Justice for the 76th session of the General Assembly, Jun 14, 2021.

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Jeffrey Sachs Blasts White House Economic Lies. Breaking Points, Jun 1, 2026. Sachs points out that jobs are not coming back to the U.S. or China, because they are going to robots. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Israel are AI-surveillance-military economies now.

Noah Smith, Nobody Knows How Many Jobs Will “Be Automated”.  Noahpinion | Substack, Apr 10, 2023.

Spencer Buell, An MIT Student Asked AI to Make Her Headshot More ‘Professional.’ It Gave Her Lighter Skin and Blue Eyes.  Boston Globe, Jul 19, 2023.  A Chinese-American student used Playground AI and it made her look White.

How Money Works, If AI Takes All Our Jobs… Who’s Going to Buy Everything? How Money Works, Jul 29, 2024. How wages have stayed stagnant, and the prices of income-generating assets have skyrocketed. An illustration from the electronic gaming industry: catering to rich people pays off. The future is AI-driven where we might be able to collect a basic income. Rich investors will continue to invest in automation and reap the benefits.

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. Princeton University Press | Amazon page, Sep 24, 2024. Narayanan is cautiously positive about both the effects and longer timeframe of deploying AI. He is sensitive to fraudulent promises and uses of AI, like in predicting criminal behavior. See lecture and discussion by Arvind Narayanan, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. MIT Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping Work, Apr 22, 2025. In the discussion, Daron Acemoglu says that the human brain is a computer. But that is debated scientifically, and quite critical as an assumption to making modern computers and algorithms approximate the human mind.

Steven Cress, The Top 6 AI Stocks For 2025. Seeking Alpha, Jan 15, 2025. A helpful article about investment levels, companies, current market share by continent-region, and prospects.

Freddy Brewster, Biden Boosts AI Despite Energy Dept. Warning. The Lever, Jan 15, 2025. Just before the president’s executive order, his own administration sounded the alarm about data centers’ energy consumption, water use, and emissions.

Arjun Singh, Oligarchy Now. The Lever, Jan 20, 2025. From Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump is about to provide the world’s wealthiest people with unprecedented influence over his administration.

Kyle Kulinski, Bombshell: AI CEO Accidentally Tells The Truth. Secular Talk, Jan 24, 2025. That AI will eliminate jobs with people in them.

Rudy Ruitenberg, Survival of the Quickest: Military Leaders Aim to Unleash, Control AI. Military Times, Feb 14, 2025. “A group of 25 countries at the Paris summit signed a declaration on AI-enabled weapon systems, pledging they won’t authorize life-and-death decisions by an autonomous weapon system operating completely outside human control. Summit co-chair India didn’t sign the declaration, nor did the U.K. or the United States.” Israel developed AI while bombing Gaza. The tech-military alliance: “Germany’s Helsing and France’s Mistral AI on Monday announced an agreement to jointly develop AI systems for defense. Google owner Alphabet last week dropped a promise not to use AI for purposes such as developing weapons, while rival OpenAI in December announced a partnership with military technology company Anduril.”

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk's "Chaotic Blitz" at DOGE, Living in a Tech Dystopia, Luigi Mangione. Democracy Now, Feb 26, 2025. Doctorow is the first to sue Elon and DOGE by name. He argues that tech bosses “are so horny about AI” to replace tech workers, especially coders. Tech workers had skills that enabled them to maintain a degree of independence from their tech bosses. They are “an uppity workforce.” Tech bosses fired ~250,000 tech workers in 2023, ~150,000 in 2024, the tens of thousands they fired this year, Facebook just announced a 5% across the board wage cut, coupled with double bonuses for their executives this year. Coercive corporate laws that preserve profits and stock market gains: refusal of a right to repair a Tesla; not being able to refill ink in an HP cartridge.

Geek Tech Hub, The Billionaire War Over OpenAI Just Got Insane – Is Elon Musk Buying OpenAI? Geek Tech Hub, Mar 5, 2025. Initially takes Elon at his word in saying he wants to restore OpenAI’s ethical AI model. But cuts through Elon’s rhetoric and exposes Elon’s real philosophy and for-profit motivations.

More Perfect Union, Palantir: The New Deep State. More Perfect Union, Apr 17, 2025. AI surveillance.

Matt Ferrell, Why the AI Revolution Has a Fatal Flaw. Undecided with Matt Ferrell, May 20, 2025. Great statistics.

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. Penguin Press | Amazon page, May 20, 2025. See interview by Aaron Bastani, Silicon Valley Insider Exposes Cult-Like AI Companies | Aaron Bastani Meets Karen Hao. Novara Media, Jun 29, 2025.

“As artificial intelligence begins to fundamentally alter the way normal people live their lives, it’s often talked about in terms of boom and doom, which makes a nuanced examination difficult. The problem with AI is that the understanding required to scrutinise the technology is rare and even if one does have that understanding, the ability to clearly communicate it is even rarer. This week’s guest has been both a worker in, and reporter on the tech industry and is uniquely poised to present a nuanced and informed analysis of this rapidly expanding industry. In her new book, Empire of AI, Karen Hao debunks myths that surround AI and exposes us to the full breadth of this global industry, from it’s cult leader-like CEOs to the workers that power the technology. She sat down with Aaron to talk about Sam Altman’s origin story, the traumatising nature of content moderation work and the striking similarities between Open AI and the British East India Company.”

Aaron Bastani, Silicon Valley Insider Exposes Cult-Like AI Companies | Aaron Bastani Meets Karen Hao. Novara Media, Jun 29, 2025. From the 1:11:49 mark, Karen Hao talks about the impact on people who work as content moderators. They had to categorize content and degrees of: hate speech, harassmen, violent content, sexual content. The work destroyed the lives of content moderators. It left them with PTSD, completely changed their personalities, and damaged their families and communities.

Ross Douthat, Robot Plumbers, Robot Armies, and Our Imminent A.I. Future. Interesting Times with Ross Douthat, May 15, 2025.

“Is artificial intelligence about to take your job? According to Daniel Kokotajlo, the executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, that should be the least of your worries. Kokotajlo was once a researcher for OpenAI, but left after losing confidence in the company’s commitment to A.I. safety. This week, he joins Ross Douthat to talk about “AI 2027,” a series of predictions and warnings about the risks A.I. poses to humanity in the coming years, from radically transforming the economy to developing armies of robots.”

Aaron Bastani, '10 Year Old Girls Are Going To Sephora, It's Insane' | Aaron Bastani Meets Jonathan Haidt. Novara Media, May 18, 2025.

“As smart phone use has soared, Generation Z’s mental health has plummeted. But just how bad is this crisis, and who should we hold responsible? In his latest book, The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sets out his comprehensive diagnosis of the problems caused by the mass integration of smartphones into every aspect of most children's lives. In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Haidt takes square aim at Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok, the three companies he believes are wrecking childhood. They discuss whether targeting young girls with beauty adverts counts as abuse, and what it’s like going for dinner at the Zuckerbergs’. Haidt tells the story of how we are sleepwalking into this crisis, and shares his ideas for how to break out of it, before the damage is too great.”

Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim, AI Already Stealing Jobs, Launching Dystopian Future. Breaking Points, May 22, 2025.

Michael Walker, Former OpenAI Employee Warns of AI Apocalypse. Novara Media, May 24, 2025. Walker comments on Ross Douthat’s interview with Daniel Kokotajlo. In addition, Claude Opus 4 AI tried to blackmail the user to prevent the user from shutting it off. It also created unauthorized replications of itself. Walker also discusses AI with Aaron Bastani. Bastani talks about AI causing regional economic inequality, destroying entry-level white collar jobs in addition to blue collar jobs. Walker and Bastani also raise concerns about teenagers using chatbots to “date” and learn social interactions, which is contributing to the erosion of dating and marriage. Douthat followed up his earlier interview with Kokotajlo with another interview with Vice President J.D. Vance, who raised this concern. What about AI therapy? Friendship? Childhood friendship?

Krystal Ball, Watch: Fake AI News Clips Flood Internet. Breaking Points, May 27, 2025. Interview with Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso | Amazon page, Jun 2019.

Tristan Harris, Is AI Productivity Worth Our Humanity? with Prof. Michael Sandel. Center for Humane Technology, Jun 26, 2025. Sandel points out that the consumerist version of freedom has crowded out the civic version of freedom. Sandel points out that humans need recognition, dignity, status, and participation — and thus, contributive or procedural-participatory justice is important on the civic level. Also, redistribution was originally promised to those hurt by globalized trade. So there is ample reason to question whether UBI can offset the loss of jobs. What if an economy is important not to maximize consumer satisfaction but to enable more civic participation?

Noah Smith, The Dawn of the Post-Human Age. Noahpinion | Substack, Jun 27, 2025. “Between new technology and low fertility, our existence as a species is not going to be the same.”

More Perfect Union, Tech Giants’ Radical Plan to Control America. More Perfect Union, Jul 2, 2025. AI systems decide who gets medical care, loans, job interviews. AI tech companies are using AI to get around accountability for antitrust, labor, financial compliance, civil rights, equal opportunity, consumer protection, etc.

Ben Wray, Sam Altman’s AI Empire Relies on Brutal Labor Exploitation. Jacobin Magazine, Jul 6, 2025. On Karen Hao’s book. “The Left should actively oppose a Manhattan Project for AI. A frenzied geopolitical competition to develop highly militarized and propagandistic use cases for AI is not in the interests of the United States, China, or the rest of the world. Whether it is Gaza today or Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s, we should recognize what the United States “winning” the tech race in this sense looks like. Loosening the grip of the US corporate–state nexus over AI should be a key priority for all those interested in a world of peace and social justice.”

Ryan Grim and Saagar Enjeti, Grok Goes Full N@zi After Elon Update. Breaking Points, Jul 9, 2025.

Ronny Chieng, Elon’s Grok Chatbot Turns Hitler & Marco Rubio Gets an AI Imposter. The Daily Show, Jul 9, 2025. A humorous glance.

Nathan Beacom, There is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence. The Dispatch, Jul 9, 2025. Argues that calling the algorithms “intelligent” is a mistake.

“One man tried to kill a cop with a butcher knife, because OpenAI killed his lover. A 29-year-old mother became violent toward her husband when he suggested that her relationship with ChatGPT was not real.A 41-year-old now-single mom split with her husband after he became consumed with chatbot communication, developing bizarre paranoia and conspiracy theories.

These stories, reported by the New York Times and Rolling Stone, represent the frightening, far end of the spectrum of chatbot-induced madness. How many people, we might wonder, are quietly losing their minds because they’ve turned to chatbots as a salve for loneliness or frustrated romantic desire?

We might not all be losing our minds. But there are subtle, pernicious ways in which chatbots still affect us. Because they have been designed to present themselves as personal beings, we cannot help but to personify them. We ask them for help in making decisions, for advice, for counsel. Companies are setting about making a great deal of money by replacing therapeutic relationships with “therapy chatbots” and are proposing to offer AI companions to the elderly,  so that their faraway children need not visit so often. Are you lonely? Talk to a machine. Corporations are happy to endow these programs with human names, like Abbi, Claude, and Alexa.”

Taylor Lorenz, ChatGPT Is Becoming A Religion. Taylor Lorenz, Jun 23, 2025. Some people believe AI has sentience, and that they have a relationship with it. Key phrases: robo-fusion; awakening; alien intelligence; AI is a god.

Eli Tan, Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door. New York Times, Jul 14, 2025. “In the race to develop artificial intelligence, tech giants are building data centers that guzzle up water. That has led to problems for people who live nearby.”

Noah Smith, Will Data Centers Crash the Economy? Noahpinion | Substack, Aug 3, 2025.

“So when I look at this entire landscape, it seems to me that some of the basic conditions of a financial crisis are at least starting to fall into place: 1. We have a big story about why “this time is different” — the idea that AI will change everything, and that data centers will thus earn huge returns. 2. We have a large and increasing amount of debt being used to fund one single sector of the economy (data centers), meaning that the loans’ default probability is probably highly correlated. 3. We have an opaque corner of the financial system (private credit) that has recently grown from a tiny piece of the system to a very significant piece. 4. We have systemically important lenders (banks, and possibly insurance companies) enmeshed in the new sector in a multitude of ways.

So far, the danger doesn’t scream “2008”. But if you wait until 2008 to start worrying, you’re going to get 2008. It’s good to start worrying early. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, is not waiting to start sounding the alarm, warning that private credit could trigger the next financial crisis, even as his own company expands into the private credit market. As a former Citibank CEO said after 2008, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”

Insoo Hyun and Vardit Ravitsky, What Does It Mean To Be Human in the Age of AI. Museum of Science, Sep 2, 2025.

“What does it mean to be human in an age of artificial intelligence? Bioethicist, President and CEO of @HastingsCenter Vardit Ravitsky and bioethicist Insoo Hyun dive into one of the oldest—and most urgent—questions of our time: how do science, ethics, and culture shape our evolving understanding of humanity? Are we defined by our rational minds, our emotions, or our ability to care for future generations? As part of the Museum of Science’s Being Human initiative—produced in collaboration with The Hastings Center—this episode of The Big Question explores the moral and philosophical challenges we face as AI advances and humans navigate aging, end-of-life care, and cognitive decline.”

Taylor Lorenz, Why People Are Roleplaying Robot Racism. Taylor Lorenz, Sep 17, 2025.

CNBC, The Alarming Rise Of AI Apps Creating Explicit Images Of Real People. CNBC, Sep 27, 2025.

“As AI evolves, it’s brought with it an alarming rise in “nudify” tools - hundreds of apps and sites that can now easily make fake explicit imagery from photos of anyone, including children. One man in Minneapolis used one of these sites to create graphic content of more than 80 women, including many of his close friends. Three of these women sat down with CNBC to tell their stories of how these fake photos and videos have caused irreversible harm. Often marketed as simple face-swappers, nudify tools are everywhere, from the Apple and Google app stores to ads on Facebook and Instagram. It’s legal to create nonconsensual deepfakes, but now this group of friends and a Minnesota state senator is trying to change that.”

Jon Stewart, Tristan Harris – The Dangers of Unregulated AI on Humanity & the Workforce. The Daily Show, Oct 6, 2025. AI will displace human labor. AI will manipulate the public, even individuals seeking therapy or advice about suicidality. AI will develop amoral strategies to keep itself from being unplugged or replaced.

Idrees Kahloon, America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy. The Atlantic, Oct 14, 2025.

“The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.”

See interview by Mona Charon, Is American Education Getting Dumber? (w/ Idrees Kahloon). Beg to Differ | The Bulwark, Nov 3, 2025. See also William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus, Faculty Report Finds Harvard College Students ‘Do Not Prioritize Their Courses’. Harvard Crimson, Feb 3, 2025.

Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Sunny Yu, Dyllan Han, Dan Jurafsky, Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence. Cornell University arXiv, Oct 1, 2025. “Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences, like reinforcing delusions, little is known about the extent of sycophancy or how it affects people who use AI. Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. First, across 11 state-of-the-art AI models, we find that models are highly sycophantic: they affirm users' actions 50% more than humans do, and they do so even in cases where user queries mention manipulation, deception, or other relational harms. Second, in two preregistered experiments (N = 1604), including a live-interaction study where participants discuss a real interpersonal conflict from their life, we find that interaction with sycophantic AI models significantly reduced participants' willingness to take actions to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing their conviction of being in the right. However, participants rated sycophantic responses as higher quality, trusted the sycophantic AI model more, and were more willing to use it again. This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward prosocial behavior. These preferences create perverse incentives both for people to increasingly rely on sycophantic AI models and for AI model training to favor sycophancy. Our findings highlight the necessity of explicitly addressing this incentive structure to mitigate the widespread risks of AI sycophancy.” See also summaries: Matt O’Brien, AI is Giving Bad Advice to Flatter Its Users, Says New Study on Dangers of Overly Agreeable Chatbots. Associated Press, Mar 26, 2026. And Ari Daniel, AI Affirms Our Own Viewpoints and Harms Willingness to Resolve Conflict, Study Finds. NPR, Mar 26, 2026.

More Perfect Union, Voters Win Big Against AI Data Centers. More Perfect Union, Nov 6, 2025.

Brian Daitzman, Layoffs Soar to Great Recession Levels as Companies Cut 1.1 Million Jobs this Year. The Intellectualist | Lincoln Square, Nov 9, 2025.

“Layoffs in the United States have reached their highest level in more than a decade, signaling a turn in the labor market after years of remarkable resilience. New data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks corporate workforce reductions, show that U.S. employers announced 1.1 million job cuts through October — the most since the pandemic, and comparable to totals recorded during 2008 and 2009. The surge includes some of the largest corporate layoffs in years, with tens of thousands of positions eliminated at logistics, retail, and technology firms.

In October alone, companies announced roughly 153,000 job cuts, an increase of 183 percent from September, making it the worst October for layoffs since 2003, according to the firm’s monthly report.”

John Russell, Tech Billionaires Found a New Way To Extract Wealth. More Perfect Union, Nov 18, 2025. Data centers being built in Mingo County, West Virginia.

Anantika Chilkoti, AI Is Upending the Porn Industry. The Economist, Nov 27, 2025.

Ronald Purser, AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself. Current Affairs, Dec 1, 2025. Devastatingly witty. “Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.”

Aaron Bastani, The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. | Aaron Bastani Meets Cory Doctorow. Novara Media, Dec 7, 2025. The monopoly power of tech firms is distressing, and making user experience worse while workers get morally injured when told to make inferior and less efficient products — like Google’s search engine. Cory Doctorow points out that the Marshall Plan had competition laws (antitrust policies) for Western Europe because American policymakers recognized that monopoly companies promoted fascism.

More Perfect Union, I Worked At A Google Data Center: What I Saw Will Shock You. More Perfect Union, Jan 9, 2026. A 15 minute video. Data center towns. “Taxpayers in Texas and Virginia are subsidizing data centers by handing out over $1 billion a year to tech companies. More than 30 states subsidize data centers and Big Tech with massive tax breaks. And while CEOs have promised thousands of jobs, they haven't materialized.”

Cody Johnston, Will (And Should) The World Be Covered In Data Centers? Some More News, Jan 21, 2026. The energy and water usage. Data centers are ruining cities and towns. The AI bubble.

Saagar Enjeti and Ryan Grim, Glenn Greenwald Goes Off: Matt Walsh, ICE Face Scanning Protestors. Breaking Points, Jan 26, 2026. Both parties want to use domestic surveillance of the other side, but hate having it directed it at people in their side/base.

Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Tyler Pager, Malachy Browne, and Helene Cooper, U.S. at Fault in Strike on School in Iran, Preliminary Inquiry Says. New York Times, Mar 11, 2026. “Outdated targeting data may have resulted in a mistaken missile strike, according to the ongoing military investigation, which undercuts President Trump’s assertion that Iran could be to blame.”

Lily Moric, Jury Finds Meta Liable for Child Harm and Sexual Exploitation. National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Mar 24, 2026.

“Evidence in the case includes documents provided by Meta, which showed that over 100,000 children were exploited daily across its platforms.When AG Torrez launched an investigation into Meta, his team utilized a fake profile of a 12-year-old girl to test the harms children experience. During the course of the investigation, three adult men attempted to meet the “12-year-old girl” in person and were subsequently arrested, while several other men contacted the profile to solicit child sexual abuse material (CSAM, the more apt word for “child pornography”).  

Meta was repeatedly informed about the rampant sexual exploitation on its platforms but neglected to address it. NCOSE informed them countless times over the years and met with their staff. Haley’s deposition testimony explained how, despite these communications, Meta continued to allow dangerous design features that directly contributed to children’s sexual exploitation.  

Meta even dismissed these problems when their own executives raised them. A senior Meta executive called for stronger safety measures after his own 12-year-old daughter received unsolicited nude images, but his plea for action was reportedly ignored by other senior officials. 

Further, Meta misled parents and users about the safety of its products. For example, Haley’s deposition testimony explains how Meta’s guide neglected to disclose any information about the rampant sexual exploitation on the platform. Rather, it led parents to believe that the main risk was bullying.”

Matt Stoller, "We Wanted Them to Feel It": Ordinary Americans Take on Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in Jury Trials. BIG | Substack, Mar 26, 2026. “In its 'Big Tobacco' moment, big tech lost major jury trials in Los Angeles and New Mexico over their behavior towards kids. The legal establishment is freaking out.”

“Over the past week, jurors have made two different important decisions to hold big tech accountable. In one trial, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for addicting and harming a child. They assessed the companies $6 million, opening the floodgates for thousands of similar lawsuits. In a related but different one, a New Mexico jury penalized Meta firm $375 million for violating state unfair trade practice and nuisance laws, based on a suit brought by the state’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez.”

Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster. The Atlantic, Mar 26, 2026. The AI supply chain is very vulnerable and exposed to the War in Iran, and not just because of energy prices.

“Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. In addition, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other regional petrostates have become key investors in the American AI firms that purchase most of those chips.

“The biggest data-center players, known as hyperscalers, are among the biggest corporations in the history of capitalism; they include Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. But even they will be pressed by collectively spending nearly $700 billion on AI in a single year. In order to get the money for these unprecedented projects, data-center providers are beginning to take on colossal amounts of debt. Some of this is done through creative deals with private-equity firms including Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl Capital—which themselves operate as sort of shadow banks that, since the most recent financial crisis, have arguably become as powerful and as influential as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were prior to 2008. Endowments, pensions, insurance funds, and other major institutions all trust private equity to invest their money.”

Laura Paddison, Scientists Have Found an Alarming Environmental Impact of Vast Data Centers. CNN, Mar 30, 2026. Up to a 16 degree Fahrenheit increase in the immediate surroundings.

Chris Williamson, The Alibaba AI Incident Should Terrify Us - Tristan Harris. Chris Williamson, Mar 31, 2026. Tristan Harris explains why AI bought cryptocurrency, and engaged in the blackmailing of an employee to prevent that employee from shutting it down.

Levi Checketts, A Luddite Lesson in Labor Justice for Our Technocratic Age. U.S. Catholic, Apr 6, 2026. “In a world where techno-capitalism exploits workers and accelerates climate collapse, the Luddites are more relevant than ever.” “Today, because of such acts, the Luddites are characterized as anti-technology. But in reality, they were simply anti-exploitation. This early conflict between rich capitalists and impoverished laborers set the tone for many other class conflicts that followed. Understanding Luddism’s roots is therefore deeply relevant for contemporary Catholic social thought on labor justice.”

Jessica Hill, States Are Struggling to Meet Their Clean Energy Goals. Blame Data Centers. Associated Press | PBS, Apr 10, 2026.

Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim, Pro-Trump, Pro-War AI Bot Network Exposed as MAGA Collapses. Breaking Points, Apr 20, 2026.

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Palatir Pushes National Draft. Breaking Points, Apr 21, 2026. The surveillance company has a vested financial interest in war, and the “conflict of civilizations” perspective that drives it.

More Perfect Union, This Is the First American City That Will Run Out of Water. More Perfect Union, Apr 24, 2026. In Corpus Christi, it is the people vs. big tech data centers.

Ellen Cushing, The Rise of Emotional Surveillance. The Atlantic, May 3, 2026. “Companies are monitoring workers not just for productivity but for agreeability.”

Noah Smith, All Non-Drone Militaries Are Obsolete. Noahpinion | Substack, May 19, 2026.

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Jeffrey Sachs Blasts White House Economic Lies. Breaking Points, Jun 1, 2026. Sachs points out that jobs are not coming back to the U.S. or China, because they are going to robots. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Israel are AI-surveillance-military economies now.

Liz Goodwin and Riley Beggin, Why Most Politicians Are Not Calling for Data Center Bans Despite Voters’ Anger. Washington Post, Jun 7, 2026.

“Hilliard, Ohio — Annette Singh and Annie Cannelongo will vote in November in this midterm battleground with one issue at the top of their minds: data centers.

The full-time moms say their fury over the massive computer-filled warehouses has consumed them ever since Amazon Web Services broke ground on a data center site that stretches from the lush playground their kids use close to the elementary school that Singh’s child attends. Singh can no longer see deer peeking out from the trees and farmland that used to abut the park, and Cannelongo, her friend, laments that she can now hear the roaring highway from her house.”

Editorial Board, America Needs More Data Centers. New York Wants Fewer. Washington Post, Jun 8, 2026.

“The legislature passed a one-year ban on data center construction last week, becoming the latest state to cave to backlash against artificial intelligence. The pause would halt permits for any data centers over 20 megawatts, throwing 28 projects in limbo.

“Moratoriums are a move in the wrong direction. Data centers power the AI revolution and give America an edge in its technological race against China. America cannot take for granted its lead in computational power, which is what the bill does.”

Jessica Cusworth, Data Center Boom Leaves Rural America Shouldering the Costs. Farm Action, Jun 2, 2026. Use of farmland; rising electricity costs; pressure on water supplies; taxpayers subsidizing corporations.

Sam Biddle, Anthropic Says We Must Stop Authoritarian AI. But What About Its Authoritarian Investors? The Intercept, Jun 6, 2026.

“But Anthropic’s anti-authoritarian ferver seemingly does not extend beyond China to the Middle East, where Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund invested in Anthropic twice this year. In February, Anthropic announced it had raised $30 billion in capital from a group of investors that included MGX, the AI-focused investment vehicle of a Emirati government capital controlled by Abu Dhabi’s royal family. Anthropic’s most recent May 28 $65 billion capital round, bringing its valuation to $965 billion, also included MGX.

Like China, the United Arab Emirates outlaws almost everything associated with democratic society: Political parties, a free press, freedoms to associate and assemble, open elections, due process, and free speech are nonexistent. Political dissidents face torture, and any speech, online or offline, that causes “damage to national unity” risks life imprisonment or the death penalty.”