Yesterday: FAA rolls out national AI air traffic control tool. Today: FAA issues nationwide ground stop after massive communication failures.

It’s not only that AI is generally stupid for general use, but now it’s interfering with critical infrastructure. If anybody in power had any sense of serving the public good, the entirety of Silicon Valley would be shut down until massive state regulations were implemented.

This is a huge con job where the people in charge are not only self-obsessed with god complexes but follow far-right, anti-state psychopaths like Curits Yarvin. These people are far more dangerous than MAGA dipshits clawing to the notion of immigrants being dangerous—especially since neither political party cares about tech oligarchs running rampant with the idea of the future.

Not only is this senseless, but it’s still actionable to contain, and nobody in power is going to remotely attempt such a thing. We’re going to deal with the consequences of this lacking en masse.

Back in college, one of the apartments I lived in had a ‘house rule’ about alcohol: all of it must be finished before another run to the liquor store was made. So, every few weeks there would be a scattered few bottles of mixers and stuff people brought over at one point and time, and we would have a night of making strange concoctions to finish everything off. We’d mix different types of alcohol into strange shots that ranged from somewhat enjoyable to completely undrinkable. It was a dumb college thing with completely forgettable (and, easily forgotten) results.

It was, for the most part, literal slop.

This is sort of what I see AI as in the long-run. Cheap entertainment for a night in college. At high levels of processing, yes, it will be able to solve complex math problems. But for your average consumer, it’ll be somewhere between an assistant and a joke—something the most uninspired kids at university will use as a party trick.

People will always want to discover and create. Nobody who isn’t financially invested in AI wants to see it take over the arts. Company founders talk about a future where people will have to work less—what do they think those people will want to do with their time? Nothing? Being creative is part of human nature, and I don’t just mean painting or making music. Some people want to build houses, some want to tend to a garden, some want to explore caves. All of this comes from curiosity about the human experience, and none of it can be replaced by a computer.

Yet so many resources are being poured into this concept that a financial collapse of the industry would take down the entire economy. The people in charge are sociopaths with no appreciation for human potential; they’re neck-deep in a god complex with only the idea for the evolution of ‘intelligence’ as a north star. People want to go to concerts and museums and visit cool buildings and archeological sites and experience reality—not the mish-mash of stolen art prompted by someone who doesnt’ want to consider anything about what it means to have a heartbeat.

There are plenty of write-ups and think pieces on the internet about You Can See Everything right now (and, I mean, not without reason—I think it’s as provocative as anything in the last ten years in that regard), so I won’t add too much to that particular pile.

One thing that does send chills down my spine, though, is that the people featured in a documentary that is exploring manipulation, self-interest, control, and pathology are just two examples carved from the Silicon Valley arena of entrepreneurs who are attempting to dictate the future of western civilization (and, unfortunately, at the moment are largely succeeding). Evidence has been mounting for decades that the people in this niche exist on a spectrum between morally dubious and downright evil—and the film does an accidentally remarkable job at showing how the mentality it takes to live in that world plays out in everything about life that isn’t a business matter.

(It is also striking that this movie is exactly the kind of thing that AI could never produce. The creativity that has spawned the cultural phenomenon and dialogue around this film is the essence of what I mean when I say a machine cannot make art. This is nuance, it’s being able to understand human nature and question it simultaneously with equal and opposing force. It’s being able to navigate the unknown in a way that is emotionally resonant. It is, quite ironically, the type of thing that the Silicon Valley tech proponents would disregard in the face of a chat bot being able to replicate the style of Van Gogh.)

The AI company Anthropic lost $80 billion in the first half of 2026. The tech industry accounts for thirty-two percent of the entire value of the S&P 500. The ‘leaders’ of tech believe in the end of humanity—which could easily explain why they don’t seem to care about the risk involved in widespread economic collapse. The writing on an AI bubble bursting has been on the walls for some time now. Yet with this technology, it’s not that I mind the idea so much as I do those building it.

Invention is not a bad thing. But when you don’t believe in people, when you don’t care about even trying to understand art, and you’re kind of indifferent about the collapse of society, your hands should not be anywhere near the wheel that is driving us all toward the future. There are people who use guns to hunt for food, there are people who use guns to force others to do their bidding, there are people who use guns to outright murder. The people at the helm of the future of the world right now are the ones would at least qualify to be in the second category, and there are plenty who are just fine with the third. So when I say something like, AI terrifies me, it’s not that I’m scared of a machine, but rather what it will learn from its inventor.

Charlamagne Palestine at The Brick Annex

Body/Head at Zebulon

I’ve seen a couple avant-garde musical acts in the past couple days that, while sonically couldn’t be more different, seemed keyed in to the same door of utilizing sound to connect to something greater in the universe. Charlamagne Palestine used intense repetition and tonal improvisation on the piano while Body/Head was a nonstop barrage of distorted guitar with various effects layering a collage of pummeling sound.

The similarities between the two acts was striking, however. They both used long-form, anti-format performances to keep the music in the moment. Seeing your regular band at a show becomes predictable if you’re familiar with their songs—you know what parts are coming up, and they might have a slight variation, but for the most part, you’re getting a louder version of an album cut. These works were very much like, This is how the room feels right now, and there’s something inherently special about that.

It seemed very telling that the two were also helmed by musicians in their 70s. Charlamagne couldn’t even remember the year he was born when giving a brief introduction to his work. Kim Gordon is 73, although you wouldn’t know it from the noise she makes (as well as how generally youthful she appeared on stage). They are both obvious masters of their craft and respective instruments and, while giving into the moment, always seemed to have almost complete control over what was happening with the sound in the room.

Being able to walk that kind of tightrope in the arts is the type of great mastery we can all only aspire to. It’s also why, when AI executives claim making music is not enjoyable or some other bullshit, they obviously have no clue what they are talking about. These sounds were extensions of the human experience, reaching beyond what our physical bodies can feel and sense, into a place that requires a guide to go. That’s what great art is, and what the best technology will never be able to replicate.

The Pope came out against AI art this week, and that rules.

There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.

The thing that bothers me most about the debate around this technology is that, on multiple levels, it makes sense. Even from an evolutionary perspective, what really separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to think, to invent, to build. Taking the concept of passing information from one generation to the next and removing the limits of mortality from that process seems fitting—that the human species was a temporary stop on the path for the idea and utility of information to remain ever-present.

Yet these AI dorks are seriously disregarding the idea that being human can be a distinct experience that offers something technology can never replicate or replace—which is exactly why they don’t understand why people (and the Pope) hate AI ‘art.’ They simply don’t seem to understand what it means to feel connected to life at a level deeper than the aesthetic, or perhaps chemical, level. Via The New York Times:

It appeared to Rabbi Navon that [Anthropic co-founder] Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.

…

Mr. Olah was so alarmed by the pope’s strong position against A.I. consciousness that he proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event, even at that late juncture, according to a Vatican organizer.

There’s far more to that article, but what strikes me as that the concept of ‘consciousness’ they’re talking about relates purely to the idea of the AI models ‘reacting’ with perceived emotional responses to information. That because a glorified computer can represent a feeling, than it must be true. It’s absolutely fucking insane.

They also seem to believe that creativity is equivalent to the result of a prompt input as opposed to an inspired thought that can be conceived from nothing. They disregard the mystery of living in a way that resonates with the universe at an ethereal level. (It is quite ironic that their argument for AI art is purely an aesthetic and superficial one, while so much of their argument for AI as a ‘conscious being’ is that it can ‘think’ and ‘feel.’)

These people reject half of what it means to be alive—at least what it means to live outside of their understood parameters. In no way should they be trusted to helm this type of technological development at any scale. Olah claims Anthropic wants a model like Claude to be used ‘for good,’ but then promises truly evil shit like this—

Mr. Olah had begun privately telling people that A.I. was so powerful it could potentially help make bioweapons in as little as 12 or 18 months.

You cannot convince me that anyone who supports AI in the way it is currently being developed is anything less than a complete sociopath with a case of self-aggrandizement that is almost peerless in history, and is inevitably going to cause major crises when this all goes to shit (be it from a technological mishap or an economic collapse).