I'd Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast I'd benefit if AI cured cancer. And I still want AI progress to slow down. On a fall afternoon 15 years ago, I met an idealistic researcher outside a Stanford coffee shop to discuss our shared dream: using AI to detect cancer. He had wiry hair, a penchant for talking with his hands, and a reputation for brilliance. He worked at a research lab that developed early screens for cancer; I, at 20, had just learned that I carried a mutation that conferred a very high risk of breast, ovarian, and other cancers.

The future of AI and jobs will be so much weirder than you think. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Last year, Steve Yegge started "suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day." Without fail, Yegge--a programmer and tech blogger--would "hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes," he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him.

This is health care's Uber moment. Every knowledge-based profession may one day reach the point when AI outperforms the human experts. In medicine, that day appeared to come in April. A group of primarily Harvard and Stanford researchers announced the results of a study that pitted ChatGPT against hundreds of physicians in a diagnostic obstacle course involving written medical mysteries and information from real-world patients. The bot had won, and the humans weren't entirely happy about it.

AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we've never seen before. Late last month, I began to consider withdrawing some money from my savings account to buy gold. It's the first time I've ever thought about panic-buying. For all of the firewalls and two-factor-authentication codes, the safety of the internet is starting to falter. Hackers are gaining the upper hand over organizations around the world--hospitals, energy grids, government agencies, and, yes, banks.

This is how America loses the AI race. In theory, Donald Trump has a consistent position on AI. On the first full day of his second term, the president declared that he would use his full authority to speed the AI industry along and, in particular, to beat China in the AI race: "We have an emergency," he said. "We have to get this stuff built." If AI is poised to become the most important technology ever made, the thinking goes, whichever country commands the most powerful bots will dominate the rest of the century and beyond. The government, it seemed, would just get out of Silicon Valley's way.

Two former staffers have created a new, perplexing company. And DOGE alumni make splashy announcements about entering complex industries with scant qualifications while promising to "root out waste." This, at least, is the premise of Special, a newly announced start-up co-founded by Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, two former Department of Government Efficiency staffers who left the federal government "motivated to extend the ethos of our work at DOGE back into the private sector," as they wrote on Special's website. The company officially launched last week with funding from the Elon Musk-friendly contingent of Silicon Valley, including the venture groups Andreessen Horowitz and Human Capital. Special is also backed by investments from numerous Musk associates, including Steve Davis, Musk's top lieutenant at DOGE.

He is about to take SpaceX public--pushing other AI companies to do the same. Elon Musk is about to set in motion a chain of events that will reshape the global financial order. For starters, when SpaceX formally goes public next week, he is all but guaranteed to become the world's first trillionaire. His rocket company is targeting a valuation of $1.77 trillion, which would make it one of the 10 biggest companies in the world--bigger than Meta, Walmart, and, for that matter, Tesla. All of this activity is less about colonizing Mars and more about providing the infrastructure for the AI boom: Musk wants to use his rockets to launch data centers into space, where there is abundant solar power to harvest.

Silicon Valley is turning to ethicists to shape the future of AI. Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed "an impressively impractical thing to do," as he later wrote. But over time, Graham became disillusioned: "I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring," he explained .

Donald Trump's new AI order is a lot of nothing. For months now, the White House has hinted that it may try to rein in the AI industry. Just two weeks ago, the nation's top tech executives--including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei--were invited to attend a ceremony for the signing of a long-anticipated executive order on AI. But just hours before the ceremony, Donald Trump scrapped it. America is leading the world in the AI race, the president told reporters at the time, "and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead."

How Much of Data-Center Activism Is Really AI Slop? Anti-AI sentiment is genuine, but its online expression looks stranger and stranger. Americans are wary of AI in general, and they are especially suspicious of the AI data centers that are popping up across the country like enormous mushrooms. A majority do not want a new data center built in their town. Across the country, community groups have organized to protest individual projects, and activists have successfully lobbied local and state politicians to place moratoriums on the facilities' construction.