In the past year or so, since the public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, people have been making their peace with the idea that an omnipotent AI might be on the horizon. Sam Altman, the company's CEO, "believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships," my colleague Ross Andersen reported after the two had several conversations. "ChatGPT was a way of serving notice." But OpenAI isn't Altman's only project, and it's not even his only project with ambitions to change the world. He is also a co-founder of a company called Tools for Humanity, which has the lofty goal of protecting people from the economic devastation that may arise from AI taking human jobs. The company's first major project is Worldcoin, which uses an evil-looking metallic orb--called the Orb--to take eyeball scans from people all over the world.

In 1992, the poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It's a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects--orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña. Her "Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff" is what it sounds like. Her "Short Talk on Trout" is mostly about the types of trout that appear in haiku. In what passes for the book's introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, "I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime."

In 2013 a Silicon Valley software engineer decided that food is an inconvenience--a pain point in a busy life. Buying food, preparing it, and cleaning up afterwards struck him as an inefficient way to feed himself. And so was born the idea of Soylent, Rob Rhinehart's meal replacement powder, described on its website as an International Complete Nutrition Platform. Soylent is the logical result of an engineer's approach to the "problem" of feeding oneself with food: there must be a more optimal solution. It's not hard to sense the trouble with this crushingly instrumental approach to nutrition.