Are we losing our minds to AI?

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers didn’t mince words in court this week while adjudicating the ongoing trial between Elon Musk and Open AI in Oakland, California. Musk and Sam Altman, Open AI’s CEO, needed to stop being messy bitches. While she didn’t put it like that (she advised both men: “Control your propensity to use social media to make things worse outside this courtroom”), the underlying message was clear. The fact that the case even made it to court is indication enough of how strongly both men feel about one another. Social media name-calling is hardly necessary to make that plain. But the reason they’re so eager to throw digital barbs at each other stems from a fundamental difference in belief about the future of AI. Musk doesn’t trust Altman to oversee it. Many people might say the same about Musk. The anger and messiness between the two is simply the highest-profile example of how the debate over AI is pushing everyone closer to the brink. The wider cultural debate around artificial intelligence is increasingly polarized—some might say unhinged—and is spilling into dangerous territory. Altman attended court just days after his house was firebombed, then shot at, by Daniel Moreno-Gama, a 20-year-old from Texas who was charged after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home and later threatening OpenAI’s headquarters. The motivation? A fundamental belief that the future direction of AI needs to be stopped. Even if most people aren’t taking to the streets in the same way Moreno-Gama did, there is a growing divide on social media and in society between those who believe AI is the future we’ve all been waiting for and those who believe it’s the future we’ve all been dreading. Scroll through social media and you won’t spend long before finding people crowing about AI’s potential to transform how we live and work, arguing that anyone holding out is simply a Luddite with no concept of how vital the technology will become in the years ahead. Many seem to t