In the space of less than two weeks, fears about the dangers posed by the rapid development of artificial intelligence have moved from the margins to centre stage. It began on September 8th, when Jacob Coxon, a young researcher who had spent three years helping to train powerful AI systems at OpenAI and then Anthropic, announced his resignation in a post on X, accusing both companies of gambling with humanity’s future. His warning drew tens of millions of views within a day. Four days later Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei published a lengthy essay calling for a slowdown until proper safeguards are in place, a plea echoed by Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, with Altman announcing that his own company would not now go public this year.
Claims and counterclaims, accusations of bad faith or of wilful disregard for an existential threat, along with a general sense of bewilderment, have followed. Washington Correspondent Keith Duggan describes how the US has suddenly become transfixed by the hazards posed by a technology that polls show was already highly unpopular. He captures a political class scrambling to respond, from the unlikely alliance of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon against the tech oligarchs to a Congress that sent itself home early. Meanwhile, Donald Trump dismissed the alarm as a hoax and insisted the only guardrail needed was “a high-IQ president” like himself.
Opinion columnist Mark O’Connell describes returning to the doom-laden ideas he first encountered a decade ago, when the prophets of AI catastrophe were still a fringe gathered around the philosopher Nick Bostrom and his thought experiment about a machine that turns the world into paper clips. Then, as now, O’Connell remains unconvinced by the apocalypse. He concludes that the real danger lies not in some rogue superintelligence but in the logic of unrestrained capitalism itself, a system that treats human lives as raw material for the production of profit.
The Irish Times’s own editorial on the subject notes the oddity of an industry pleading for regulation while the government resists. It weighs the cynical suspicion that the biggest firms want rules mainly to lock out competitors, but argues the warnings cannot simply be waved away. With the US economy now heavily leveraged on AI and locked in a race with China, it calls for independent oversight and global co-operation, and concludes that development should pause until a robust framework is agreed.
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One of the more obvious changes wrought by AI – as anyone who has spent any time on the internet lately will have noticed – has been to flood the culture with turgid, lifeless prose. This mass subcontracting of the act of writing (and therefore, in a very real sense, thinking) is one thing, but we are also living through a crisis of reading.
Teenagers in Ireland and elsewhere are much worse at reading than they were 10 years ago – and the numbers have been in consistent decline for many years. Recent research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) highlighted students’ reduced capacity to read carefully and with sustained attention. “We cannot say for sure, but skimming social media feeds and rapidly processing information may be contributing to worsening ability and motivation to engage with complex texts and data,” the OECD said.
In an insightful analysis, drawing on conversations with children, teachers and writers, Education Correspondent Niamh Towey looks at how we might reverse the literacy slump and get young people reading again.
In the week that Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae was struck in the face while sitting in his car in Dublin, Ellen Coyne looks at the rising abuse and threats facing Irish politicians and asks: what is being done to protect them? Elsewhere in the news section, Paul Colgan recounts what he saw in a day at Bray District Court, where a dispute between solicitors and the Government over fees paid for criminal defence work is causing significant disruption. Many solicitors are defiant; a smaller number have quietly returned to work.
In the World section, Europe Correspondent Naomi O’Leary watches a day of coverage on CNews, France’s equivalent of Fox News, which reveals a view of France that sees the country in permanent crisis. Meanwhile, London Correspondent Mark Paul reports from an affluent English village that declared independence to stop an asylum centre.
An Irish Times investigation this week revealed the scale of farmland owned by TDs and Senators, and listed the payments they receive under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. It showed that the biggest farming landowner was Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon.
In Opinion, John Gibbons picks up the theme, pointing out that the farming sector is vastly over-represented in the Oireachtas. He argues that politicians live in fear of the powerful farming lobby, highlighting the outsized influence of the livestock industry in particular.
We have some strong interviews across irishtimes.com this weekend, including conversations with the writer Louise O’Neill, the journalist-turned-entrepreneur Mark Little, the former Dublin star Jack McCaffrey and the cyclist Eddie Dunbar.
Finally, keep an eye out for Drummer Seeks Musicians, our new three-part podcast on the U2 origin story. Presented by Róisín Ingle, the first episode will be out tomorrow as part of our Storylines strand of narrative podcasts.
We like hearing from you. Feel free to send comments, feedback or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to feedback@irishtimes.com.
