Is It The End of the World as We Know It?

How are you feeling about AI these days?

It’s surreal, right? Infuriating.

We have actually reached the point where serious people who understand this technology—including some people who have helped to invent it and build it and even run the companies developing it—are warning us that sometime relatively soon AI agents might well have the power to seize control of the world and displace us from our position as the dominant force on earth.

Or maybe just kill us all.

Now, that’s not by any means an inevitability. It’s not even anything like a 50 percent chance, we’re told. Maybe something closer to 5 percent, a survey of AI experts found in 2024.

That was two years ago—an eternity in this rapidly advancing field. The odds are worse today. Still, most experts on AI technology say it’s nowhere near capable enough right now to accomplish human extinction or domination, either by its own icy digital choices or by accident.

But the nightmare scenario can no longer be summarily dismissed.

“The debate over whether you can lose control is over,” says Max Tegmark, professor of physics at MIT and founder of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit which advocates against extreme, large-scale risks taken by AI developers.

How did we get here?

How is it that a technology this powerful, this dangerous, has been developed headlong with virtually zero democratic accountability?

We didn’t vote on it. Congress never authorized it. There’s been no great public debate on this.

That’s the infuriating part. How did we get to this perilous place?

The story is not complicated or surprising. You can fairly blame Donald Trump. And the greed of AI venture capitalists and CEOs.

In 2024, President Joe Biden brought leading AI developers to the White House and began constructing a federal regulatory framework for AI. But a powerful faction of Silicon Valley saw Biden’s proposal as a threat—to innovation, startups, profits. More profits.

That’s the moment many AI leaders went from woke to MAGA. After Trump won in November 2024, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and claimed that the Biden administration had laid out plans for “full government control” of AI.

“When you leave a meeting like that, what do yo do?” Rogan asked Andreessen.

“You go endorse Donald Trump,” he answered.

In January, 2025, Trump came in and quickly dismantled Biden’s nascent efforts at regulating AI. Recently, seeing the approaching dangers, the Trump administration has quietly re-established some of the Biden regulatory framework—but it’s too late at this point. The AI agents have escaped their masters’ control. And soon they may be running wild and free through the internet.

You might have seen this chart floating around recently, the one that plots major news outlets and commentators on a grid: how reliable, and who's liberal, who’s conservative, and who’s playing it down the middle. It’s from Ad Fontes Media, and it’s a useful snapshot. I don't agree with every placement on it, but that’s sort of the point of a chart like this. It’s a conversation starter, not hard science.

Here’s my question, though: once you’ve looked at it, what do you actually do? You can stare at that chart, but a chart alone doesn't change how you read the news tomorrow morning.

That’s the gap Ground News was built to close. (They use Ad Fontes data, too, among other sources.) But instead of just showing you where an outlet sits on a spectrum of bias and reliability, Ground News lets you compare how a specific story is being covered by the left, the right, and everybody trying to stay in the middle.

Ground News is an excellent way to get a real sense of how media outlets report different stories differently. It’s empowering.

Right now, they are offering Real Patriotism readers 40% off the Ground News Vantage Plan with my link: www.groundnews.com/moran

I won't tell you what to conclude. Go look and decide for yourself. I think you’ll find it useful.

The extraordinary powers of AI have been built, primarily, around language. They are language machines.

Feed these machines all the accumulated linguistic output of humanity and teach them to find relationships within it. That’s it. That’s the trick.

The result is often astonishing.

But there is a huge category error right there in the very conception of how to create machines that can “think.”

Mind is not language.

I have a theory. It’s about conscience. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” Hamlet. says.

Why? What is its source?

Imagine a small child, no more than five years old. Let’s say she’s toddling down the street outside my office window here at home. I’m looking at her, remembering my own kids at that age—and she falls down. Hard. She’s injured and cries out.

I would feel something first. Not think something.

The closer I am to that child at the moment of her injury, the more intense the feeling inside me. If I were the one to have caused the pain that the child feels, my physical reaction would be more intense still, and qualititatively different.

Conscience is prior to language. I believe a significant contributor to the fact that humans have consciences is the fact that we share the capacity to feel physical pain. We understand each other beyond words and before thought because we can feel pain.

The human mind is not language. We are embodied beings.

These machines cannot respond to that little girl the way we do. They lack the fundamental understanding that shapes us to our core, which is even beyond our capacity to feel pain: We know we will die.

And because of that we know other things the machines cannot. Fear. Desire. Cold. Loneliness. We know what it is to need another person. We know what it is to love someone and therefore to fear losing them.

There is no such thing as human intelligence without all of that.

That is why these AI agents are so very dangerous. They are not us.

We cannot give these machines authority over us.

That is a statement that has as close to unanimous agreement among all human beings as any ever made. Only flesh-and-blood people can say what the human good is. That must be the foundation of strict AI regulation.

—Terry