In early fall, I felt my anxiety rising from its usual baseline. Was it September’s back-to-school energy? The looming midterm elections? Nope, I realized with annoyance: It was AI—again. Only this time, instead of its purveyors warning of massive job displacement, they were foretelling mass extinction. Who needs jobs when we’re all dead?Curiosity soon replaced my knee-jerk irritation. The summer of 2026 was a clear turning point in the AI narrative. Less than four years after ChatGPT launched, OpenAI software broke out of a supposedly safe test environment and hacked…
