It hasn’t been an easy path for Mark Zuckerberg. However you keep score on his performance as a major figure in American life, he has survived attacks from the highest levels of government against his business, reputation, and livelihood. Few major figures in tech, with the possible exception of his longtime mentor, investor, and friend Peter Thiel, have endured quite the same treatment. Simply put, Zuck won’t quit.
That indestructible attitude has carried straight into AI. Amid criticism, naysaying, and ridicule, Zuckerberg has refused to concede the race to the leading hyperscalers. Now, as those frontier companies hit their own buzz saw of criticism, Zuck has dropped a long manifesto laying out his vision for America’s technological future and Meta’s place in it.
Liberal democracy must discipline superintelligence. Superintelligence must revive liberal democracy. Each is supposed to save the other.
The most striking thing is not that Zuckerberg wants Meta to win. It is what he thinks victory requires. Despite years of periodic hostility from the U.S. government, he has positioned Meta as perhaps the most explicitly pro-American player in the AI industry. He is betting the farm on the proposition that America’s political principles — not merely its capital, engineers, or computing power — are what can carry us through the age of superintelligence.
That’s a gigantic wager, and it arrives at an awkward moment. Dissatisfaction with America’s actual system of government is near a breaking point. More Americans are asking whether the assumptions grounding the regime are viable any more — or even true.
Even many who still defend America’s founding principles believe the government we actually have has become corrupt, broken, and badly detached from them. The appetite for a “new founding,” on the left and the right, keeps growing. Yet the country is too divided and degraded for any ordinary political movement to break through to the other side.
That frustration is part of why so much American energy, ingenuity, money, and willpower have poured into the narrow goal of building the most powerful technology possible — something that may soon go far beyond what any individual human being can comprehend or control.
The irony is brutal. Technological prowess was once among America’s great sources of pride. Now millions of people increasingly experience it as a curse from hell rather than a blessing from God. They already feel reduced to peonage and stripped of agency by institutions they do not trust. And now tech, they fear, is preparing to sweep the refuse we have become into the trash.
Not so fast, says Zuck. His argument begins with a surprisingly old-fashioned insight: Human beings disagree. They struggle, suffer, compete, fear, and want incompatible things. No technical breakthrough abolishes politics because no technical breakthrough can reconcile every human value at once.
“There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once,” Zuckerberg writes. "Any singular superintelligence would have to prioritize some values over others." His answer is not perfect alignment but a balance of power — the same basic insight, he argues, that underlies Western democratic institutions.
That is why America’s humbler principles — dispersing power, allowing people to define their own goals, and trusting them to work things out for themselves — matter so much in Zuckerberg’s vision. Paradoxically, political humility produces personal ambition. It renews energy more reliably than any genius, planner, or guru could ever manufacture from above.
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If this sounds familiar, it should. Zuckerberg is singing from the hymnal of good old-fashioned liberal democracy. His wild idea is that machines powerful enough to transform human life beyond recognition are best developed by patriotic Americans who still believe liberal democracy is basically right about how human beings ought to live together.
And here is the problem.
If liberal democracy brought us to a point where the American government has largely expunged liberal-democratic habits from its own operation, how exactly are we supposed to encode those habits into superintelligence?
Do you believe your vote counts?
Do you believe legislative, executive, and judicial power are effectively separated?
Do you trust your fellow citizens to form judgments and pursue their own plans?
Do you think most of us still possess the maturity, education, thoughtfulness, and patriotism that self-government demands?
In other words: Do Americans still believe in liberal democracy strongly enough to teach it to machines?
That is where Zuckerberg’s argument becomes both elegant and unnerving. The same country that increasingly doubts its political order is now being asked to use that order as the operating principle for technologies more powerful than any previous institution.
Many Americans, meanwhile, are trapped between two impulses: burn it all down or run for the hills. Almost nobody has a plausible alternative regime that could actually work here, much less arrive through a peaceful and orderly transition. People feel bereft of political options, which is one reason the hunger for some higher, almost spiritual answer keeps growing.
The trouble is that whatever spirituality emanates from the upper reaches of the tech world often combines the creepiest and least American aspects of the hippie and the nerd.
Zuckerberg’s answer is startlingly different. He is not proposing that superintelligence replace liberal democracy. He is proposing that the arrival of superintelligence may force Americans to recover it. The new computational powers will be so immense that only a political order committed to dispersed authority, pluralism, and limits can keep a handful of self-appointed global masters from remaking everyone in their own image.
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That is the real bet: AI does not redeem liberal democracy because the machines become wise. AI redeems it by making the alternatives intolerable.
It is a surprisingly elegant and tantalizing vision. But there is one catch. For it to work, Americans will have to treat AI the way they treat liberty itself — not as an accessory or afterthought, but as something woven into daily life. Maybe you personally can remain mostly outside it. But if most Americans do, Zuckerberg strongly implies, the country may not generate the distributed competence, power, and agency his model requires.
So Zuckerberg’s wager runs in both directions. Liberal democracy must discipline superintelligence. Superintelligence must revive liberal democracy. Each is supposed to save the other.
Maybe that circle is virtuous. Maybe it is impossible.
But Mark Zuckerberg has placed his bet. Now? It’s your turn.
In normal times, the odds are close to zero that you or I would read anything by the kind of person who writes papers with titles such as “Edge Inversions in (Pₖ)-closed Groups.” These are not normal times, and mathematician Kirwin Hampshire now finds himself in an extraordinarily abnormal position.
In a harrowing Substack confession, Hampshire does not merely say that artificial intelligence is coming for his job. He says it is coming for his life — so forcefully that he already feels himself entering a kind of death throes.
Technology continues raising the spiritual stakes.
Not physical death, not yet. He says he is not suicidal. But he has been “screaming internally for days.”
Hampshire begins his apocalyptic declaration flatly: “I am going insane.” Frontier AI models, he says, have solved enough long-standing mathematical problems and conjectures that the meaning of his life’s work has begun to collapse.
“I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments,” he writes.
“It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare.”
Hyperbole? Perhaps. But Hampshire’s colleagues offer him a consolation that is almost worse than despair: Even if large language models advance mathematics more effectively than human beings ever could, mathematicians can continue doing what they have always done.
They can continue, in other words, without consequence.
They would become exhibits in a Museum of Human Accomplishments — animatronic figures carrying on a lifelike pantomime while the real movers of the world operate elsewhere.
The language, and the bone-rattling recognition behind it, will sound familiar to readers of Michel Houellebecq. His characters often inhabit a Europe that has already expired, leaving them little to do but submit to a brief terminal subservience and hope death arrives quickly.
Americans tend to dismiss such people as pessimists. But Houellebecq has spent more than 25 years showing that merciless positivity can become a fatal conceit.
The deeper catastrophe is not that millions of people think too negatively. It is that spiritual relationship and spiritual experience have steadily receded from their lives. The sea of the soulful is withdrawing from beaches where secular logic and ideology have stranded them.
In “Platform,” the protagonist cannot continue after losing, amid the degradations of sex tourism, his last access to love. In “Serotonin,” another man fights a futile pharmaceutical battle against depression until the drugs reduce him to almost nothing.
Houellebecq’s desperate refrain is easy to miss: Do you not see the apocalypse of a civilization dying from heartsickness and soulsickness — an illness it then exports around the world?
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Technological pessimists answer that machines can never replace other human beings in affairs of the heart and soul. Yet some of the most exuberant technological optimists inadvertently expose the hollowness of the pessimists’ own account of what makes a human life not merely worth living, but justifiable.
The hyper-optimists place above human relationship an encounter with the divine — or something that resembles it.
What are ordinary feelings, cares, and sorrows, they ask, when just around the corner lies the prospect of transcendent communion with a godlike superintelligence capable of carrying human consciousness across the universe?
Christian saints and ordinary believers have long insisted that personal relationships, however precious, cannot by themselves cure the heartsick and soulsick experience of separation from God.
Hampshire’s anguish therefore requires terms that narrow his audience beyond both secular techno-optimists and secular techno-pessimists.
He accuses his colleagues of evading what is truly at stake: “Something about mathematical discovery ... is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.”
Against that experience, Hampshire senses something close to satanic oppression.
“I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself,” he writes. “Am I alone in this paranoia? If we loosed a powerful demon in the machine, what would that look like? Would it consume lots of power, and gleefully imitate us, and tell us anything we wanted to hear? Would it fuel our delusions, and generate unspeakable images and give us (for a price of course) anything we desired? If a mathematician made a deal with the devil, what do you think they would ask for?”
The hyper-optimist might answer that ours has always been a plane of sorrows and that technology may soon grant us an exit.
The Christian offers a harder answer: However much satisfaction we take in exercising our gifts, those gifts will do us little good if they serve a master other than Christ.
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In that sense, the humanist may be the one living on borrowed time.
Hampshire’s pain should give us pause. Yet he places great weight on mathematics’ “Talmudic” quality — a “lively discourse of philosophical and religious richness spanning thousands of years” — while seeming unwilling, at least for now, to move from spiritual terror toward more explicitly salvific ground.
Technology, meanwhile, continues raising the spiritual stakes.
Secular pessimists and optimists alike may find it bizarre to conclude that those most devoted to God should be our most trustworthy guides in wielding tools that would inspire the envy of Zeus and Mephistopheles.
But a world sliding into a love apocalypse worse than anything our machines may do is running out of other answers.
Generative AI has gained all kinds of new skills over the years, one of which is permanence, or the ability to remember details from past conversations. These days, your favorite AI platform may know a lot about you, such as your occupation, hobbies, and likes/dislikes. But what would happen if your AI chatbot had its memory hijacked to steal your data? That’s exactly what can happen with this latest fatal flaw that was discovered in some AI platforms.
This concerning trick was first uncovered by a research team at New Mexico State University. Dubbed GhostWriter, it has the ability to use hidden prompts to carry out tasks without the user’s knowledge. These can be innocuous, like capturing information currently saved in the clipboard on your device, or they can be malicious, like logging into your bank account and routing funds to an external bank, as well as stealing files, passwords, and other personal information.
It lies dormant for weeks, months, or even years.
According to the researchers, GhostWriter works in two stages:
From the AI agent’s point of view, the tasks were both valid commands, and it will complete them to the best of its ability. From the user’s point of view, he often won’t know that a secondary task was carried out on his device, leaving him unaware of any malicious activity connected to his account. And for the attacker, he receives the stolen data with little fanfare.
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What makes GhostWriter especially dangerous is that it’s not a virus or a hack in itself. It's simply a tweak to the AI’s memory — a simple hidden command to do something its original user didn’t intend for it to do, nor could the user know to issue his own command to stop the act.
GhostWriter is also persistent, meaning that it can’t be overridden or erased as long as the potential victim is unaware it exists. Instead, it lies dormant for weeks, months, or even years until the right user prompt triggers the command that causes the malicious activity to be carried out.
If there’s any silver lining, it’s the fact that GhostWriter largely affects agentic AI, or agents. Most AI platforms on the market today — including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok — are all simple chatbots that require human input to carry out tasks. That means for most casual users, GhostWriter shouldn’t pose a threat to their personal information.
That said, while AI agents are still quite rare, many of the top AI companies in the world are scrambling to build functional versions to carry out work projects, complete personal tasks, and more. NVIDIA, a hardware leader in the space, wishes to outfit companies with enterprise AI that can work alongside (and even replace) human employees. Then there’s Google, which wants to load an agentic version of Gemini into Android devices called Gemini Intelligence. Although agents are scarce today, all the major AI platforms are working hard to make agents ubiquitous in the next five years or less.
As for those who do rely on agentic AI today, the New Mexico State University researchers believe that Agentic Memory Sentry, a defense system that uses refined memory saving and retrieval mechanisms to lower the likelihood of a successful GhostWriter attack, is the best way to thwart potential attacks, though even this method isn’t perfect yet. Ultimately, users will either have to trust agentic AI with these built-in risks, or avoid it altogether. I know which option I’ll pick.
Six weeks after Mitch McConnell was hospitalized for a fall and pneumonia, he has yet to be cleared to return to work — but his office did share a brand-new proof-of-life photo of him.
In the statement accompanying the photo, McConnell claimed to be going through “intense physical therapy” and said he would not be making an appearance at any events in the near future.
“That's the same picture,” “Pat Gray Unleashed" co-host Jeff Fisher comments.
“We don’t even know that that’s recent. We don’t know if it’s real. Could be AI,” Gray says.
The photo, Gray points out, is eerily similar to the first photo released of McConnell. He’s sitting while his wife has her hand on his arm.
“The only difference is sitting in a different chair,” he says.
While the walls in both photos appear to look exactly the same, in the first photo he’s holding a newspaper, and in the second he’s not.
“What kind of game are they playing with the American people?” Gray asks.
“We’re obviously being scammed and played for fools,” he adds.
“We don’t understand why,” Fisher chimes in.
“No. What is it accomplishing?” Gray asks. “If he’s incapacitated-slash-dead, what is this doing for you to not tell the American people?”
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