Five takeaways from an unhinged AI discourse

What's behind the feverish AI discourse? Who thinks "AI is fake"? Is "the left" wrong to dismiss AI? Is that even what's happening? What's really going on with AI in 2026.

The AI discourse has been particularly, let’s say, “heated” lately. It’s hitting a lot of the beats we’ve heard before—people are not ready for what’s coming, critics are too dismissive, and at everyone’s peril, “the left” is getting AI all wrong, etc—but delivered at a fever pitch. A viral, AI-generated blog post on X called “Something Big Is Happening,” by Matt Shumer, a CEO of an AI company, was one catalyst, though it builds off sentiments articulated in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s much longer essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” which makes a similar if more indulgent and nuanced…

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