The Techno-Religion at the Center of the A.I. Debate

If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi. Sean Evans from Hot Ones here. With YouTube Premium, I get ad free videos, offline downloads, background play, and so much more. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel any time. From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroev. This is The Daily. After a group of tech leaders called for putting guardrails on artificial intelligence, this week, the debate over AI safety entered a new phase, the backlash. I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. Tech executives, lawmakers, and president Trump himself are all pushing back. It's a hoax. And You're right. We're not gonna let that happen, sir. No. We're not gonna let it happen. And the critics are now increasingly making an unusual claim. I think it comes from a deep rooted ideology that's pretty dystopian. This is really a religion, a cult like belief, a doomsday cult that has been prophesizing that AI will end humanity. That the people raising the alarm about AI are part of a doomsday cult. There's a coordinated campaign to make up the American people afraid. They've created something which they believe is godlike. Is is that what Today, my colleague, Cade Metz, explains where that criticism comes from and why it matters. It's Friday, September 18. Cade, thank you so much for being here yet again. Glad to do it. So over the past few days, there has been this wave of criticism directed at the people who've been calling attention to what they see as the existential dangers of AI. And it feels like there's just a whole lot being thrown around here. Accusations that have ranged from these people who are raising the alarm are lying to you to these people are in a cult. Can you just break down what is going on? Many, many things are going on. There are people who are saying these AI technologies of today are not as powerful as the doomsayers say they are. They're claiming that these companies are just engaging in an elaborate form of regulatory capture, trying to solidify their place at the top of the industry. And by regulatory capture, what people mean is that these companies want to get regulation on the books now so that anyone that comes after them has a harder time catching up. This essentially could ice out competitors. That's exactly right. The claim is that they want regulation on their terms. They want to define the regulation that suits them the most. And that could put others at a disadvantage. So you're right. There are so many complaints here. We could go on and on and on. But this was topped off this week by this …