AI Doomsday’s Got Nothing on the Mike Johnson Urge To Just Take It up the Tailpipe

Welcome back to Monday Barf Bag.

Anyone who’s ever been mocked for fretting that robots will take over the world will have—for better or for worse—been somewhat vindicated this week. That is, until they watched House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. 

ICYMI, whiffs of an AI doomsday began cropping up last Tuesday, when Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon stepped down from his position and sounded a seven-tweet alarm on the dangers of the rapidly developing technology. (Read: Surprise! Brainrot Whistleblower Says Brainrot is Bad For You, Actually.) One of his warnings, which included the threat that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” was affirmed by another Anthropic engineer, who quote-posted Coxon, saying “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” A few days later, on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei penned a 3,800-word call for an international slowdown of the technology, and told Anderson Cooper that he “agrees” with Coxon more than he “disagrees” with him regarding the warning that AI could, y’know, wipe us all out. Reassuring! 

 

Experts have since been foreboding the “end of humanity,” and backdropping the klaxons have been none other than House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—who appeared on CNN to completely renounce any responsibility Congress might have with, y’know, stepping in. Because who cares about representing the people when you could represent… the literal polar opposite of the people? 

“The problem is, I’m telling you again, the guys who are raising the alarms all have very different ideas about what the guardrails should be,” Johnson told the outlet’s Jake Tapper. “There’s no consensus among them, and Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know all the ins and outs of it.” He continued, “We don’t need everybody to panic right now. We need to handle this new technology like we have others in the past, and make sure we’re doing everything we can, responsibly, to also not smother American innovation.” 

 

Needless to say, not knowing the ins and outs of a “frontier” has never stopped Johnson before from slashing away at American rights—so clearly, something else is at play here. 

Alas, the persistent counterargument to stomping on the AI brakes has been the threat of China’s AI growth, a point predictably flagged by Johnson. “We cannot put a moratorium on [AI] because China will overlap us, and that’s the challenge,” the house speaker continued. “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American.”

This exact reasoning was later echoed by Trump, who altogether downplayed the AI panic from his golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland. “We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins,” the president told reporters on Sunday, hours after Johnson’s interview. “And we can put guardrails, we can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up.” 

Hm. Insofar as I can see, there are a few obvious negative forces. One of them monitors porn intake with his son, and the other spends way too much time on a golf course. 

More barf:

  • The Senate’s returning from break, resurfacing the months-old question: Where TF is Mitch McConnell? (Chicago Tribune)
  • Turns out Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding was bankrolled by a Putin-friendly Russian oligarch. (ProPublica)
  • Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. has been racking up taxpayer-funded air miles… (The Washington Post)
  • … and so has Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). (The New Republic)
  • War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bullied his subordinates into participating in a “60 Minutes” segment, sources say. (CNN)
  • Good for us! The EPA’s planning on repealing carbon pollution standards on Monday, apparently. (Bloomberg)
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