“The biggest impact I think it's had, though, is it's been a weapon of mass anxiety. It has been the singular cause of a massive amount of anxiety worldwide, but especially in America.”
Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · October 2026
Ed Elson asks whether the futurist ideology behind the leading AI labs has changed reality or only the conversation. Newport says it sped up investment in large language models, but that its main effect has been fear. He argues AI industries elsewhere don't talk about existential threats or every job being automated.
Transcript
Wong's been the same way, and he has his own biases. He doesn't want export bans because he wants to sell chips. But if you can see the frustration over the last year in his interviews, where he'll say things like, I read sci-fi as a kid too, but enough with the sci-fi. What that's really telling you is that the part of the AI Industry who knows this technology that doesn't come from those circles is seeing this very differently than the part of the industry and the critics that all come from those same circles. So understanding the ideology, like I get accused sometimes of saying, well, you're just accusing them of being weird. That doesn't mean they're wrong. And I don't care if they're weird. We're all weird. Jensen Wong wears a motorcycle racing jacket for some reason. We're all weird. Computer scientists are weird. It's not about weirdness. It's about specifically how does this ideology affect how you talk about your technology and the experiments that you run. And I do think those hacking experiments OpenAI run, they did them hastily because they felt like they were racing to superintelligence. And I think Anthropic's obsession with recursive self-improvement, which is going to create models and tools that are more obfuscated and more unpredictable, is not because they're trying to build better products, but because they're racing to create superintelligence. So these ideologies affect how they talk and how they act. And so we have to understand it.
Do you think that it is affecting the actual trajectory of America? And by the way, you say, you know, they're weird, or that you're not necessarily accusing him of being weird. But I think that that's actually might be the right word, or maybe kind of the word would be crazy delusional, because I think, to your point, what we have is like a pretty extreme, fantastical perspective on the world that is steering the direction in which supposedly the most important technology of our time are being built. And so maybe it is like you guys are all a little bit delusional. You guys are all a little bit, you're too into your sci-fi books and it's messing with your understanding of reality. But I guess the question is, do you believe this ideology that it is actually affecting not just the conversation, but the actual reality of the human and societal experience today?
I think it really did speed up the rate at which we grew LLMs, the amount of money we're willing to invest in them. I think OpenAI and Anthropic racing each other, motivated in part by ideological goals, probably was moving for this technology faster than what would have happened if it had been discovered in other non-ideological circles where it might have progressed in more of a careful way of like the Google way, the Amazon way of like, let's try to build a product. Now let's build another. So for better or for worse, I think it has changed the speed at which the technology advanced. I think it led to investment in these sort of big showy things like solving math problems that really don't make sense because there's not a product there unless you're really trying to sort of race forward and demonstrate the intelligence of your model. So I do think it has changed things. The biggest impact I think it's had, though, is it's been a weapon of mass anxiety. It has been the singular cause of a massive amount of anxiety worldwide, but especially in America. And I say especially in America because the AI Industry in other countries aren't connected to this futurism. In Europe, they don't think about it the same way. In the CCP, which they do terrible things with AI over there, I don't want to defend the CCP, but they don't talk about existential threats or every job is going to be automated because that ideology doesn't exist. They wouldn't be allowed to exist in the CPT. It's too cult-like or religious. They wouldn't allow it to exist. So I think the biggest impact of the leading companies happening to be connected to this ideology is that it's been a weapon of mass anxiety. And we undervalue how big of a harm that's caused. A lot of my work on this topic has come out of my frustration that everyone I know is now having to live under a blanket of anxiety because of the beliefs of these people in the Bay Area. And so I've been trying to be out there and be like, let's try to reality check this a little bit. This is, you should care about this, but you shouldn't be anxious about it. And it's so much unnecessary anxiety after we had to go through the COVID years of year after year of actual justify anxiety. It just feels like from a humanist perspective to be a real wrong. And this ideology, I think, is a major driver of it. If those companies weren't involved in the generative AI revolution, we would still have really advanced tools and no one would be stressed out about it. Now, that's my counterfactual. Cal
Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding faculty member of the Center for Digital Ethics and the inaugural director of the Computer Science, Ethics, and Society academic program. Cal writes about technology and its impact on our ability to live and work deeply in an increasingly distracted world. He is the New York Times best-selling author of eight books, including most recently. Slow productivity, a world without email, digital minimalism, and deep work. He's also a longtime contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. Cal, this was fascinating. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Ed.
This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Jorge Carti. Our research team is Dan Shalan, Kristen O'Donoghue, and Mia Silverio. Jake McPherson is our social producer. Drew Burroughs is our technical director. And Catherine Dylan is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us tomorrow for the latest edition of my newsletter, simply put.
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