Many people, particularly women, who are in what is loosely and pejoratively called the ‘anti AI’ cohort, have commented on an increase in rhetoric about ‘artificial general intelligence’ (a meta marketing term that implies an ‘AI greater than AI’) and, hand in glove, statements about machines killing humanity; also known as ‘AI doomer-ism’.

Scientists and researchers such as Olivia Guest, Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender and Iris van Rooij have been contending with an increase in online attacks on their work and characters (you can visit their Bluesky accounts to see examples of misogyny and stupidity directed against them) from an army of sock puppets; partly organically grown, as all boosterism is, but also partly, surely orchestrated by corporates.

Doubtless, there are many others facing harassment.

There are immediate reasons: OpenAI’s release of GPT-6 Astra and statements from the usual suspects such as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI frontman Sam Altman that this release means we have ‘entered the age of AGI’ is a key factor. Mad bursts of enthusiasm for ‘AI’ related company announcements are nothing new but this time, there seems to be a strong whiff of desperation in the air. The attacks are more unhinged than usual and have the quality of people flailing about to avoid drowning.

That flailing is prompted by a merciless material reality, moving towards you like a train: slowly at first, and then upon you, as if from nowhere (though predictable for those paying attention). The tech industry overall, and the ‘AI’ division of tech capitalism specifically, face the material consequences of the US’ war on Iran: a constriction of hydrocarbon flow and processing and reduction of the availability and increased cost of byproducts (diesel fuel, plastic, helium, aluminium and more). This is taking shape alongside a growing resistance to the presence of ‘AI’ data centers in communities across the world: easily identifiable manifestations of capitalism’s terminal mania for growth at all costs, including life itself.

Hard limits are in view and true believers, with no vision for the future beyond whatever they think ‘AI’ or ‘AGI’ are (usually whatever they’re told by the corporates), dimly aware of these limits but unable to accept what it means, are lashing out.

In this, we can detect an effort to police thought so analysis, or even a simple request for evidence to support claims, are considered not merely differences of opinion or approach, but a deviation from the catechism of a church; by insisting that boosters and doomers (often, the same people) show their work, you display your lack of faith.

And the punishment for this, is an inquisition.

…

Richard Feynman was, by many accounts, a complete bastard but it’s important to properly attribute sources. At the conclusion of the 1986 US Congressional Rogers Report on the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, Feynman, commenting on how managerial and marketing decisions overrode engineering recommendations, leading to an avoidable calamity, stated that “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

This is good counsel and applies as much to ‘AI’ mania, now threatened by natural, geopolitical and grass roots obstacles as it did to a foolish and fatal decision to launch a spacecraft decades age.

Nature cannot be fooled. The ‘AI’ age will end, one way or another. What will we build from the ruins?