Rothfeld casts anti-AI resistance as a humanist movement

Writing in The New Yorker, staff writer Becca Rothfeld argues that opposition to artificial intelligence is driven, at root, by a humanist conviction rather than by numbers about productivity or risk.

Her through-line, drawn from the people and sources making the case: the value of learning, creation, and care lies partly in the fact that a human is doing them, not only in whatever is produced at the end. The output is not the whole product. She reports what she calls the less quantifiable side of resistance to AI.

The piece lands on the stake plainly. "Staving off the A.I. apocalypse can only matter if there is something, anything, worth preserving," Rothfeld writes.

Two of the AI watchers we track in our Who's Who directory posted the essay in the days after it ran.