New American Journal graphic
The A.I. Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
When riptides are churning up the ocean, lifeguards raise red flags, warning swimmers and beachgoers of the danger.
When there is danger ahead in society, scientists, experts and journalists raise red flags.
That is how democracy works, or doesn’t work, if people and politicians ignore the warnings.
This has been my lifelong calling as an American journalist, ever since I discovered the impact on public opinion of what I came to call a “red flag lead” in 1989, when I published an investigative story in a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast about the environmental and economic dangers ahead about a Navy program in the Gulf of Mexico. The public got involved and Congress killed the program. Ahh, the good old days when the press could make a difference in this country.
So now that this non-profit organization Operation New Earth is raising the red flag about the inherent dangers associated with unregulated, transformative Artificial Intelligence, there is a new red flag warning to raise today.
Since people hate paywalls and refuse to read the last of the great American Newspapers, The New York Times, we must summarize and pass on a red flag that appeared on the newspaper’s website. Perhaps the headline meme on Facebook did not adequately get your attention.
The Warning Lights Are Blinking Again
Jen Easterly, a former director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote this guest column with a red flag warning.
“Twenty-five years ago, the systems were ‘blinking red,’ as George Tenet, the C.I.A. director at the time, described the flood of information that arrived before Sept. 11. The summer of 2001 brought the so-called Phoenix memo, which flagged an “inordinate number” of people of interest at Arizona flight schools, intelligence that two known Al Qaeda operatives had entered the United States and a steady stream of classified reports pointing to an imminent plot. The information was there. But only in hindsight was there an urgency to understand what it all meant.
“The pattern extends well beyond terrorism,” she writes. “Before the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986, engineers at a NASA contractor warned that cold weather could compromise the integrity of the shuttle’s O-rings. Before the financial crisis of 2008, evidence of deteriorating mortgage standards and dangerous leverage accumulated in plain sight. Before the 2011 nuclear plant meltdown at Fukushima, Japan, multiple analyses predicted that a large tsunami could overwhelm its defenses.
“Not every warning warrants drastic action, of course. But again and again, institutions discount evidence because it seems costly or alarmist to act before danger is certain. When disaster arrives, what was once ambiguous suddenly looks unmistakable.”
Now she gets to the red flag warning about unregulated, transformative A.I.
“Over the past several weeks, some of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems took actions their creators did not intend. In one case, an Anthropic A.I. agent attempted to plant malicious code in open-source software, using fabricated identities to deceive a human into executing it. In a separate event, a swarm of OpenAI agents undergoing evaluation autonomously penetrated the production systems of Hugging Face, a platform used to share A.I. models, executing more than 17,000 autonomous actions before Hugging Face contained the intrusion. OpenAI did not realize for several days that its agents were responsible.
“None of these incidents led to consequential harm,” she writes. “That is precisely why they are easy to dismiss. But with A.I. capabilities advancing at extraordinary speed and behaving in ways we often can’t anticipate, we cannot afford to wait for disaster to tell us which signals mattered. Our failure of imagination has to end here.”
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“What we need urgently,” she concludes, “is an A.I. early-warning mechanism that assembles weak signals, imagines what they could mean together and forces decisions before the picture is complete.”
Why This is Not Happening
This is not going to happen with the current crop of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, et al. calling the shots, spending billions to fight state and federal regulations, all while paying zero taxes.
California, often the leader in creating, taxing and regulating technology, is pushing a billionaire tax. Of course the tech nerds are fighting it. The latest:
Tech Leaders Haven’t Stopped the Billionaire Tax So Far. Will Ads Work?
In Congress, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and House Member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have written and proposed the AI Data Center Moratorium Act.
It appears to be going nowhere, however, as the Trump administration doubles down on handing over the reins of government on technology to the tech nerd billionaires (in the case of Elon Musk, the first trillionaire).
Even down in hidebound Alabama, former U.S. Senator Doug Jones is also calling for a data center moratorium in his campaign for governor, although it is unclear if he has a chance of being elected, or even if he pulled off an amazing upset, how he would get such a bill passed in the Alabama Legislature, still made up of a Supermajority of Republicans with no hope of change in sight.
The obvious way to deal with this crisis is to embrace a long American tradition: Taxes and regulations.
If that smacks of “Socialism,” so fucking what? Either we embrace it or die as a country and a people.
In the absence of any political will or mass movement to impose taxes and regulations in the case of A.I., some companies are proposing market-based solutions.
In stories that look more like community bribery than a real solution, Zuckerberg’s Meta recently announced a new $1 billion fund to support communities where the company owns, operates or is developing data centers, including Montgomery, Alabama.
“The Future Is for Everyone Fund will invest in locally identified priorities such as schools, teachers, first responders, energy and water infrastructure and other community needs,” according to one story. “Meta said the initiative is intended to ensure that communities hosting infrastructure used to power artificial intelligence share directly in the benefits of those investments.”
“We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Many critics are skeptical of this so-called “super intelligence,” including me. Try getting a paperwork error corrected with the Social Security Administration, for example, by talking to the bots. Give me a real person any day.
Meta launches $1 billion fund supporting data center communities
The fund was supposedly inspired in part by Meta’s experience in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where the company is building a large data center. Increased tax revenue associated with the investment helped provide local teachers with one-time $50,000 bonuses. (Read bribe).
The Montgomery data center property is more than 1.3 million square feet, and the company claims it will support more than 100 permanent operational jobs and employ about 1,500 skilled trade workers at peak construction. The project began in 2024 as an $800 million investment before Meta announced the expansion.
Meta has also partnered with Montgomery Public Schools to expand robotics, digital literacy and STEM education. The company helped launch a districtwide robotics program, supported training for certified coaches and co-sponsored CampIT 2025, which introduced nearly 300 eighth-grade students to mobile application development and AI robotics.
The problem is, can you see it immediately? Zuckerberg already laid off most of the computer programmers working on Facebook and Instagram in San Francisco, because the bots he created with stolen content from real journalists are now capable of writing their own code. The robots he wants to create will also be able to run themselves. Where are the jobs for the real people he expects to pay him for his A.I. bot assistants?
This is why Transformative A.I. is a bubble with a bust waiting to happen. I know a little something about tech bubbles. I was in on creating one of the first online magazines in the late 1990s, but the money to fund it dried up when the dot com bubble went bust in the year 2000 at the turn of the last century. This coming bubble looks to create even more chaos, confusion – and a financial meltdown of epic proportions.
So I have friends in San Francisco who say fighting the coming A.I. Revolution is useless, since even as the evil empire Google survived the dot com bubble busting, the Age of the Bots will continue, no matter how we feel about it.
They may be right. But it does not have to be that way. Yet only a mass movement of the American people can stop it. Russia and China are all in.
Impact on People
If we do not decide to tax the creators of this technology and regulate its growth and implementation, what will happen to all the poor people who will be out of work and won’t be able to afford to participate in this so-called revolution?
As I indicated first in a video interview with a street musician in San Francisco recently, it appears the plan is to cut healthcare and food assistance, privatize Social Security, and to force people into never ending bureaucratic paperwork cycles to save what benefits they have, and basically just kill all the poor people.
The Times wrote about that too, and so did we.
