To my friend Walter, and much-admired Matt--you guys are largely spot on regarding AI but missing a few key points. AI won't merely force the population to be stupider: the hype itself is a propaganda campaign to convince us we're stupider already. I asked ChatGPT some literary questions, questions requiring basic analysis, and as Noam Chomsky pointed out in an online-only Times oped, discovered that it's a giant Cliff Notes generator working at 14 million times the speed of anything else available. It came up with banal and basically meaningless prose that sounded as if it meant something until you looked at it for a few seconds: the kind of thing a mediocre high school teacher might like. But of course if we're being told that THIS level of intelligence is wildly brilliant and to be feared, what does it mean about us? The other interesting lacuna in the national hysteria which you guys touched on but needs more thinking: AI is utterly incapable of irony: it can lamely explain it if it can find some explanation offered before (it can flat-footedly get the point of the joke 'Q: why did the chicken cross the road? A: to get to the other side' but is utterly lost by 'Q: why did the baby cross the road? A: its mother stapled it to the chicken'--which joke I was happy to learn was a favorite of Anthony Bourdain's) and, as far as I and many others going back to Aristotle are concerned, there is no real intelligence without a capacity to hold opposing truths in one's mind at the same time and explore the possibilities offered by their coexistence. Meanwhile all the horrible things that we predict AI will do, we do already--spy on you, misinform you, kill the wrong people by accident or for the wrong reasons, with no culpability, from thousands of miles away, assassins without uniforms, without codes of conduct, without names or consciences. Check the news stories: none, not one, ever mentions this fact.