What's the AI Endgame?

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How should you feel about the AI boom? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Chris Hayes about how to emotionally calibrate our response to this dizzying AI moment. Hayes describes why AI gives him “The Bad Feeling,” and how it led him to report on AI like an anthropologist would. The two discuss why AI is described as “the jagged frontier,” and they explore the distinction between using AI for creative thinking versus grunt work.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Chris Hayes: If you’re having it do your brainstorming, like, your brainstorming muscles are going to get weaker. And my livelihood, my career is coming up with stuff. I gotta keep that. I gotta keep that sharp. Now maybe in five years, they’ll just have an AI do my show. And the AI will generate all the takes, and the AI will talk, and I’ll be out of a job. Fine. But until that happens, I don’t want the AI doing that.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where, today, we’re going to calibrate our feelings about artificial intelligence.

There’s this phrase that’s coined by AI researchers that I can’t get out of my head these days: It’s called “the jagged frontier.”

The phrase is meant to describe how AI can be extremely and unexpectedly good at some human tasks and then also extremely and unexpectedly bad at others. Individually, this can mean that it’s useful or even transformative for some people, while others see it as unnecessary, or even more akin to snake oil. For example: Large language models and especially coding agents have transformed the job of many programmers, making them more productive. That’s not true of all industries though, especially creative ones, where there are moral or financial or creative reasons to object to its use.

“The jagged frontier” is meant to apply to use cases and industries. In some ways it’s an echo of the old cliché: “The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed.”

But lately I’ve been thinking about the jagged frontier as it applies to the broader AI moment and the discourse. This moment that we are living in—the AI boom, the hype cycle, or revolution, you choose your own language—it’s a weird one. If you try to keep up with industry news, it’s easy to feel just instantly overwhelmed. There’s the obvious, existential stuff: Will AI replace all white-collar workers? Is AI making us dumber or lazier? There’s also a lot of what’s being described as “AI malaise.” It’s this ambient feeling that there’s too much happening, too fast, and without most people’s say.

On places like X, there’s all kinds of breathless chatter—about people setting up swarms of bots to run their computers and monitor their personal lives, or of people creating vibe-trading platforms that can make, and lose, money while they sleep. CEOs aren’t just talking about job loss—they’re writing 14,000-word essays about a future where “our current economic setup will no longer make sense.” Now, if you are a regular person—the type of person who is more worried about the price of gas right now—these conversations can sound like they’re coming from another planet. And they’re also making a lot of people ambiently anxious. If you’re at all skeptical of the AI industry and the men who lead it, then you’d be right to be concerned about the future that these companies are outlining.

So, how do we calibrate our anxiety and our expectations about AI in this moment? How is AI going to impact our politics in the coming years? Should you be scared? Excited? Angry? Sad? Some unholy mix of all of that?

Chris Hayes has been asking these kinds of questions for the last few months. Hayes is the host of All In on MS Now and the host of the podcast Why Is This Happening?; he’s also written a great book on the attention economy called The Siren’s Call. Chris has this new podcast series out about the AI endgame, and in it he does something that I think is crucial: He tries to make sense of this moment with an almost anthropological perspective. So many people in the AI discourse are just in so deep that it can be really, really hard to see the big picture. And so, I brought on Chris to do just that.

[Music]

Warzel: Chris, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Hayes: It’s great to be here, man. Thanks for having me.

Warzel: So you’ve described your feelings about AI in the first episode of this short-run podcast series that you’re doing about it. The whole generative-AI revolution, the discourse, the whole thing as having, I thought this was great, like a bodily, somatic effect on you.

Hayes: Yes.

Warzel: So tell me about this feeling. I want you to describe it. What happens when you encounter the news or discourse about AI?

Hayes: There’s this feeling that I’ve come to describe or think of as The Bad Feeling, like capital T, capital B, capital F, which is just a feeling of kind of like anxiety, doom, shutdown that I get from a lot of things. Some certain political news will give me The Bad Feeling. And basically the AI discourse gives me The Bad Feeling, usually because it feels like the end of something. It feels like it’s going to destroy things I love, or maybe lead to the end of human civilization. Some high-tech version of nuclear winter that we can only sort of hardly imagine.

And I think because of that, it puts me in this kind of fetal position, defensive crouch. And I think also it’s the case, one of the goals here is … there’s a world of people who are very in the AI discourse. And that world is very fertile and intense, and it’s largely happening on X still. But it’s also like its own kind of bubble, you know?

Warzel: Totally.

Hayes: And I think people outside of it find it scary and alienating. And I think that’s actually like a huge amount of people. That’s most people, at this point.

Warzel: Yes.

Hayes: And so part of what I’m trying to do is penetrate that from the outside, because I had not really been in that discourse intensely. Try to penetrate it in a way that I can be a kind of guide for other people that are outside of it, if that makes sense.

Warzel: It does. I have this theory, essentially, that we all have AI psychosis, right? Like, we’ve been using that term to describe this problematic relationship that some people have with chatbots. It’s an informal, nonmedical term, but like broadly speaking: AI driving folks, you know, informally insane. It’s like your boss has AI psychosis, and they will only accept marketing summaries that go through Copilot, right? Like, programmers have it, because they’re getting this competency high of like 10X-ing their productivity. And I feel like you have these people on X who definitely are marinating in this like micro-discourse. That’s very similar to the way that, like, Twitter weirdened politics, right? And then the skeptics, I think, also have a version of it.

Hayes: Absolutely.

Warzel: Because you either have skeptics who are like, I’m putting my fingers in my ears, I’m waiting for this to pass—or you have people who are like, I believe that this is very dangerous. I’m curious: Why do you think we can’t have a regular conversation about AI?

Hayes: It’s a great question. I mean, I think probably all discourses around transformative technologies tend to be a little berserk, so I think that’s part of it. I think we have an attention economy that is particularly inclined toward psychosis, because the crazier things are, the more attentionally salient they are. The bolder the claims, the more attentionally salient.

Warzel: It also moves so fast, like the speed of it. Which I saw someone the other day saying like, “We don’t talk about Claude Code anymore, because we talk about Codex.” Like Claude Code was last week’s thing. It is no longer like relevant to this thing. And I’m like—if you are moving in the broad, everyone needs to be paying attention to our conversation. If you are moving at the speed of, “If you weren’t paying attention on a daily, weekly basis, you don’t belong in this conversation anymore,” it almost feels to me like it’s supposed to be a little bit exclusionary, in that way.

Hayes: And that’s fine too. I mean, specialist discourse is a thing that you find in all sorts of domains and realms. And, you know, I don’t even begrudge that. One of the things I’m trying to do is just open up to people that are inside the conversation. And not again, I’m trying to do it not in the hothouse. Like, very intentionally coming to it from the outside. Because I think it’s not like there’s a shortage of people who are making AI and doing AI, are all doing each other’s podcasts like constantly. It’s just this entire discursive engine that’s just churning out, you know, code and content and models.

I’m trying to find a way in as a kind of Virgil-figure guide for people that are outside of that. Because it is alienating. I got to say—you know, it really is. It has a very cultish, hothouse, you know, true-believer feel in there.

Warzel: And in the same way too, like I can see it radicalizing people. And again, that’s why I think the politics thing is so salient.

Hayes: Yes.

Warzel: Okay, so I love this idea. You’re coming at it from the outside. And since you’ve been doing this, and you’ve had this experience, I would love if you could kind of give me the optimist take and the skeptic take as you see it.

Hayes: So one concept I’ve been playing with is: Let’s think about a normal distribution of outcomes. A probability curve, a bell curve. I think a lot of the discourse ends up focusing on like tail outcomes, as opposed to like the center of the bell curve.

And I think partly that’s because that center has moved so quickly that people are pulled towards the tails. And I think partly that’s because we’re inheritors of an entire mythic superstructure that, again, I think the AI people think is nonsense, liberal-arts-major craziness, but is clearly structuring the way everyone thinks about this. The myths of Gollum and Frankenstein are obviously massively influential in the narrative structure people are imposing on this.

Warzel: Yes, and the Terminator.

Hayes: Yes, and HAL. Everyone will—again, there’s a reason that our technology is ape science fiction, and it’s not because science fiction was so prescient. It’s because it’s literally the thing that was consumed by the folks that are making the technology. Like, that’s why it happens. It’s not like, Wow, how did they predict that?; it’s like, No, there was no future. We got those messages about what technology should look like. Everyone grew up with it, and then they made the thing, right? So I keep coming back to this idea of: Let’s think about it as a normal technology.

Warzel: Right.

Hayes: Like, what does it mean for it to be a normal technology? And what that means is like, okay: automobile, personal computer, the internet, cell phones, radio, television, the telegram, electrification. These are all normal technologies—massively revolutionary, enormous consequences. Like huge, huge costs and huge, huge benefits.

But fundamentally, human life went on. Like it wasn’t the end of us. And so I think that’s my way into it. And so in some ways I think that’s kind of the optimistic take, right? Is that it’s a normal technology, with dislocations, costs, and benefits that we can reason together around. And try to find ways to distribute the benefits broadly and mitigate the costs.

The pessimistic take I have is similar to the way that, say, industrialization functioned. Right? Which required a sort of creation of wage labor and a concentration of capital, and a kind of extractive relationship from the beginning. That there is an inherent sort of pro-capital bias to the technology, and that it basically becomes a tool for accelerating the concentration of wealth and power in smaller and smaller hands. And I think there’s a lot of reasons to

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