‘AI, “Humanity”, and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome’

Jim Prosser, back in February:

Let me be clear about causation, because the AI parallel only works if we’re honest about it. The communications failures didn’t kill nuclear power. The disasters did. But two decades of talking over the public meant the industry had built precisely zero reservoir of human-scale trust to draw on when the real crises hit. Nuclear pioneer Alvin Weinberg admitted in 1976 (three years before Three Mile Island) that “the public perception and acceptance of nuclear energy appears to be the question that we missed rather badly.” After TMI and Chernobyl confirmed the public’s worst suspicions, over a hundred planned U.S. reactors were cancelled.

The entire essay is very good, quite thought provoking. But it really shines in drawing the parallels to nuclear power a generation ago, and the need to communicate the benefits to ordinary people in ways that they actually care about. Regarding OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman:

But think about what the people behind those numbers are actually worried about. They’re not anxious about AI in the abstract, per se, but its implications. They’re anxious about their job, their kid’s homework, their creative work getting scraped without permission, their privacy. Human-scale concerns that are specific, personal, and grounded in the daily texture of individual lives.

And Brockman’s response to this very specific, very human anxiety is to ... float further up into the philosophical stratosphere while writing a mega-checks to a partisan PAC and explaining it in the language of civilizational mission. It’s like a doctor hearing a patient who says, “My knee hurts,” who then delivers a lecture on the elegance of the musculoskeletal system. The patient doesn’t need you to appreciate the beauty of human biology. They need you to look at their damn knee.

★ Monday, 18 May 2026