La burbuja de la IA

[Benzino Napaloni]

Sentencia histórica contra la IA: un tribunal prohíbe despedir empleados para reemplazarlos por robots o algoritmos https://share.google/b5GvXtOC1EL16301M

Puntualización: en la malvada China comunista comeniños.

El mismo sitio donde no se está buscando la quimera de la IA general y se centran en desarrollos específicos y acotados.

[sudden and sharp]

Ojo a las "puntualizaciones"...



No lo había traído porque no estoy seguro de si es cierto o no:

Los jóvenes chinos se están quedando sin hogar porque están en la lista negra del Sistema de Crédito Social. Una vez que estás en la lista negra, la cartera digital WeChat te prohíbe inmediatamente gastar tu propio dinero digital o recibir tu salario... Así que te quedas sin hogar.
https://x.com/albernap/status/2046349927052128691




No es fácil discernir hoy día. Cuidado, pues. 


Más:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/ADVChina/comments/1sr0t9y/young_chinese_people_are_becoming_homeless/?tl=es-es

2. https://maldita.es/buloteca/claim/en-china-decenas-de-miles-de-jovenes-duermen-en-la-calle-no-por-falta-de-trabajo-sino-porque-estan-en-la-lista-negra-del-sistema-de-credito-social-alli-el-castigo-no-es-la-carcel-sino-el-bloqueo-de-wechat-pay





Ojo, y prudencia, por favor.

[Benzino Napaloni]

¿Y es mejor un sistema donde no hace falta un Sistema de Crédito Social, sino que el mismo precio ya supone la exclusión de jóvenes potencialmente compradores?

Aquí nadie está diciendo que China, o ya puestos también Putin, sean unos angelitos. Para algunas cosas son muy muy cabrones.

La diferencia que cada vez se percibe más clara entre ellos y "Occidente", es que unos piensan a largo plazo y otros creen tener la sartén por el mango y piensan que eso del largo plazo no es importante.


Recuerdo que a finales de los 40 EEUU tuvo que sacar a toda prisa el Plan Marshall cuando vio los resultados electorales del Partido Comunista de Francia e Italia.

Al ciudadano común lo primero que le preocupa es tener comida en el plato y un techo. Si el sistema en Occidente no es capaz de proveer necesidades básicas, es natural que haya tentaciones de preferir otro sistema. La cosa es si esta vez habrá otro Roosevelt que acepte hacer concesiones para evitar caer en los riesgos de la alternativa.


Y al hilo de la IA, ya saben lo que pienso. Hay dos motivos detrás de la burbuja (al menos). Uno, reemplazar el fiasco del Metaverso y que las tecnológicas americanas tengan algo con lo que vender humo y seguir financiándose. Dos, buscar una manera de amortizar puestos de trabajo y evitar que el invierno demográfico le devuelva demasiado poder al trabajador. Hay muchas empresas occidentales, no digamos ya españolas, que sólo funcionan cuando hay cincuenta desesperados en la puerta con el CV.

[pollo]

¿Y es mejor un sistema donde no hace falta un Sistema de Crédito Social, sino que el mismo precio ya supone la exclusión de jóvenes potencialmente compradores?

Aquí nadie está diciendo que China, o ya puestos también Putin, sean unos angelitos. Para algunas cosas son muy muy cabrones.

La diferencia que cada vez se percibe más clara entre ellos y "Occidente", es que unos piensan a largo plazo y otros creen tener la sartén por el mango y piensan que eso del largo plazo no es importante.


Recuerdo que a finales de los 40 EEUU tuvo que sacar a toda prisa el Plan Marshall cuando vio los resultados electorales del Partido Comunista de Francia e Italia.

Al ciudadano común lo primero que le preocupa es tener comida en el plato y un techo. Si el sistema en Occidente no es capaz de proveer necesidades básicas, es natural que haya tentaciones de preferir otro sistema. La cosa es si esta vez habrá otro Roosevelt que acepte hacer concesiones para evitar caer en los riesgos de la alternativa.


Y al hilo de la IA, ya saben lo que pienso. Hay dos motivos detrás de la burbuja (al menos). Uno, reemplazar el fiasco del Metaverso y que las tecnológicas americanas tengan algo con lo que vender humo y seguir financiándose. Dos, buscar una manera de amortizar puestos de trabajo y evitar que el invierno demográfico le devuelva demasiado poder al trabajador. Hay muchas empresas occidentales, no digamos ya españolas, que sólo funcionan cuando hay cincuenta desesperados en la puerta con el CV.

Lo de esa noticia de bloquear los pagos, no sé Rick, parece falso. Especialmente viniendo de twitter, esa fuente de verdades. Suena más bien a otro intento de convencernos de que se siguen comiendo bebés crudos cuando lo único que están haciendo es no ser subnormales como todo occidente. Sólo hay que ver quienes dirigen el cotarro.

[sudden and sharp]

¿Y es mejor un sistema donde no hace falta un Sistema de Crédito Social, sino que el mismo precio ya supone la exclusión de jóvenes potencialmente compradores?

Aquí nadie está diciendo que China, o ya puestos también Putin, sean unos angelitos. Para algunas cosas son muy muy cabrones.

La diferencia que cada vez se percibe más clara entre ellos y "Occidente", es que unos piensan a largo plazo y otros creen tener la sartén por el mango y piensan que eso del largo plazo no es importante.


Recuerdo que a finales de los 40 EEUU tuvo que sacar a toda prisa el Plan Marshall cuando vio los resultados electorales del Partido Comunista de Francia e Italia.

Al ciudadano común lo primero que le preocupa es tener comida en el plato y un techo. Si el sistema en Occidente no es capaz de proveer necesidades básicas, es natural que haya tentaciones de preferir otro sistema. La cosa es si esta vez habrá otro Roosevelt que acepte hacer concesiones para evitar caer en los riesgos de la alternativa.


Y al hilo de la IA, ya saben lo que pienso. Hay dos motivos detrás de la burbuja (al menos). Uno, reemplazar el fiasco del Metaverso y que las tecnológicas americanas tengan algo con lo que vender humo y seguir financiándose. Dos, buscar una manera de amortizar puestos de trabajo y evitar que el invierno demográfico le devuelva demasiado poder al trabajador. Hay muchas empresas occidentales, no digamos ya españolas, que sólo funcionan cuando hay cincuenta desesperados en la puerta con el CV.

Lo de esa noticia de bloquear los pagos, no sé Rick, parece falso. Especialmente viniendo de twitter, esa fuente de verdades. Suena más bien a otro intento de convencernos de que se siguen comiendo bebés crudos cuando lo único que están haciendo es no ser subnormales como todo occidente. Sólo hay que ver quienes dirigen el cotarro.

Bebés no...

Lo que os vais a tragar son vuestros prejuicios...  Amén de no pocas imbecilidades.




-----
Lo he dicho yo. Apúntamela a mí.

[muyuu]

https://rival.security/posts/mythos-discovered-a-cve-already-in-its-training-data---and-thats-still-worrying

[muyuu]

https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/

Nearly 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents have to find a new power source after their energy source looks to redirect lines to data centers

Catherina Gioino
May 12, 2026, 1:09 PM ET

The residents of Lake Tahoe have less than a year to find a new source of energy.

The Sierra Nevada tourist hub—home to ski resorts, lakeside casinos, and roughly 25 to 28 million annual visitors—is facing an energy crisis with a familiar culprit: the data centers powering the AI boom.

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

Northern Nevada has become one of the fastest-growing data-center corridors in the country. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have either built or are planning facilities around the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center east of Reno. The Desert Research Institute, using data from NV Energy’s 2024 Integrated Resource Plan, found that the 12 data center projects located overwhelmingly in Northern Nevada could drive 5,900 megawatts of new demand by 2033. At a regional business event last fall, NV Energy’s director of business development called the moment “unprecedented,” saying the company was eager to serve the new industrial load but that it would not “impact our existing customer base.”

But Liberty’s 49,000 California customers may already be bearing the cost. Liberty Utilities generates about 25% of its power from solar facilities it owns in Nevada. The other 75% comes from NV Energy, and that source will no longer be supplied to the region by this time next year.

“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes told Fortune. Hughes is a North Lake Tahoe resident, CEO of the nonprofit Tahoe Spark, and a supervisor within the California Energy Commission’s Efficiency Division.
A jurisdictional knot with no easy fix

What makes Tahoe’s crisis so difficult is that no single regulator oversees the entire chain from power generation to customer bills.

Liberty is a California investor-owned utility. Its customers live in California and pay rates approved by the California Public Utilities Commission. But Liberty’s grid sits inside NV Energy’s balancing authority, connects to NV Energy at 38 points, and relies entirely on Nevada transmission lines, according to a Liberty filing with state regulators. Liberty’s territory is a small sliver along California’s eastern border, sitting within NV Energy’s balancing zone rather than the California Independent System Operator, which coordinates the grid for virtually every other ratepayer in the state.

Building a direct connection to California’s grid would require a new transmission line west over the Sierra, a project Liberty President Eric Schwarzrock said would cost “hundreds of millions of dollars” with significant land impacts.

The CPUC approves Liberty’s rates and procurement requests, but it cannot order NV Energy to keep selling wholesale power or dictate how Nevada plans for data centers. That falls to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates interstate transmission and wholesale electricity sales. With NV Energy and Nevada regulators controlling the upstream grid, the result is a system where California sets the rules, Nevada runs the wires, federal jurisdiction applies to the wholesale market, and no single entity is accountable for the outcome.

In March 2026, Liberty asked the CPUC to authorize an expedited request for proposals for replacement energy beginning June 1, 2027. In that filing, Liberty said NV Energy had cited data centers in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center area and northern Nevada transmission constraints, among other reasons, for ending full-requirements service.

Hughes and the Sierra Club’s Tahoe Area Group want the commission to reject that approach and instead open a full proceeding. In an April 1, 2026, letter to CPUC commissioners shared with Fortune, Sierra Club Vice Chair Tobi Tyler argued that the scale of the procurement—affecting 49,000 ratepayers dependent on an isolated, rapidly transforming grid—demands the transparency and public participation that only a formal proceeding provides. Tahoe Spark’s underlying protest states that “California does not produce a Liberty-specific forecast of demand, peak conditions, or procurement needed for numerous California communities in a high wildfire risk area.”

“You need to open a full proceeding and do a transparent process and understand what we look like in California policy, and what the long-term game is,” Hughes said. Even regulators are still sorting through the legal boundaries, she added: “They’re basically trying to decide what to do right now, or even what they legally can do.”

Even the regulators are still sorting through the legal boundaries, she added: “The procurement will have to be approved by the CPUC. They’re basically trying to decide what to do right now, or even what they legally can do.”
The data center next door

Data centers used 22% of Nevada’s electricity in 2024, and that share could rise to 35% by 2030. In NV Energy’s own 2024 resource plan, about 75% of major-project load growth is attributed to data centers, according to Sierra Club expert testimony filed with Nevada regulators and reviewed by Fortune, and most of it is concentrated in Northern Nevada—using the same system that feeds power to Lake Tahoe.

NV Energy is building Greenlink West, a 525-kV, $4.2 billion transmission line from Las Vegas to Yerington, expected online in May 2027. Schwarzrock said Liberty would be “first in the waiting line” when Greenlink opens, giving it access to a wider pool of energy providers. But that timeline matches the contract deadline exactly, leaving almost no margin for error. About 70% of the project’s costs will be borne by Southern Nevada customers.

But this is nothing new, at least according to NV Energy.

Katie Jo Collier, a spokesperson for the utility, said the transition was rooted in a longtime understanding with Liberty “well before data center load growth was a consideration,” calling it “a planned transition for many years, not a reaction to recent developments.” NV Energy sold its California electric assets to Liberty in 2009 and agreed to keep supplying power temporarily. That arrangement was extended in 2015, again in 2020, and once more in late 2025, and each time because Liberty had not yet secured an independent supply, a timeline corroborated by regulatory documents reviewed by Fortune.

But independent experts have questioned whether NV Energy’s own demand projections are reliable. In testimony filed with Nevada regulators in Oct. 2024, energy economist Rose Anderson of Synapse Energy Economics warned that NV Energy’s major-project load forecast is ‘highly uncertain’ and that existing customers could end up paying for infrastructure built to serve industrial demand that never materializes.
Rates were already climbing

The supply crisis arrives on top of an existing affordability fight. In its 2025 general rate case, Liberty originally sought a 19.1% revenue increase—about $37.51 more per month for the average residential customer, according to CPUC filings. The CPUC approved a smaller increase: 11.4%, with a 9.75% return on equity rather than Liberty’s requested 11%.

The rate case spotlighted wildfire costs, insurance premiums, and infrastructure spending in a high-risk mountain region. The CPUC decision noted Liberty’s wildfire exposure and its exclusion from California’s AB 1054 Wildfire Fund, suggesting that rising insurance costs (quoted at over $30 million alone) for small utilities could warrant future rule making.

Tahoe Spark opposed the rate-case settlement, arguing that it failed to examine the interstate wholesale power structure underlying the costs paid by California ratepayers. Hughes said the problem is not merely high rates but the way costs are allocated in a region where visitor demand, second homes, ski resorts, and development projects drive infrastructure needs that permanent residents pay for.

“We’re the cost of being redistributed onto a declining community, and that is a crisis,” Hughes said.

Hughes argues that Tahoe is treated as a wealthy vacation-home market even though its year-round residents include low-income communities and essential workers. “Even though we have low-income communities in both South Lake Tahoe and North Lake Tahoe, Kings Beach, both the Energy Commission and the California Public Utility Commission do not include us in any of their socioeconomic plans,” she said.

The basin’s government structure compounds the accountability problem. Lake Tahoe spans two states, multiple counties, one incorporated city, and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. County supervisors, state appointees, utility regulators, and resort developers all touch parts of the system, but no single body owns the whole problem. Liberty’s demand pattern illustrates how different this territory is from the rest of California: while most regional utilities peak in summer, Liberty’s demand crests around Christmas, when second-home owners arrive for ski season — driving infrastructure costs that year-round residents bear.
What happens next

Liberty has told customers that NV Energy will remain the transmission provider—the wires aren’t going anywhere. The question is who supplies the electricity that flows over them, what it costs, and whether California regulators can protect customers whose upstream grid sits outside California’s usual planning structure.

Schwarzrock said the utility plans to bid the replacement contract to “anybody and everybody,” focusing first on meeting California’s renewable energy requirements. Liberty anticipates issuing a formal RFP in summer 2026, with replacement power most likely coming from sources outside California, delivered over NV Energy’s transmission system.

Hughes said short-term replacement power is likely available from elsewhere in the West—but she’s not optimistic about what comes after. “Short term, you can commonly get good deals, but it’s unstable,” she said. “The short-term deal gets you through. But then you’re in the Western market, competing against PG&E, Southern California Edison, data centers, and mining companies. We’re 49,000 customers. We have no leverage.”

Her larger concern is that as California and Nevada move toward a more integrated Western electricity market, Tahoe’s small customer base will be increasingly exposed to competition from larger utilities and industrial buyers with far more purchasing power.

“We have no representation,” Hughes said. “It’s resource extraction.”

[pollo]

¿Y es mejor un sistema donde no hace falta un Sistema de Crédito Social, sino que el mismo precio ya supone la exclusión de jóvenes potencialmente compradores?

Aquí nadie está diciendo que China, o ya puestos también Putin, sean unos angelitos. Para algunas cosas son muy muy cabrones.

La diferencia que cada vez se percibe más clara entre ellos y "Occidente", es que unos piensan a largo plazo y otros creen tener la sartén por el mango y piensan que eso del largo plazo no es importante.


Recuerdo que a finales de los 40 EEUU tuvo que sacar a toda prisa el Plan Marshall cuando vio los resultados electorales del Partido Comunista de Francia e Italia.

Al ciudadano común lo primero que le preocupa es tener comida en el plato y un techo. Si el sistema en Occidente no es capaz de proveer necesidades básicas, es natural que haya tentaciones de preferir otro sistema. La cosa es si esta vez habrá otro Roosevelt que acepte hacer concesiones para evitar caer en los riesgos de la alternativa.


Y al hilo de la IA, ya saben lo que pienso. Hay dos motivos detrás de la burbuja (al menos). Uno, reemplazar el fiasco del Metaverso y que las tecnológicas americanas tengan algo con lo que vender humo y seguir financiándose. Dos, buscar una manera de amortizar puestos de trabajo y evitar que el invierno demográfico le devuelva demasiado poder al trabajador. Hay muchas empresas occidentales, no digamos ya españolas, que sólo funcionan cuando hay cincuenta desesperados en la puerta con el CV.

Lo de esa noticia de bloquear los pagos, no sé Rick, parece falso. Especialmente viniendo de twitter, esa fuente de verdades. Suena más bien a otro intento de convencernos de que se siguen comiendo bebés crudos cuando lo único que están haciendo es no ser subnormales como todo occidente. Sólo hay que ver quienes dirigen el cotarro.

Bebés no...

Lo que os vais a tragar son vuestros prejuicios...  Amén de no pocas imbecilidades.




-----
Lo he dicho yo. Apúntamela a mí.

A ver si vas al psiquiatra de una vez.

[muyuu]

https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2054629212854624329

Saludos.

https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2054655260652716149

Saludos.

[muyuu]

https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2053896786142789725

Saludos.

[muyuu]

https://archive.is/oqVDm ( https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altmans-business-dealings-under-gop-scrutiny-ahead-of-openais-ipo-52c1cc4d )

Sam Altman’s Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI’s IPO

Republican-led House Oversight Committee says it is investigating, and six GOP state attorneys general are calling for SEC review after WSJ

Philip Wegmann, Amrith Ramkumar and Berber Jin


May 11, 2026 11:20 pm ET

WASHINGTON—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s personal investments are coming under intensifying scrutiny from Republicans as the company heads for an initial public offering, with the House Oversight committee launching a probe into potential conflicts of interest and several GOP attorneys general calling for a Securities and Exchange Commission review.

The moves follow an April article in The Wall Street Journal that detailed Altman’s efforts to have OpenAI back companies he personally invested in. They coincide with a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk in which the billionaire has alleged that Altman and OpenAI manipulated him into giving tens of millions of dollars to found OpenAI as a nonprofit organization, only for them to turn the AI lab into a for-profit venture.

The House of Representatives Oversight Committee on Friday sent a letter to Altman requesting a briefing from a top executive about potential conflicts of interest and documents outlining the company’s governance practices, according to a copy the committee posted to its website Monday.

“The Committee aims to ensure that funds donated for charitable purposes are not diverted for unintended uses, such as artificially increasing the market value of other companies in which an executive or board member may hold an interest,” the House letter from Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) says. It says the effort is part of an investigation into potential conflicts of interest involving nonprofits.

Comer supported Musk’s work on the Department of Government Efficiency last year, which included targeting nonprofits accused of fraud. 
In the Comer letter and the SEC letter, which both cite the Journal’s reporting, the Republicans argue that Altman’s deals with companies he invests in, such as nuclear-fusion firm Helion, could pose conflict-of-interest concerns because OpenAI’s involvement could boost the value of the other companies.

OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor defended Altman in a court hearing Monday, testifying that Altman had been “forthright” and “proactive and transparent” about his involvements in other companies. Altman recused himself from recent discussions about a deal between OpenAI and Helion as well, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The comments were made during the continuing court case between Altman and Musk. OpenAI has said that Musk not only knew about the for-profit conversion plan but also supported it and asked for unilateral control.

The attorneys general wrote to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins asking him to scrutinize the potential conflicts ahead of the IPO.


The attorneys general from Florida, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, West Virginia and Louisiana said Altman “has a history of self-dealing and serious conflicts of interest that have created significant risk for the company.” Because Altman has no direct equity in OpenAI, “his personal financial interests have only limited alignment with OpenAI’s financial performance,” the letter says.

OpenAI is expected to quickly become a member of indexes and exchange-traded funds shortly after the IPO because of its gargantuan valuation, recently around $850 billion in the private market. That is set to give many investors exposure to the company.

“Altman’s troubling conduct thus far pales in comparison to the harm that would result if he were permitted to continue this pattern after OpenAI goes public,” reads a copy of the letter viewed by the Journal. The attorneys general ask for close review of documents submitted ahead of the public listing, including the S-1, an initial registration document companies file when they go public detailing their finances and conflicts of interest. “The consequences of any self-dealing by Altman could be borne by our state pensions and individual investors, creating enormous financial risk.”

SpaceX recently acquired Musk’s xAI, a competitor to the maker of ChatGPT. Critics of Musk say he and other OpenAI rivals are trying to turn regulators and the public against the company to keep pace in the AI race.

OpenAI’s IPO is expected to be one of the largest ever. SpaceX and Anthropic, another OpenAI rival, are also expected to pursue IPOs soon.
In addition to asking OpenAI to lead an investment in Helion, Altman last summer asked rocket-maker Stoke Space if it wanted to partner with the company to build data centers in space. Altman is an investor in Stoke Space through his family office, the Journal reported.

Both Musk and Altman are allies of President Trump and have generally supported Republican efforts to adopt industry-friendly AI rules. The SEC under Atkins is bringing fewer enforcement cases targeting Wall Street’s alleged rulebreakers.
 
Perceived conflicts of interest contributed to the OpenAI board briefly ousting Altman before he was later reinstated. The letter from the attorneys general asks the SEC for more details about his ouster and any governance mechanisms to prevent his potential conflicts of interest from becoming a problem.

[muyuu]

https://www.thenewcritic.com/p/the-great-zombification

The Great Zombification
“And so perfect parallel constructions fill the lecture halls, the take-home tests, the school newspapers, and perhaps even the idiom of student chatter.”

By Owen Yingling

16 min. readView original
THE NEW CRITIC

Owen Yingling is a 21-year-old writer and assistant editor of The New Critic from Arlington, Virginia. He studies Philosophy at The University of Chicago.

Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.

Take the infamous photograph of a UCLA student showing off a ChatGPT window at graduation. What exactly does it mean? There are a million silly articles and think-pieces that unwittingly engage with it at the most charitable level: the student is showing off how he used ChatGPT to cheat on his essays, complete his final project, whatever, in order to graduate. Cheating on examinations is not particularly interesting or new. “Perhaps,” these pieces seem to chide in a stern parental voice, “the schools need to really crack down on AI because it makes cheating so much easier.” This is a cozy and noble sentiment that conflates a difference in kind with a difference in degrees. I do not think anyone over the age of 23, even if you are a teacher, graduate student, or professor, understands the extent to which AI usage affects every appendage of the university system.

The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at “elite” universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training.

I did not really notice the sing-songy cadence in the voice of one of my professors until my friend pointed it out: “Do you think he’s writing his lectures with Chat?” I am a tired and lazy student. The senior slump has started a quarter too early for me. “Who cares,” I thought.

Clinically, I wonder if this marks the transition to the metastatic phase. When I arrived at UChicago, LLMs seemed like nothing more than a benign tumor. I remember that a fraternity’s ill-concoted plot to use AI on an asynchronous midterm ended with most of them getting 70s. And I remember my logic professor laughing at the poorly reasoned answers to homework questions that ChatGPT would give. I don’t think she was laughing two years later when I was TAing the class and we observed a fairly distinct gap of about 40 percentage points between the take-home test and the one administered in-person.

The transition to Stage I, an aggregation of harmful tumorous cells, was not particularly alarming at UChicago because it was localized in an area already treated as a bit of an academic joke: the business economics specialization, a recently created moneymaker bemoaned by the traditional UChicago student as a portal for frat types and generic ‘elite human capital’ types, viewed even by most participants (mostly double-majors; myself included) as a bit of a beach vacation, a cool relaxing respite from the rigor of the rest of UChicago.

In the typical “bizcon” class, a student must complete six or seven lazily graded problem sets and take a midterm and final exam. Professors always release one or more sample exams before the test date. There is almost no math above the simplest algebra, no thinking beyond the rote repetition of problems and concepts covered on the lecture slides. Some of the required classes must be taken at the business school, where the professors always marvel at our blank stares and how few questions we have compared to the MBA students. To get an acceptable grade, there is rarely any need to do anything besides reviewing the sample exams and problem sets come test time, and there is certainly no pressing requirement to attend class or actually complete these problem sets yourself. In short, bizcon classes are the perfect primary site for cancerous growth.

The growth soon spread to the standard economics department. Last year, a friend of mine took Statistics 244, a popular econ elective, and reported the following scene inside the exam room:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“But people literally Chatted the whole exam
Teacher sat in the front of the class and didn’t gaf”
During the exam, students were pulling out phones and taking photographs of the test to submit to LLMs before copying down machine-written responses into their blue books.

I was disturbed but not surprised when I began to see intrusions into the humanities. Typically, each fraternity deals with one or two plagiarism cases a year in the mandatory humanities courses, but after sophomore year and the release of GPT 5, the cases (allegedly) went down and the grades went up.

Parallel growth marked the next stage. I was asleep in my Cairo hotel bed, studying abroad, when Sidechat, UChicago’s anonymous social media platform, made a tremendous discovery: The Maroon, our school newspaper, had published two articles completely written by AI. This had gone unnoticed for a few months before the only UChicago student with free time on his hands decided to see what sort of groundbreaking coverage of Chicago-area sports The Maroon might have and was certainly dejected to realize that instead of being furnished insider scoops on the Bulls’ roster moves, he was stuck reading sentences like: “Chicago’s perfect start isn’t a fluke; it’s the product of cohesion,” and “And through it all, there’s Giddey — the calm in the chaos, dictating the tempo and keeping the team grounded in the momentum.”

It should have been clear then that AI use was not simply a matter of academic misconduct. It could not be dealt with solely through reforming the baffling university disciplinary system, which is consistently content to grab twenty or so kids a year and suspend them for a year or two for cheating on an assignment or exam.

In the months since The Maroon case first aroused my suspicions, I’ve noticed a raft of student publications publishing partially or fully AI-generated pieces. There is a rather infamous new campus “journal” advertised with bombastic posters on every cork board that, if you bothered to scan their QR codes or navigate to their Instagram, you’d realize is a sort of unintentional Moltbook. Every piece is written with what appears to be no human effort whatsoever and is met with a corresponding lack of engagement from actual people.

And so perfect parallel constructions fill the lecture halls, the take-home tests, the school newspapers, and perhaps even the idiom of student chatter. Given all of the decay I’d seen over the past couple of years, my realization that even professors had begun to succumb to the digital disease was tinged with the relief of a terminal patient that the fight was finally over.

But I am starting to fear that this cancer has more grandiose ambitions than the death of its host.

In April, The University of Chicago announced that “Rika Mansueto, AB’91, and Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80,” had made a $50 million gift “to advance UChicago research and support faculty in AI.” According to the university, aside from funding AI research projects, the money will “[support] a dozen projects that promote a wide range of pedagogical innovation, seeking to expand and leverage machine learning and AI in the classroom” — the final clause of the sentence is remarkably out of tune with the rest “— or to deliberately limit the use of AI.” This addition is too jarring to be ignored but too offhanded to be treated seriously: Here is a suspicious island in this placid sea of buzzwords and well-worn phrases.

“AI in the classroom!” screech the other top universities:



Everyone knows about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis — the “zombie ant-fungus” made infamous in those Natural Geographic videos we watched in middle school. I believe I am watching the spontaneous generation of something similar. Recently, I sat next to someone in class for 10 weeks and watched, baffled, as they slowly began to turn all facets of their life over to an LLM. First, it was their homework. They used Chat to generate answers to dry problem sets while ignoring whatever was being taught up on the board. Then it was their emails. Extension asks à la Claude became coffee chat requests became “write me a nice thank you note to send my professor,” before spilling over onto fragmentary text messages, gym routines, summaries of books read for pleasure, and perhaps even a long message to send a girl. I was astonished then, but it is not hard to understand how this sort of thing happens.

I recently reread a prophetic Scott Alexander fantasy story from 2012 known as “The Whispering Earring.” This earring is a very curious and familiar artifact:

“...when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form ‘Better for you if you…’ The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own…

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring’s commands momentous on the level of ‘Become a soldier.’ No more are they even simple on the level of ‘Have bread for breakfast.’ Now they are more like ‘Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way’ or ‘Articulate the letter p.’ The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.”

In an increasingly large number of spheres, there are tremendous object-level “benefits” to using artificial intelligence, not least in the cutthroat world of elite universities where students are asked to balance a 4.0, a not-insubstantial number of extracurriculars, a rich social life capable of absorbing the stress of the prior asks, and a number of biological constraints involving sleep and nutrition, as well as caffeine, nicotine, and adderall intake.

In this world, the more you offload the areas you cannot cultivate sufficient care for, the better you will perform. So the best universities are not teaching students to be wise, to be a banker or consultant, to be an “indoctrinated” leftist academic, or to be a rich elitist prick. The best universities preach the efficiency, convenience, and countless other benefits of chaining one’s intellect to a very charming machine.

Maybe I’m describing college in overly resplendent words, for the modern university is a schizophrenic institution. It is as often as filthy, pointless, and degradable as it is alluring and edifying. Purists and idealistic crusaders (UChicago’s very own mad president Robert Hutchins, for example) are often driven insane by it, while industrialists and sell-outs are generally thwarted or slowed by its atavistic structures. Whatever your conception of the modern university, whether grand or grim, understanding the current landscape of campus-wide AI use, much less its intensification, should destroy it.

The glossy and ever-increasing university announcements about AI centers, donations, and initiatives feel like 1980s Pravda articles. It would not be right, in my view, to say that there is a disconnect between the story that schools are telling to alumni, donors, and themselves and the story on the ground. There is an impassable chasm.

At Princeton, for instance, where the administration “[encourages] faculty to experiment with generative AI (GAI) tools,” in the classroom and holds symposiums on “teaching AI literacy,” cheating cases nearly doubled from 63 reported cases during the 2023-2024 year to 119 in 2024-2025 — the yearly disciplinary report noting that “there was a significant increase in the use of generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) in the cases adjudicated this past year.” I’m certain this trend holds true — in practice, if not the collected data — at every single school that has trumpeted initiatives to use AI in the classroom.

Every anecdote I hear about AI use shows that there is no “integration” happening, there is simply substitution: for learning, teaching, and conversing. These are the bare activities required to enact whatever concept of the university you would like, whether it tends towards monastery or marketplace.

Now it’s true that I am being something of a sophist. You might shake your head.

“Owen, you can tell as many of these lurid stories as you like; you can conjure up this picture of AI use as a creeping cancer, or an octopus from a nineteenth-century political cartoon, but so what? You’ve jumped down from the world of concepts and ideas to fleshy anecdotes, but don’t think that we’ll let you get back up there so easily: right now, AI integration in colleges has been a grim farce, great, but that means what exactly? That doesn’t mean it can’t be successful; you haven’t shown us that there is any theoretical incompatibility between AI use and education. We agree — schools need to do better — now let us tell you about our Edutech start-up…”

I think the practical hurdles are so great and the benefits of integration — at least in ‘core’ or humanities classes at elite universities — are so low, that this is an unacceptable position.

We can only understand the administrative apathy on widespread AI use at these elite schools as part of the modern university’s inability to make anything beyond pragmatic demands on students. These schools can barely grade students with any sort of rigor, so it’s no wonder UChicago (and its ilk) can only muster up the nerve to officially punish a handful of students each year. The demands students put on themselves — for a 4.0 or a prestigious club membership — do not stem from the authority of the university but from the behavior of their peers, the pressure from their parents, and the nebulous intrusion of the job market the second they step foot on campus. Perhaps Deep Springs can shield students from these burdens and fully impose their own humanist ideals, but a T10 cannot, so it’s laughable to complain too fervently about how they won’t.

If these schools embraced “AI integration in the classroom,” there are piecemeal reforms these schools could make to stem the worst excesses of widespread AI use — paradoxically, lessening the severity of punishments given for cheating would do much to stem the most flagrant AI use — but these measures would do little to stave off what some would call a “transformation,” others a “zombification,” into a very different sort of institution. Punishing more students will not address why students voluntarily hand over their student newspaper articles, workout routine, or dating life to a computer, even if it safeguards the classroom for a little while longer.

And for what imagined benefit are we then risking the final remnants of this old, beautiful, and crumbling project? What could “the integration of AI in the classroom” concretely mean at what are supposedly the most elite and well-funded universities in the country?

The case I’ve heard for “AI in the classroom” runs as follows (and are sinisterly similar to those school district-wide initiatives involving iPads and Chromebooks which lobotomized or traumatized an entire generation): AI will “democratize” education by giving all students access to the same resources.

But this framework, when applied to such elite schools as are advocating its adoption, is a contradiction in terms. If the best use of AI is “cheapening” education (removing work from professors by generating essay feedback, examinations, course material, etc.) — in sum automating and standardizing “teaching” — why would it make any sense for the “best” schools, which claim to spare no expense on education, to turn to it? It’s a bit like if haute cuisine restaurants decided to replace their entrees with Soylent because it was “new and innovative.”

Goethe once noted, “A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.” Teaching is a relationship between humans — perhaps mediated across time and space by tools or instruments but a relationship nevertheless. And lest we be misled by the names of things, anyone who has ever spent any time “learning” understands that it is more akin to Platonic recollection or the exercise of an Aquinian intellect than fitting patterns to some vast set of unapprehended data.

The best teachers — those who can stimulate students like Goethe’s romantic educator or Socrates in Meno — are not always Robin Williams imitations, but they are eccentric, sometimes malicious, and occasionally downright insane. Already, the standardization of academia and teaching over the last 50 years has decimated this type. The best and worst professors at any given college are usually the aged fossils who arrived before grad-school and a tenure-track position became a narrow gate and student evaluations became gospel; no one can deny that the unthinking application of metrics and checkboxes funnels teaching standards toward mediocrity.1 Introducing AI into the classroom as a teacher or even the producer of teaching material will drive this unique but ideal type to extinction.

Now of course, it is possible to imagine AI bots like Claude being better teachers than the best humans in the same way it is perhaps possible to imagine them as better novelists or filmmakers than we are, but if this is really the fate we are consigned to, I suspect that the truly optimized and widespread use of AI to teach students a book-centered education — the tendrils of which are already deeply embedded within every part of whatever remains of academic life today — will likely choke out any leftover semblance of their sentimental education. In such a world, there might never be adults, nay, even human beings, again. There is something rather dystopian in such a sterilized conception of education.

And regardless of the hypothetical benefits, integrating AI tools and material into the classroom means homogenization and centralization. Already today, the top schools are more interchangeable (some students now decide where they will attend college by simply picking the highest-ranking school on the US News Best National Universities list they get into) and more intertwined with the federal government than at any point in the last century. Tying education to a capital-intensive and (likely soon to be) tightly regulated technology is one more step toward a different, frightening future. A world in which independent educational institutions are neutered and transformed by their reliance on a central authority into factories designed to train students according to the “needs of society” is not a new prospect — it has been the persistent dream of Fabians, technocrats, and engineers — but to me, at least, it is a terrifying one.

So what is to be done? Some would say, even considering the harms I’ve just outlined, nothing. “Let the schools integrate AI as much as they want…” There is an extreme idealist view of education that might see the threat of AI as good precisely because it could transform those kids — the former connoisseurs of SparkNotes and Mathway, the ones snickering in lectures and inking formulas onto their palms before exams before the rise of generative AI — into zombies lurching and stumbling their way into the “permanent underclass” (as the tech bros say), leaving the elect few free to enjoy the benefits of a humanist education without all the noise and din. Under this framework, there is little to do but wait: the university system will soon fall apart, and then something new can be built from its ashes. There is little good in the university today: it is a brand, a hollowed-out signifier that has long since lost its referent. Its demise, then, would do nothing more than deliver us from our confusion when we unconsciously substitute their immense worth a hundred years ago for their value today.

In this vision of the future, shared with the educational extremist by every stripe of anti-humanist, terms like “university” and “college” may persist as empty names like “Senator” or “Caesar” did when Rome fell. It is impossibly sad to imagine this world, bereft of these concepts except in a slowly degrading material culture. Unseen beauties will be lost: millions of volumes once rebound, carefully catalogued, shelved, and preserved with monastic care sold for pennies; a few collections preserved for curiosity’s sake or drifting into the hands of rich nostalgic collectors. The glory of those wonderful doctoral genealogies — graduate students who can trace their lineage back to Leibniz or Lessing — cut short forever. The buildings, of course, will remain, to be observed and treated respectfully — like old cathedrals, mainline Protestant churches, and most of the European continent.

I am not such an idealist. I would be happy to make concessions and cut deals to save the universities at the expense of the community of “true learners” currently stifled in rather unpropitious conditions. For one, I do not believe in an educational Eden. In 1936, Robert Hutchins lamented that:

“This is the position of the higher learning in America. The universities are dependent on the people. The people love money and think that education is a way of getting it. They think too that democracy means that every child should be permitted to acquire the educational insignia that will be helpful in making money. They do not believe in the cultivation of the intellect for its own sake.”

Much has happened since then to ensure that little has changed. The university system has held itself in a remarkable equipoise between professionalization and intellectualism. I am content with this — the struggle is a microcosm of what every person faces in life. To pretend like we can banish it from education is to expect heaven on Earth. An intensification of generative AI use on college campuses would destroy this equilibrium not by, as some might suppose, necessarily strengthening the preprofessional position, but by diminishing learning — whether that is being taught how to use zero-coupons to make synthetic loans or examining the presentation of chivalry in Chaucer.

If schools took a harder line on AI — limiting pedagogical integration and cracking down on cheating — it would not solve any of the problems that stem from the tension (between training a mind for the workforce and the good life) that every real university grapples with. But it would ensure that these problems do not suddenly become by fiat irrelevant as students’ minds crumble — and the schools with them.

It is true that one particular form of the university — the post-WWII research university — is dead, its death rattles readily apparent. It is too early to say, however, exactly what will wear its skin. Let us hope that it is not this preview of an undead university, cancer-ridden, crawling about without purpose, discipline, or originality. The Western intellectual tradition has survived several botched suicide attempts. I wonder if our descendants will look back at our current treatment of higher education as one more disfiguring try.