Tag Archives: Communications

The AI Doom Fever Finally Fades

Is the AI Doom Fever Breaking? (It’s About Time!) — Cal Newport, AI Reality Check, Deep Questions Podcast

For many years now executives leading the big AI companies have been telling the public that their own products will destroy the economy and gut the white-collar workforce. As Cal Newport observes this is the rough equivalent of a Pfizer executive announcing a new pill that cures psoriasis but also turns half the population into zombies. But lately the extremist rhetoric on AI has started to soften significantly. Instead of totally replacing entire segments of the workforce, these new AI systems will now simply augment existing workers and also lead to massive new opportunities for employment. That’s quite a radical shift in attitude, especially coming from people whose breathless messaging has been so bold. 

Nevertheless, tech companies are still laying off tens of thousands of employees and citing AI as the reason. So, we’ll see. Newport thinks the previous over-the-top positioning on AI resulted more from culture, whereas the recent shift in tone is likely more tactical. His analysis is comprehensive and seems pretty accurate given that he’s been pushing back on this rhetorical issue for years now. 

A Strange Sales Pitch

In his podcast, Newport runs through many of the recent doom statements. Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft AI has suggested that AI will be capable of automating most knowledge work within roughly a year. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has warned that the technology will soon replace up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in finance, consulting, and tech. Sam Altman of OpenAI speculated last summer about a future in which AI would “do everything,” leaving humans to find new ways to “participate” in the world.

“That’s basically what we’re getting from the AI CEOs,” Newport says. “And I think it’s just lunacy.” Newport has held this position for some time now. And it’s an opinion shared online by many advanced engineers who have been working with AI systems for a long time. However, there are many so-called social media influencers in the AI space who still push the end-of-the world theme. It’s been an odd experience for sure. Granted, software executives have a long history of bragging in their corporate earnings calls that their systems will enable customers to cut expensive employees. It’s hard to think, though, of another industry whose leaders so cheerfully predict that their products will wreck civilization while making their founders and a few insiders rich beyond their wildest dreams. Seems like a difficult sell, eh?

The New Vibe

In late April 2026, Altman posted on X that OpenAI wants to “build tools to augment and elevate people, not entities to replace them,” and added that “jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong.” A few days later, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back even harder. In a Fortune interview posted May 2, he called the half-of-jobs prediction “ridiculous” and warned that becoming a CEO can leave a person with what he described as “a God complex,” speaking as if their position alone gave them the authority to predict civilization-scale outcomes. Huang also estimated that AI has already created more than half a million jobs, because companies that adopt it grow faster and hire more, and noted that demand for software engineers is actually rising.

Newport reads Huang’s comments as a slightly concealed dig at Amodei, but perhaps it was a subtle signal to the industry that things will be shifting. Either way, the tone has clearly migrated from outright apocalypse to smooth augmentation. Who knows. But at least it’s a welcome change for those directly affected by the recent massive layoffs attributed to AI systems that haven’t even been fully built and deployed yet. 

Where the Doom Came From

To understand the old rhetoric, though, Newport argues that you have to look at the tech culture of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, especially among engineers, and especially content articulated in a few internet forums in recent decades. The most influential was LessWrong, founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky and devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Also, the blog Slate Star Codex, written by Scott Alexander, helped push the same themes into a wider readership. Out of this loose network grew the rationalist movement, which is the idea that if you trained yourself to think like a logical engineer, you could overcome cognitive bias and act more effectively in the world. Newport, who was trained in computer science at MIT, recognizes this culture. “I’m around engineers. I am an engineer. I know this way of thinking,” he says, adding that his wife once told him, “Don’t take me to the MIT Christmas parties because you guys are all so weird.”

Two important offshoots followed. One was effective altruism, which applies something called expected-value reasoning to charitable giving and was made famous — and then infamous — by Sam Bankman-Fried when he led FTX. The other was the existential risk community (X-risk), which argued that very rare disasters with very large costs deserve serious consideration right now. Newport summarizes the X-risk crowd as focusing especially on three threats: asteroid strikes, deadly pandemics, and superintelligent AI. Nick Bostrom’s 2002 paper Existential Risks is the foundational text, but the wider X-risk literature also covers nanotechnology, nuclear war, and what Bostrom calls “totalitarian lock-in.” Newport doesn’t mention Bill Joy’s shock article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” in WIRED in 2000 but it certainly fits the paradigm.

The X-risk crew organized a closed-door conference that produced the open letter signed by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and many of the leading AI researchers of the day. Newport places it in Puerto Rico in 2017, but the actual event was the Future of Life Institute’s “Future of AI: Opportunities and Challenges” conference in San Juan in January 2015. The 2017 follow-up was the Beneficial AI conference at Asilomar in California. Robert McMillan’s WIRED piece from January 2015, “AI Has Arrived, and That Really Worries the World’s Brightest Minds,” captured the elite anxiety that emerged from the Puerto Rico meeting and may be the article Newport has in mind when he describes the era. There were other similar pieces in the elite media during this time period as well. The elites aren’t shy with the media. 

ChatGPT and the Hero Complex

Then ChatGPT arrived. For people who had spent ten years writing footnoted lists about the coming superintelligence, it felt like the moment they had been preparing for. Newport thinks this was both terrifying and intoxicating. “What if we were right about this risk,” Newport imagines them thinking, “and not only were we right, but it’s happening?” The rationalists sensed they were going to be Neo. They were going to be John Connor. They were the ones who saw it coming and would now lead everyone else through it. It may be hard for normal people to think this way, but we are talking about the tech elite, after all. They do actually live in a different world, one that’s in many ways disconnected from the normal reality of people who have to work for a living. Newport stresses that it’s important to realize that the current AI companies we see now all grew from that culture. 

OpenAI, Newport says, originally presented itself as a nonprofit AI safety organization heavily shaped by X-risk concerns. It was started as almost a hobby project for the rationalist crowd before commercial ambitions reshaped what it is now. Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI staff who, according to Newport, felt their old employer was not being rigorous enough about safety. Grok came out of the same orbit. The CEOs, Newport says, were not playing 4D chess with investors. They were just talking the way everyone they knew talked in Silicon Valley. The trouble started when their companies got too big to keep speaking only to their own closed subculture. As Newport puts it, “we’re not, you know, in the Mission District anymore.”

Why It’s Breaking Now

Newport sees three potential forces that may be accelerating the recent change in AI positioning:

First, there is real IPO pressure building. As OpenAI and Anthropic move toward public markets, more sober East Coast investors (who wear suites, Newport says) are quietly asking the founders to stop terrifying the customers they hope will pay for AI products. 

Second, public opinion is turning. A Quinnipiac poll from March 2026 found that 55 percent of Americans now believe AI may do more harm than good in daily life, which is up from 44 percent a year earlier, with about seven in ten people expecting fewer job opportunities in the future.

And third, journalists are running out of patience. Ezra Klein’s May 2026 New York Times column “Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen” reports that the economists he interviewed are skeptical of mass joblessness. Also, a recent Ronan Farrow piece in The New Yorker even raises the question of whether Altman is actually a strong chief executive for a trillion-dollar company.

Newport says there may be additional pressures in the market pushing AI executives to temper their rhetoric in recent months, but his analysis on the three issues above seems pretty comprehensive as a working hypothesis. 

A Welcome Maturation

The Silicon Valley monoculture has finally collided with the rest of the country, Newport argues. Wall Street realism, journalistic scrutiny, and ordinary public sentiment are forcing the language to evolve to the realities of the market. Newport sounds almost relieved. Somebody, he suggests, finally had to tell these founders to “stop talking like you’re Sarah Connor from Terminator 2.” His understated parting advice still applies. Take AI seriously, but not everything you hear about it.

Using Actions to Communicate

Actions work. They resonate. They attract. They move. They generate other actions. And they do these things far more effectively than words.

People talk a lot about communications. But what most people mean by “communications” is just talking. We have to communicate more, right? Meetings, emails, chats, Zooms, reports, and decisions. More words, basically. But people rarely see the direct and reciprocal relationship between communications and actions. Instead, they simply deliver a single message from their brain to someone else’s using words flying through the air. Once they’ve done that, they’ve communicated. No iteration to press for understanding, no checking to see if messages resonate and lead to desired actions, no assertion of responsibility to clarify as often as necessary, no consent to mutually adjust expectations as things emerge. Just dump some words and run. That’s how most people communicate. Badly.

And that’s why communications comes up all the time. The inherent problems are never resolved because people don’t think through all the steps in the process. In fact, the delivery of words is only one very small part of communications. Also, if you rely only on words you need a lot of them to move people to actions. It’s simply not a very efficient way to communicate.

So, what’s a better way to communicate? Simple. Use actions. In fact, I can’t think of a better way to communicate anything than via action. Actions work. They resonate. They attract. They move. They generate other actions. And they do these things far more effectively than words. Some people who genuinely want to communicate well don’t realize this. They don’t know that actions themselves are communications, so they default to just trying to improve their verbal skills. Others shy away from using actions to communicate because actions are complex and more difficult to implement than just pushing words out into the air. Still others know full well that actions deliver clear messages so they intentionally don’t act so they can duck responsibility and hide behind the obfuscation of their words.

Now, words can be used to support and amplify actions and clarify intent, but the fastest way to see through the meaninglessness of words is to judge their corresponding actions. So, are there any corresponding actions? If so, are those actions consistent with the words? If not, dismiss the words entirely and judge the actions alone. You’ll likely get a vastly different message. But beware. Many people have this consistency bit worked out, and they bend their words to fit their actions after the fact to persuade you they were consistent when reality clearly says otherwise. That’s spin. You can spot that when your stomach turns inside out as someone talks to you. Trust your gut, not your head. In the end a person’s action is the only communication you need to understand. And it’s your most effective tool to deliver your own communications as well.

Try it. Work with it. Make it a skill.