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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Individuals can convince themselves to do self-harmful things. The former owner of segway used it as a medium to launch himself off a cliff, the inventor of leaded gasoline used it as a medium to poison himself and then used his bed assist as a medium to strangle himself. Humanity building AI and using it to convert the world into paperclips (an act that benefits noone) isn’t significantly different: in a way the AI isn’t responsible, it did exactly what we programmed it to.

there are layers of UI elements, permission checks, and recovery options available for the things it can do.

There have been many cases where someone sees “Admin access required. Are you sure you want to do this?”, enters their credentials and clicks “yes”, the programmer didn’t mention the action was irreversible (maybe he didn’t realize himself), and they didn’t realize it would delete their important data. Is there a significant difference if a group builds AI and (perhaps unintentionally) gives it access to robotics, not realizing they just (indirectly) told it to destroy themselves?