Welcome to the Voyage
of the Damned
Feb. 14, 2026, 7:58 a.m. ET
Credit...Photo
Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Washington
When President Trump
vitiated scientific facts on Thursday, helping fossil fuel fat cats by
eliminating the government’s ability to regulate treacherous gases, a reporter
asked what he says to people worried about the very real hazards of a hotter
planet.
“I tell them don’t worry
about it,” he shot back.
The administration has
even coined a word to denigrate those who push back on Trump’s rash policies:
“panican,” as in one who panics.
In a world steeped in
violence and menace, we are constantly being told by the people in charge not
to worry.
Don’t worry about a sweltering Earth.
Don’t worry about all those powerful creeps getting away with abusing young
women exploited by Jeffrey Epstein; instead, just behold the beauty of the
rising Dow, as the abrasive, evasive Pam Bondi suggested at a congressional
hearing Wednesday.
Don’t worry about the
Trump family’s unethical get-rich-quick schemes. Don’t worry about an economy increasingly
catering to the well connected. Don’t worry about the president threatening to
unilaterally set the rules for state elections — Congress be damned.
The pueri aeterni of
Silicon Valley have greased the palm of our King Joffrey in the White House.
And now we are told not to worry about safeguards for A.I., the most
spine-tingling technology ever created.
I interviewed Elon
Musk in 2017, when he still cared about A.I. safety as much as he once cared about
going to the wildest party on Epstein’s island and now cares about constantly sharing deranged
posts about race on X. He told me that the fate of humanity depends on not
allowing the algorithms to be concealed and concentrated in the hands of tech
and government elites.
“It’s great when the
emperor is Marcus Aurelius,” Musk said then. “It’s not so great when the
emperor is Caligula.”
Let’s just say that our
man in the White House is no Marcus Aurelius.
When I reported in Silicon Valley back
then, the debate was whether A.I. would jump to the dark side once it got
smarter than us.
But since then, even the
tech gods who once had good intentions have gone to the dark side, seduced by
the billions to be made on A.I., including on erotica. These geniuses who were
supposed to escort us into a better, safer future turned out to be the biggest
sellouts of all time.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s
chief executive, has welcomed erotica, or “adult mode,” as it’s called, saying
he wants to “treat adult users like adults.”
Once Musk put up an
A.I.-generated picture of himself in a bikini to demonstrate his A.I. model’s
new feature, people used it to manipulate pictures of women online, stripping off
their clothes.
The tech bros are
thrilled with their ability to buy influence in Trump world. (Yes, Jeff Bezos,
I’m talking about “Melania.”)
As Wired reported, the
president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, was one of Trump’s biggest individual
donors in 2025, to the tune of $25 million. Another $25 million is on the way
to a PAC that fights politicians who favor regulating A.I. OpenAI’s original
mission was to protect humanity, but where’s the money in that?
The tech universe
shuddered this week at alarms from several Paul Reveres.
An urgent post on X titled “Something Big Is Happening,” by
Matt Shumer, the C.E.O. of two small tech companies, went viral. He warned that
A.I. is leaping ahead faster than we think.
“The future is being
shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a
handful of companies … Open AI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind,” he wrote, adding:
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job … I tell the A.I.
what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find
the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself.” Now,
he wrote, OpenAI’s newest model is showing judgment, and it knows how to make
the right call on its own.
On Monday, an Anthropic
A.I. safety researcher, Mrinank Sharma, quit his job, posting an apocalyptic warning on X that the “world is in
peril” from A.I., bioweapons and cascading crises.
Anthropic’s C.E.O.,
Dario Amodei, has been the most responsible tech executive in acknowledging the
awesome, hair-curling power of A.I., saying it will “test who we are as a
species” and reveal whether humanity has the maturity to handle this “almost
unimaginable power.” (The Wall Street Journal reported Friday
that the company’s A.I. tool, Claude, had helped the American military capture
Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.)
Sharma is not sure if humanity has the
maturity to handle A.I. “I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our
values govern our actions,” he wrote.
He said he will
disappear to England and pursue a poetry degree, signing off with a William
Stafford poem containing a line that augured A.I. dominance: “Nothing you do
can stop time’s unfolding.”
Zoë Hitzig, a researcher
at OpenAI, also quit on Monday. In a guest essay for The New York Times, she said she
had lost faith that OpenAI still wanted to back her work on the two outcomes
she fears most: “a technology that manipulates the people who use it at no cost
and one that exclusively benefits the few who can afford to use it.”
Another OpenAI
executive, Ryan Beiermeister, lost her job in the safety division after
complaining about ChatGPT’s rollout of A.I. erotica, The Journal disclosed.
Beiermeister, The
Journal said, did not think the company had enough guardrails in place to stop
child-exploitation content and wall off adult content from teens.
OpenAI claimed Beiermeister’s
departure was due to sexual discrimination against a male colleague. She
adamantly denied that to The Journal.
Despite the smarmy
reassurances of the tech lords, some A.I. insiders are alarmed by what they’re
seeing.
The people in charge tell us not to
worry. But we should worry. It’s getting scary out there. There’s nothing
artificial about that.
