Which AI Movie Are We in Now?
 September 15, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, This morning I sent my kid to school in a cardigan. You know what that means…  In today’s newsletter, we spotlight the women guiding us through a very noisy AI doomcycle. Plus, the EPA is doing anti-abortionists’ dirty work, and Nona Willis Aronowitz gets a whole lot of “no”s from Jezebel founder and author Anna Holmes. Moving into suéter weather, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONThree tech bros of the apocalypse: In the seminal 2006 film, “Mission: Impossible 3,” Simon Pegg’s character describes a computer program powerful enough to destroy the world; they call it an “anti-god.” Five movies later, the program is a reality and a real nightmare for Tom Cruise. Right now, we’re living in MI:3, and women in tech are trying to save us before we hit MI:8. Over the weekend, prominent men in AI have hit the airwaves to warn everyone that their creation has the potential to “kill all humans” by the end of this decade. Spurred by Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned to sound an alarm about AI’s existential threats, they called for a global slowdown of the technology. While these warnings are not entirely new, they are being treated as groundbreaking in part because they are coming from the very men working at the killing-humans factory. But some of the smartest and most balanced analyses of what’s happening right now are coming from women in tech, like computer scientist Timnit Gebru, who, in an interview with WIRED this week, pointed out one of the flaws in the current framing of “superintelligence,” which assumes that powerful AI forces will act of their own volition, independent of their human masters. “When a bridge collapses, you don’t analyse whether the bridge was ethical or sentient or why it decided to collapse,” Gebru pointed out. “You ask, who is the person who built this bridge to be so flimsy? There are permits you have to acquire. There are supposed to be tests. When you ask about the bridge collapsing itself, you’ve lost the thread.”  GEBRU SPEAKING ON A SXSW PANEL EARLIER THIS YEAR TITLED RECLAIMING OUR HUMANITY IN THE AGE OF AI. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Of course, the truth is that AI does move in unexpected ways (most famously in the Hugging Face incident this summer, in which an OpenAI model attacked another system without specific prompting). But in an extremely thorough breakdown of recent “rogue” activities, tech expert Abi Awomosu, author of the How Not to Use AI Substack, writes, “[AI agents] were given a goal and left alone…That isn’t going rogue. That’s being left unsupervised. The humans wanted the capability measured without the guardrails, so they removed the guardrails, and then stood back and marveled at what an unguarded thing does. You don’t get to call that the machine’s character. That’s your bad parenting.” To be fair, regular AI and superintelligence are not the same thing; the latter can cause an agent to end up far afield from its original task. Which is why the government absolutely does need to step in with regulations, especially on the development of superintelligence. But the people closest to the matter also have to regulate themselves, if only to preserve their own hide. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote an essay proposing a “pace the frontier” approach, which is all fine and well, but babe, y’all own the frontier—you can slow the pace right now if you wanted to. And you should want to, considering the whole human extinction thing. Should we be worried about the future of AI? Yes. And we should also be worried about the present of AI because, as the many, many headlines prove, our destruction is not a singular event a few years down the line. It’s happening right now in slow drips and drabs: “What about floods and fires? What about a major disruption to the global food supply chain? There are real threats coming to us, like people being able to create and use chemical weapons,” Gebru said in her WIRED interview. But part of the willingness to overlook those but snap to attention at the thought of an “anti-god” comes from privilege and a sense that “you can’t imagine other things harming you,” she says. “Like if you’re not worried about police brutality, or floods, or warfare – things that can actually kill you – then you can obsess over the machine-god.” So, if we are in the middle of the “Mission Impossible” franchise, we still have time to get regulations passed and frontiers paced before we reach the stage where Tom Cruise realizes that his poor decision-making has brought humanity to the brink of imminent death. The actual experts are telling us—shouting from the rooftops, in fact—that this particular mission is possible. AND:
 SIRI, PLAY ALL WE DO IS WIN. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 A Lightning Round on…the Word “No”Anna Holmes’ new book celebrates putting your foot down.BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE Do you have trouble saying “no”? Writer and Jezebel founder Anna Holmes gets it—but she’s not letting you off the hook. The Power of No: A Celebration is her new book, or “subtle manifesto” as she calls it, that makes the case for shaking your head and setting boundaries, even in a world that discourages it. Set up as a series of vignettes and quotes, The Power of No is so persuasive that, mid-reading, I finally sent a firm rejection to a dating-app match who had been annoying me for days. The relief was startling. Here are some nuggets from Holmes about that potent little word. On the OG masters of “no”: Kids really know how to say “no.” In some cases, they need to be encouraged not to say it because you can’t just say “no” to everything and you have to do things you don’t want to do. But I envy the freedom that young kids have to say “nope,” before they start to question the consequences at around nine or ten years old. They know the word before they even start talking; babies know how to push things away and reject them. On why knowing yourself helps you say “no”: We are socialized as women to be accommodating and not say “no,” and because of that, we don’t always know how to assert what it is we do want. The more I understand about what I want, the easier it is for me to know how to say “no.” I hope the book inspires people to take a beat and say, “Before I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to something, I have to ask myself what I really want as opposed to trying to fill up dead air or assuage my anxiety about how to respond.” On Gen Z, the “no” generation: Listen, if I had had access in my twenties to a bunch of women talking on TikTok about the red flags to look out for with guys, or how they were not going to have sex for a year, it might have felt really revolutionary. Perhaps the younger generation is too cautious, but maybe the flip side is that they’re more empowered to say “no.” Often when I see younger people on social media talking about things like relationships and sex and how they navigate the workplace, I’m like, “I fucking wish I knew that when I was 24.” Favorite form of “no”: Maya Angelou’s “We’re not going to have that opportunity today.” I like it because it’s polite, it’s firm, it can’t be argued with and she uses “we,” which implicates the question-asker and is very clever. Bravest personal “no”: My “no” to bad treatment from a boss from many years ago who was an underminer and a gaslighter. Ghosting: Yes or no? I am all for ghosting if it is directed towards someone who 1) won’t take “no” for an answer or won’t hear your “no” or 2) towards someone to whom saying “no” might create emotional and physical danger for the recipient. Oh also, I am for ghosting if the person doing the asking has treated you badly.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
