All posts tagged: hatred

The Hatred That Broke American Politics

The Hatred That Broke American Politics

“If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.” Nine years ago, that message spread across the internet. The call was answered by several hundred white supremacists, who marched through the University of Virginia. The rage-filled men carried torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They swarmed around the historic rotunda, arriving at a statue of the school’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. There they met a tiny band of student counterprotesters who responded with their own chant: “Black lives matter.” That evening turned violent, the first act in a deadly weekend. Most Americans remember the torches, the rage, the death. But those clashing chants also revealed a gap between the targets of hatred and the words available to name it. Race is the wound America sees. Anti-Semitism is the one it doesn’t. Jews have frequently been imagined as a colorless minority whose great persecution took place elsewhere, or as a group whose Christian-adjacent faith flourished with the religious freedom they found in …

AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology

AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A bulk of Americans really hate AI — and many AI CEOs can’t quite grasp why. There’s a serious mismatch between public sentiment and corporate excitement over AI. Companies continue to AI-wash layoffs and jam the tech into every corner of their products, yet research keeps finding that Americans are opposed to rampant AI expansion: according to one recent Economist/YouGov poll, a staggering 70 percent of Americans think that AI is “moving too fast,” and about 64 percent believe it’s unlikely that the general population will ever reap future economic benefits of the tech. Yet no one seems to be more confused than the makers of the tech themselves. Back in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang lamented on a podcast that the AI backlash has been “extremely hurtful,” blaming pushback on “doomers” pushing a negative “narrative” of AI. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman observed in an X post last fall that there are “so many cynics,” and that it “cracks …