The aftermath of a Russian missile strike on October 12th, 2026 in Kyiv, Ukraine. | Photo by Andrew Kravchenko/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
Ukrainian officials claim the Elon Musk-owned Starlink put new limits on its service in the area without warning, disrupting the country's drone operations and missions, according to reports from Reuters and the Financial Times. The move comes just days after Musk wrote on X that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy "has gone too far," in response to President Donald Trump's disapproval of Ukraine targeting Russian oil refineries.
"It is clear that this action is not coincidental and is related to the current political situation," Ukrainian defense tech advisor Serhii Beskrestnov writes on Telegram.
Imagine a light bar on this 2017 Roadster concept image, and you’ll start to see it. | Image: Tesla
For a car that's supposed to be one of the fastest ever made, the new Tesla Roadster certainly took its sweet-ass time getting here.
It's been nearly a decade since Elon Musk made the surprise announcement about plans to build a next-gen Roadster. Now, the Tesla Roadster is finally expected to make its production-ready debut at an event in Waco, Texas - and the timing couldn't be worse.
The new Roadster is set to arrive in an EV market beset by high energy prices, political turmoil, and consumer uncertainty. The tax-credit-fueled exuberance of the post-covid years has since given way to slower sales and fewer options. Automakers are scalin …
In the 1987 Nintendo game “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” there is a village you can visit and a home you can enter and a man in a purple shirt you can speak with. But the only thing he says is “I am Error.” I was unexpectedly delighted by this dialogue when I first encountered it on a Gamecube emulator in 2009 (I’m not that old). It felt both meta and existential, or just an amusing bug. It turned out that Error was actually the character’s name, a sort of in-joke slash translation mistake that has since become a meme akin to “Your princess is in another castle” or “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this” from the original “Legend of Zelda.”
Error is a non-player character (NPC), meaning one that the player can’t control but is usually more than just video game wallpaper. Nearly 40 years later, NPCs have come a long way, with increasingly complex behaviors and conversational dialogue that span far more than just three words. The upcoming game “Grand Theft Auto VI” is rumored to feature unprecedented complex NPCs with rich, fleshed-out personalities and backstories, while video game companies explore using artificial intelligence to let players train NPCs as they interact.
In many ways, NPCs are how many people were first introduced to AI, although in a relatively simplistic form compared to the chatbots and massive data center hogs that we have come to either love or loathe, with little room in between. Years ago, NPCs became an insult spun out of 4Chan, the anonymous online forum, to describe real people who don’t think for themselves and follow a set of cultural programming, usually illustrated by an expressionless gray cartoon avatar. The meme became popularized by chronically online cohorts of Donald Trump supporters during his first presidential term, adjacent to the idea of “Trump derangement syndrome,” both implying that people oppose the MAGA movement out of reflexive mindlessness and not, you know, because they’d looked under the hood and seen it for what it is.
It might just sound like a new way to call someone an idiot, but the NPC label has much deeper, scarier implications. On the surface, it seems like harmless video game humor, and I’m sure we’ve all had encounters with actual humans that resembled interacting with tautological machines programmed with limited responses. “There is weather today. Did you hear about celebrity? Sports.” And certainly social media, now overrun by bots, increasingly feels as if every conversation is between different viruses. These realities don’t map to every experience yet following the NPC slander to its logical conclusion can be dangerous: declaring that a person’s alleged lack of inner thinking is justification for dismissing their humanity. After all, they’re just mindless characters in a video game (and maybe reality is just The Matrix, so whatever), so it’s fine to ignore them, disenfranchise them or abandon them to a grim fate.
Solipsism, the philosophical position that you can only experience your own consciousness, and therefore other people might not exist or have souls, is not a new idea. René Descartes believed animals were soulless, unthinking automatons, though modern neuroscience has repeatedly disproven that one. (On some level, “I am Error” echoes Descartes’ famous quip about thinking and therefore am-ing.) But now that complex AI has spilled from video games into the mainstream, it’s especially dangerous to see the NPC label has become embedded in mainstream politics, whether explicitly or not.
All this is rooted in Donald Trump’s recent campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” via executive order, posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” The idea has quickly been embraced by tech leaders, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying this week that AI is “no more” and promising to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”
Yeah, most of us are going to roll our eyes hard at AI being “super,” but if these attempts at normalization gain ground and get pushed to their absurd conclusion, it might end in providing AI more rights than humans. (It’s worth noting Musk invokes the NPC meme often.) It’s right there in the name: “Super intelligence” is better than the old, human kind, so why shouldn’t we give these computer programs rights and defend them from regulation? That’s why stories about AI bots being put into virtual torture chambers aren’t just silly, but foregrounds the false notion that AI is capable of suffering. (Maybe don’t put bots in rooms like that anyway — at the very least, it’s a waste of energy.)
After all, AI will either become the savior of humanity or make humans obsolete, depending on what day of the week it is. Sure, this technology is nifty, even as it comes with an enormous environmental destruction. But we are still a long way from elevating the technology above regular human intelligence. But as in a two-for-one, if you can be sold on the myth that AI is superhuman, it travels along with the idea that regular humans are disposable. In other words, the tech bros are trying to turn us all into NPCs, into Errors, not least through the mass surveillance programs being used to hunt migrants and spy on protesters.
Yes, thankfully, granting above-human rights to supposedly sentient AI sentience is still a fringe idea, but we can see that changing before our eyes, not to mention we already kind of did that with corporations. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told POLITICO that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” To further consolidate its power — or at least keep the economy from crashing — Silicon Valley wants us to believe their latest technological invention can think, reason and moralize. It’s no surprise that tech bros were recently exposed trying to convince none other than the pope that AI is conscious, but to his credit, Leo XIV has rejected this idea, saying “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity” and elsewhere warning against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”
Spending time with large language models like ChatGPT and knowing a little about how they work, it becomes clear that it’s just a really good computer program that can mirror human expression, sometimes terribly and sometimes surprisingly well. There remains zero hard evidence that AI algorithms are sentient.
Yet an increasing number of people are convinced otherwise, as seen in the controversial AI psychosis phenomenon, which makes me wonder how so many people have persuaded themselves a souped-up version of “I am Error” is a conscious being. It can feel like human interaction typing back and forth with these things, but there are always gaps where you can sense the uncanny valley, where you know it’s just a lot of math and nothing more. Perhaps, if you want to be really cynical about it, you could boil down all of human nature and biology and the emergence of consciousness into “a lot of math” as well. But our brains aren’t computers and physics has yet to fully explain consciousness — that’s why they call it a hard problem. Instead of stewing in this mystery, tech bros have gotten the metaphor backward, assigning personhood to bots while denying it to living humans. Talk about soulless.
If people don’t widely embrace artificial intelligence out of fear or a godlike savior complex, AI’s biggest champions will try something else: labeling critics “the enemy.” That’s precisely how President Donald Trump described people who don’t like his rebrand via executive order of AI to “super intelligence,” posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”
As noted by Axios, the White House still uses the term “AI” including on websites like ai.gov, though that website was updated Thursday with “SI.gov” in massive text. “The URL is still ‘AI.gov,’ though, with ‘SI.gov’ leading to an error page,” Axios reported, which Salon confirmed.
Tech billionaires are already embracing the term super intelligence. This week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said AI is “no more” and promised to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”
Peter Thiel, founder of the tech company Palantir that aggregates data used in federal mass surveillance and deportation programs, has gone as far to describe AI’s critics as “the Antichrist.” Apocalyptic eschatology has long been an interest of Thiel’s, who has made the Antichrist a central topic of secretive lectures he’s given behind closed doors. Thiel doesn’t seem to believe in an Antichrist like in the “Book of Revelation,” but rather as a force that imposes a one-world government and stifles technological development.
In leaked recordings obtained by Politico’s Decoded of Thiel’s speeches in Nashville in late September and published Thursday, the tech mogul claimed former President Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV only oppose AI to boost their popularity, which is apparently something they would need.
“Many people know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Thiel said. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI,” adding “AI is the threat über alles of late modernity. The pope knows it. That’s why he wrote his first encyclical … he needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI.”
Obama recently called for public oversight of AI while the pope’s first encyclical focuses on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”
For years, and especially in the last month or so, we’ve been collectively inundated with an AI industry which, uncannily and bizarrely, tells us simultaneously that AI is essential, inevitable and runs a significant chance of exterminating all of us in as few as two or three years. If you’ve dipped into this debate at all, you’ve quickly come upon discussions of so-called “rationalists” or “long-termists” or supporters of “effective altruism” who are simultaneously ubiquitous among those developing AI and in the AI safety (i.e., the folks sounding the alarm) community as well. (For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I’ll refer to these folks as the “REL nexus”: rationalists, effective altruists and long-termists. This is my coinage since I don’t know a better one.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with this world and how it relates to current debates about AI. So I wanted to share my basic impressions.
A Republican Gives a Thumbs Up to White House Effort to Seize Congress’ Power
Yesterday afternoon, TPM’s Emine Yücel got word that Senate Democrats would hold a vote on a bill that would block Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought’s latest bid to impound almost a billion dollars. Congress had appropriated the funds and President Trump had signed that appropriations bill into law, but the administration later deemed the funding too woke, finding that it helped immigrants, met its contorted definition of “DEI,” or was otherwise unacceptable.
Congress, of course, holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. If Congress writes an appropriations bill, and the president signs it, the funds must be spent in the way Congress laid out. But Vought has found ways to claim he does not, in fact, need to abide by that schema, and has used various maneuvers to not just slash funding to government offices and programs but end some entirely. This latest one is a so-called pocket rescission, exploiting a loophole Vought believes exists in the Impoundment Control Act. I won’t unpack it here, but Emine has reported on it extensively.
So, on Wednesday, Senate Democrats on the appropriations committee put forward a bill to block Vought’s pocket rescission, and all future ones. The vote was held under unanimous consent, meaning a single senator could block it. It seemed inevitable one would — the question was who, and why.
So, around 7 p.m., we got our answer: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected to the bill. He did not directly address the way in which Vought’s maneuvering has run roughshod over one of Congress’ most important duties: dictating federal spending. He shrugged that all government spending should be reduced, and then said the law around impoundments was vague. “It’ll probably have to be all sorted out by the Supreme Court,” he said.
Sen. Eric Schmitt Faces Fallout From His Jack Smith Debacle
Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican from Missouri, speaks as he questions former Special Counsel Jack Smith during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on September 29, 2026. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images)
New details about Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) fantastic flame-out during a congressional hearing with Jack Smith continue to emerge. The senator on Tuesday attempted to float a conspiracy theory about the former special counsel meeting with Fulton County DA Fani Willis at an Atlanta Hawks game. That theory immediately collapsed, but not before he accused Smith of perjury for not indulging it.
Schmitt was warned that the texts he based his allegation on were “unvetted” and that he should proceed with caution, MS NOW reported yesterday. Some Senate Judiciary staff believe the White House had urged Schmitt to undertake his stunt, the report said.
Schmitt in an interview with Politico was unapologetic, and seemingly confirmed that his misapprehension about whether Smith attended an Atlanta Hawks game or an Iowa Hawkeyes game had to do with completely overlooking the existence of women’s sports, a topic about which the GOP professes to care greatly. “Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt told Politico, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”
Schmitt’s staffer who held up a posterboard during his display was up for a new job at the White House, Politico reports. Now, he may not be.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just launched a 120-day study on the future of warfare, led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich, and while it makes sense given their ties to the administration, critics could point out that Musk's and Luckey's companies already sell the kinds of technology the study is likely to recommend.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump and top AI leaders announced a signed pledge called a “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” — a voluntary promise to implement more controls and safety measures as the rapid development of artificial intelligence continues. But there seems to be a catch.
Daniel Drezner says we are now in the Wile E. Coyote phase of the 2026 midterm, the phase of six weeks or so in which everyone knows the GOP is toast but we pretend we don’t. Some of this is simply the political press’s collective suspension of disbelief. It’s neither fair nor fun to act as though the outcome is mostly known. Nor is this new. G. Elliott Morris notes that election odds makers consistently overstate the odds of the president’s party in the midterms, which is sort of another way of saying the same thing since the president’s party is usually on the losing end of the proposition. I would argue that a significant amount of this remains the structural, though not necessarily ideological, bias in favor of the Republican party — two decades on, Washington, D.C. remains wired for the GOP. But what all of this really reminds me of is the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and what was then referred to as the “vibe shift” — both the hidden reality Donald Trump’s narrow but clear victory had purportedly revealed but also the shift in attitudes about cultural power and the future driven by that victory.
In elite circles the argument and belief went something like this. We thought that MAGA was a movement of reaction fueled by those left behind or discarded by the forward march of history and culture trying to wrench society back to an imagined 1950s. Not at all. In fact, it was the movement of the young and the most vital elements of the culture and the future. It was even expanding in the non-white constituencies which were supposed to be the anchors of the political left, the communities which were supposedly the targets and victims of MAGA, not its latest converts. Most of all, MAGA now had cultural sway to match its electoral power. And both were growing.
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