Lee is a public interest technologist and researcher in the Boston area, and public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, recently started investigating claims that its artificial intelligence platform is getting lazier. Such shortcomings are a far cry from the firing and rehiring saga of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, last month. Pundits speculated that Altman’s initial ousting was due to a project called Q*, which – unlike ChatGPT – was able to solve grade-school arithmetic. Q* was seen as a step towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) and therefore a possible existential threat to humanity. I disagree.
As a technologist who has published research employing Q-learning and worked under one of its pioneers, I was dumbfounded to scroll through dozens of these outrageous takes. Q-learning, a decades-old algorithm belonging to a branch of AI known as “ reinforcement learning (RL),” is not new and is certainly not going to lead to the total destruction of humankind. Saying so is disingenuous and dangerous. The ability for Q* to solve elementary school equations says more about ChatGPT’s inability to do so than its supposedly fearsome capabilities – which are on par with a calculator. Like the proverbial monster under the bed, humanity’s real threat is not AI – it’s the fearmongering around it.
The supposed existential threat of AI is rooted in the assumption that AI systems will become conscious and superintelligent – i.e., that AI will become AGI. A fringe theory then claims a conscious, superintelligent AGI could, either through malevolence or by accident, kill us all. Proponents of this extreme view, who use an extreme extension of utilitarianism known as longtermism, claim our ultimate imperative is thus to prevent “ extinction threats ” like AGI in order to prevent the total annihilation of humanity. If this sounds like a stretch of the imagination, it is.
This AI doomerism, espoused by people like OpenAI’s now former interim CEO, Emmett Shear, assumes that AGI is even a likely scenario. But as someone who has conducted research on cognition for over a decade, I’m not worried AI will become sentient. And AI experts, including one of the pioneers, agree. A chasm remains that cannot be bridged between human-like performance and human-like understanding. Even if an AI system appears to produce human-like behavior, copying is not comprehension – a speaking parrot is still a parrot. Further, there are still many tasks requiring abstraction where even state-of-the-art AI models fall well short of human performance, and many aspects of human cognition that remain ineffable, like consciousness.
Heeding false alarms over killer AGI has real-world, present-day consequences. It shifts otherwise valuable research priorities, avoids accountability for present harms, and distracts legislators from pushing for real solutions. Billions of dollars, university departments and whole companies have now pivoted to “AI safety.” By focusing on hypothetical threats, we forgo real threats like climate change, ironically likely sped up by the massive amounts of water used by servers running AI models. We ignore the ways marginalized communities are currently harmed by AI systems like automated hiring and predictive policing. We forget about ways to address these harms, like passing legislation to regulate tech companies and AI. And we entrench the power of the tech industry by focusing on its chosen solution and excusing it from culpability for these harms.
When it comes to the mysterious Q*, I’m sure the addition of Q-learning will improve ChatGPT’s performance. After all, an ongoing line of research, thankfully less over-hyped, already exists to use RL to improve large language models like ChatGPT, called reinforcement learning with human feedback. And a decade ago, RL already helped train AI systems to play Atari and beat the world champion of Go. These accomplishments were impressive, but are engineering feats. At the end of the day, it’s precisely the current impacts of human-engineered systems that we need to worry about. The threats are not in the future, they’re in the now.
In “The Wizard of Oz,” the protagonists are awed by the powerful Oz, an intimidating mystical figure that towers over them physically and metaphorically throughout their journey. Much later, the ruse is revealed: The much-feared wizard was simply a small, old man operating a set of cranks and levers.
Don’t let the doomers distract you. Q-learning, as with the rest of AI, is not a fearful, mystical being – it’s just an equation set in code, written by humans. Tech CEOs would like you to buy into their faulty math and not the real implications of their current AI products. But their logic doesn’t add up. Instead, we urgently need to tackle real problems by regulating the tech industry, protecting people from AI technologies like facial recognition and providing meaningful redress from AI harms. That is what we really owe the future.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.