High Point: The intelligence is artificial
Paul E. AnnaFollow
We are still just over halfway through 2026, so it is too soon to tell how this year will be remembered by history
So far, there has been the start of the U.S. war with Iran, fires are burning in the countryside around the world and the coming midterm elections promise their own negative headlines. On the brighter side, we did have an epic FIFA World Cup, and Taylor and Travis’s royal wedding, if you can call it that, took place in Madison Square Garden. And the feel-good story of the year so far has to be the crew of Artemis II’s return to space. In the “depends on how you look at it” category, there was the Semi-quincentennial, or the 250th anniversary of the United States. Felt a little tepid to me.
But at this point, a leading candidate for this year’s most significant news story may well be the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, or AI as it is colloquially known, into the fabric of our lives. It seems that everything I look at on my phone, read about in the paper or watch on the telly has in some ways been influenced, not necessarily for the better, by AI
The stock market went ga-ga in the first six months of the year over anything with the letters “a” and “i” in it. But this month, that infatuation seems to have lost a little luster as investors rethink their all-in approach. We’ll see if the year ends with a burst of the bubble. Across the country, small towns initially welcomed plans for AI data centers. But they, too, have begun to take a different approach now that the implications of what these projects will bring to their communities are becoming clearer. And a big story this past week was a predatory attack a rogue AI made on a competing platform. Can they control these things?
As consumers and users of AI, we have gone from Siri and Alexa to Claude and Gemini as search engines have taken on more human personas. And the experience has gotten worse instead of better, as they often provide inaccurate information and send us to sponsored-supported ad content and Reddit posts as
For me, the capper came earlier this month when META, the technology company that began as Facebook, released a new ad campaign for their AI platforms. The minute-long ad starts with black-and-white visuals of a blinking eye and shots of people in motion. “Some people will have you believe that AI will make us less connected. That it will leave us behind,” a voiceover begins. “We couldn’t disagree more.”
At about this time in the spot, a faint but familiar drumbeat begins to play. If you are a fan of David Bowie and his 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust,” you may have instantly recognized the opening of the song “Five Years” coming on
As the commercial progressed, the fast-cut images changed from black and white to color shots of people in loving situations, parents and kids hugging, that sort of thing. The voiceover began to talk of connection and optimism, and the music track started to wind into the song
“Five Years” is a pretty bleak song. It’s about an announcement that civilization has just five years left on the clock. In the opening stanza, Bowie sings: News had just come over. We had five years left to cry in. News guy wept and told us Earth was really dying. But the way the song was cut in the commercial, that meaning was eliminated, scrubbed out and sanitized so it seemed to be a rallying cry for the future of both mankind and, of course, META’s AI platforms
The thing is, this was a promotional commercial produced by people, not AI. And the people who made it twisted artistic intent into a crafty but inaccurate way to manipulate viewers into thinking that AI is about connection and curing disease when it really is about money
Time will tell what role AI will have in history. But this year it may be the most important story of our time
Let’s hope it’s a good one
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