Three Terrible AI Manifestos & What They Mean for Us
Chatting w/AI philosopher Cristina DiGiacomo + "One of the Best Things I've Ever Read"
🎥 Above: Watch my entire discussion with Cristina DiGiacomo on the philosopher’s approach to human-AI coexistence.
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OUR SHARED HUMANITY HAS NEVER BEEN UNDER THREAT like it is right now. LLMs are generating (often misleading) content, being used as therapists and doctors, replacing teachers, starting to gut the entry-level job market, and so much more. AI is already hyper-present in our lives, and we seem to be at the beginning of the beginning.
The problem, of course, is that we have no idea where this is all going, and the people leading us into it are hellbent on forcing us into it anyway, consequences be damned. What’s worse is that the men (almost all white men, again) atop the tech oligarchy appear both unable and unwilling to engage with even the slightest skepticism.
I discussed this and more with Cristina DiGiacomo, philosopher and founder of 10P1 (consulting around ethical infrastructure & decision systems for AI leadership). Cristina’s goal is to promote a moral and ethical code for how people design, deploy, and live with AI. It’s a crucial space in a crucial moment.
I encourage you to watch the entire hour—it could have gone much longer, and I wish it had. If you are going to watch just one clip, make it this one:
It’s all about us. AI cannot destroy us. Humans will destroy ourselves with AI. As such, we can really improve prospects with AI, too. Every output you’ve ever seen from an LLM—every single one of them—is based on a corpus of human-built input. It all comes from us.
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Now, we are suddenly awash in manifestos from Big Tech. Predictably, every one of them is vacuous, and at least two of them are downright frightening.
So, go ahead and read what Anthropic, OpenAI, and Palantir purport to “think”—they are companies, not people—and apply your own critical thinking to them.
Cristina sums them up nicely on her Substack:
All three are written from inside the machine. All three define the problem technically and solve it technically. Safety is an alignment problem. Equity is an access problem. Power is a capability problem. The questions are engineering questions. The answers are engineering answers.
All three assume, without examination, that the people writing the manifesto are the right people to be writing it. There is no moment in any of these documents where the authors ask: what would it mean if we’re wrong? Not wrong about a detail. Wrong about the whole thing. Wrong about who should be deciding.
And none of them ask who they are accountable to. Not in the way that question demands to be answered. Accountable to users is a product answer. Accountable to democracy is a policy answer. Neither is a moral answer. The moral answer requires a framework none of these documents possesses.
Accountability begins with intellectual accountability. I know we are in the “LOL, nothing matters” era, but I simply refuse to accept that. I also refuse to accept the purposeless, because-we-can, nihilistic attitudes of the men leading the charge.
Silicon Valley super investor Marc Andreesen is the king of know-nothingness masking as intellectualism. His worldview is toxic on a good day, and it’s also so badly misinformed that I doubt he can help it.
Watch this clip where he says he does no introspection (if you can stomach nearly two hours of Silicon Valley grind mentality talk, watch the whole thing).
The specific quote:
If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s.
Roughly 2,400 years ago, Aristotle, a person we still talk about a lot, posited that self-reflection was the beginning of wisdom. For centuries, his musings on the topic have been debated, discussed, taught, and more… and here I am talking about them still. I have my doubts that anyone will be talking positively about anything Andreesen did in 50 years, let alone 2,400 (if we make it to either number). Imagine writing something called The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and unironically including an enemies list like this:
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
What Andreesen, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, et al, have done is “playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Like with everything else MAGA and MAGA-aligned, they’re projecting.
I’ve never seen a better case for self-reflection made by someone who refuses to acknowledge the existence of self-reflection.
On the topic of memorable for all the wrong reasons, Palantir, the company harvesting and collating your data for untold government spyware and surveillance projects, has adopted the world view of its CEO Alex Karp as its own. We should all be afraid.
As Cristina notes, the Palantir item is probably the most honest of the manifestos. That in and of itself is not good. Read it for yourself, but I’ll focus on this little racist nugget:
We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?”
In short, the “white genocide” crowd is selling incredibly powerful technology to the police. Make of that what you will, but understand that this is a technology made by people, deployed by people, built to harm people. Even if you can excuse the technology as “important” or otherwise worth having, the company selling it is openly supporting an ethos meant to sow fear, terror, and general authoritarianism.
All of this requires action, of course, but to get to action we need to understand the why and how of it all. To do so, the teachings of Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Descartes (to name just a few) are foundational works.
If you want this in a more practical, digestible version, watch TV writer extraordinaire Michael Schur (The Office, The Good Place) talk about ethics. And, watch The Good Place! It may be a goofy little comedy, but it’s also a fantastic intellectual work on the fundamental teachings of ethics and moral philosophy. [And, yes, fans of “The Office” will know I’m recommending we listen to the man who played Mose Schrute, Dwight’s strange, neck-bearded cousin.]
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32% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 68%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.
One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read #1
We’re starting a new tiny project with the goal of creating the the best reading list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one piece you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s Zach Peterson kicking things off with what he says is the thing to read if you are interested in the wonders of the animal kingdom. Enjoy—and submit your own selection below!
Title: “Do Elephants Have Souls?”
By: Caitrin Nicol Keiper, The New Atlantis (2013)
From Zach:
This is easily one of the best things I’ve ever read, and definitely the article I’ve shared the most with the most people, and it’s not close. It’s so moving, and so informative, and will affect how you look at animals across the spectrum, not just elephants. If you already hold elephants in high regard, this piece will show you that they are probably even more remarkable than you think they are. I just read it again after sharing it with someone, and it still gets to me. I remember the first time I read it, I started crying… and I was on public transit!
Zach Peterson, a writer and editor based in Prague, is a longtime Sree collaborator.
Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com
Yes, I recognize that shift you describe.
From asking what AI does, to asking what we choose to build through it.
In my own work, I keep coming back to the same unease.
We are scaling decisions faster than we are scaling responsibility.
I grew up in Sweden, close to the nuclear debate.
What struck me, even then, was how responsibility was built into the system.
The waste didn’t disappear. It stayed with you.
When I look at AI today, I feel that contrast.
The impact scales. But responsibility becomes harder to locate.
For me, that’s where the real question sits.
If humans are the engine behind AI, why aren’t human consequences part of the system itself?
I’ve been trying to think this through from an infrastructure lens, not just tools:
https://saraeson.substack.com/p/what-falldin-knew
Not whether AI is aligned.
But aligned to what, and accountable to whom.
Thank you Sree for this honorable summary of our incredible conversation. Grateful that you are sharing my work.