Odd Lots · Thursday, September 24, 2026
Taylor Lorenz argues that AI is not going to kill humanity, emphasizing the difficulty of eliminating all humans. She believes the real concern lies in anthropomorphizing AI, assigning agency to computer programs as if they were human. This, she contends, is problematic for policy debates, particularly regarding liability.
“Okay, so first of all, it's not going to kill us. It's just, like, it's actually so hard to kill all humans on Earth, like, even if we wanted to.”
“So we're probably going to be fine. I think like what I think is concerning or worth interrogating is the way that we anthropomorphize AI. And that's what I wrote about is the way that people assign agency to these products. And I think in some ways it's really great to do that because we have to describe, you know, You have to sort of describe how they work, but they're not humans. And we are talking about computer programs. And I do think that when we go to these policy debates about liability and stuff, it's really important to recognize that these are not like truly living beings.”