Kelsey Piper
Journalist writing on AI, effective altruism and global development; contributing writer at The Argument, previously a senior writer at Vox's Future Perfect.
Kelsey Piper did not write this page.
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Their wordsI don't think if you let this runaway process of AI improvement spiral to its ultimate conclusion, you get a super-powerful, super-helpful assistant. I suspect you get something else entirely.
↗The Opening Argumenttheargumentmag.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Anthropicrecursive self-improvement
Their wordsif Anthropic is correct, if we now have AIs that are smart enough to considerably improve the process of training future AIs, and if things can be expected to speed up rather than slow down from here, then it seems very unlikely to me that this ends well.
↗The Opening Argumenttheargumentmag.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI do not ultimately expect that a world where humans are without economic value, where humans are not necessary to hold power or build things, is a world where humans retain significant individual rights.
↗The Opening Argumenttheargumentmag.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsAs machine learning models improve, it's likely that minors will be fully booted from the majority of the internet.
↗Jonathan Haidt is wrong about age-gating the internettheargumentmag.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI wish everyone giving this parenting advice were first required to actually try, for an hour, to configure a computer such that it gives a user the ability to meaningfully interact with the web without bombarding them with content selected to make them hooked and miserable. It can't be done.
↗Jonathan Haidt is wrong about age-gating the internettheargumentmag.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIf you could not make money off advertising to minors (say, because we imposed taxes on it like we do on tobacco), I suspect that would crush most of the slop-for-kids ecosystem.
↗Jonathan Haidt is wrong about age-gating the internettheargumentmag.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 7 weeks earlier
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Our reading
Refusing to engage with AI tools leads to being mistaken about their strengths and limitations.
Their wordsIf you are unwilling to check it out, you will be wrong about what its strengths and limitations are - and you'll miss that a growing share of the words you are reading are AI-generated.
↗The literary world is sleepwalking into an AI disastertheargumentmag.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsI don't like it any more than anyone else, but the age when you can run a literary magazine on trust is over.
↗The literary world is sleepwalking into an AI disastertheargumentmag.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 7 days earlier
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Their wordsIt's not just Prodigy, Oremus observed correctly; the entire premise of edtech companies like Gimkit or Blooket is making games with a minor educational element, with the ultimate result that "schools have embraced education software that has become hard to distinguish from Candy Crush."
↗Homework shouldn’t be all fun and gamestheargumentmag.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI think it would be a lot more effective to just give your kid an old-fashioned worksheet and then say "When you're done, you can play video games all evening." Then, they would pick whatever game they like most and probably both do more math and have more fun.
↗Homework shouldn’t be all fun and gamestheargumentmag.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsAnd this sort of setup can never, ever teach "sustained focus on something that looks hard at first glance," which is one of the most valuable muscles to help children exercise.
↗Homework shouldn’t be all fun and gamestheargumentmag.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsBut I actually think that the principled liberal position on crime and public order does not require a departure from the general Democratic ethos of being humane, compassionate, and concerned for the marginalized.
↗Our moral obligation to prevent crimetheargumentmag.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsBut while we have a plan for addressing crime - focused violence reduction programs, improved enforcement, more police on the street - and tools like fare gates to address vandalism, my prediction is that trust will take much longer to grow than homicides take to fall.
↗Our moral obligation to prevent crimetheargumentmag.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsA safe, clean environment should not be a privilege for the ultra-wealthy; it is the basic obligation of our society to provide it to everybody.
↗Our moral obligation to prevent crimetheargumentmag.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 7 days earlier
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Their wordsBy almost every metric, AI progress from 2024 to 2026 has been much faster than AI progress from 2022 to 2024.
↗AI's biggest critic has lost the plottheargumentmag.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
The cost of querying an AI model at a specific capability level has decreased significantly.
Their wordsAt the same time, the cost of querying a model at a given capability level has plummeted. GPT-4-level intelligence is about 1/1000th as expensive as it was when GPT-4 was released.
↗AI's biggest critic has lost the plottheargumentmag.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Their wordsMaking them more productive is a big deal, and in 2026, AI makes them more productive.
↗AI's biggest critic has lost the plottheargumentmag.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 8 weeks earlier
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Our reading
Technological progress is not a guarantee that any specific technology will be a force for good.
Their wordsTechnological progress has been an enormous force for good in the world, but that is no guarantee that any specific technology will be.
- 5 days earlier
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Our reading
The dispute between the DOD and Anthropic will likely be detrimental to national security concerns.
Their wordsThis escalated the contract dispute into a fiasco that, multiple experts in AI and public policy told me, will probably end up being quite bad for the very national security concerns that supposedly motivated it.
↗Anthropic is somehow both too dangerous to allow and essential to national securitytheargumentmag.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsYou couldn't use Claude to power a killer bot right now even if you wanted to; it would be a danger to our troops and fairly useless at our objectives.
↗Anthropic is somehow both too dangerous to allow and essential to national securitytheargumentmag.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsBut I think a much likelier consequence of this behavior by the government is for AI labs to be much more reluctant to engage with the government, much less inclined to build partnerships, and much more inclined to work in secrecy.
↗Anthropic is somehow both too dangerous to allow and essential to national securitytheargumentmag.com 3rd of 3 in this piece