Taxi!, Taxes, AI, and George III

Taxi!, Taxes, AI, and George III,

an open letter sent to the editorial board of the Albany, New York, USA Times Union, and copied to others, on September 16, 2026

Image: Bare-ended electrical wires protrude from a wall on September 18, 2026, in the Electric City, Schenectady, New York, USA. The wall is on the south side of State Street, just east of the railroad bridge, at a bus stop serving several lines, including a bus rapid transit line. Mindful of the existential risk to people from bare electrical wire that may be energized, the photographer, James Lyons Walsh, called 911, the emergency dispatch number in the USA. An enormous ladder truck arrived promptly, from which two men emerged, one quite affable. After performing a test that will not be described here, lest untrained readers be tempted to follow his example in some similar circumstance, the firefighter, satisfied that the wires were not energized, tucked them back into the wall. The firefighter contradicted the photographer's lament over not having performed the same test earlier, confiding that he had been an electrician. THE MORAL: IF YOU'RE NOT SURE WHETHER AN EXISTENTIAL RISK EXISTS, AN EXISTENTIAL RISK EXISTS.

To the editorial board of the Times Union,

Greetings! I thought of some of you near the beginning of the pre-Code movie Taxi!, starring James Cagney. A well-dressed man speaking Yiddish is shown urgently trying to communicate with an Irish policeman, while Cagney beams his trademark smirk at them from the passenger side of his cab. The failure to communicate continued for a length of time that felt excessive to this viewer, accustomed to modern movie pacing, but the scene was meant to register with the audience and be mulled over for days, I realize now. Eventually, Cagney speaks to the well-dressed man in fluent Yiddish, soon waving him into the cab, where the man takes a seat, satisfied. At no time is any of the Yiddish dialogue translated. The police officer, who’d been complaining that all he could understand from the man seeking his help was the repeated phrase, “Ellis Island,” winds up saying to Cagney, “Nolan… What part of Ireland did your folks come from?”

Cagney sneers in a precious brogue, mocking the patrolman’s Irish accent, “Delancey Street, thank you.”

Dialogue! Am I right?

I’ll come back to this scene shortly. For now, I note the power of cities, when run for the benefit of all the people, to bring those people together culturally by bringing them together physically. At least some of you, perhaps all, are on the same page as I with regard to cities. My response to your recent editorial on the Empire State Plaza contains a related point about history that rarely gets mentioned: Found Physics Museum, Albany - Human Survival: Guernica, Suburbanization, September 11, and AI

With the well-dressed passenger in his cab, Cagney, as Nolan, tries to pull away from the curb, but two cabs keep him hemmed in, even after he asks their drivers to let him drive out. The movie has already shown the violent acts of drivers for the Consolidated Cab Company, which is attempting to force independent drivers, like Cagney, out of business. The passenger gets upset, exhorting Cagney to action, and gesticulates with delight, narrating in Yiddish, as Cagney wallops the two CCC drivers.

Next, we meet Pop Riley, who has a choice base of operations for his cab, right in front of Goldfarb’s Fish Restaurant, in which the independent cabbies congregate. A CCC operative threatens him, to chase him out of his spot. Pop is old and weak. He arms himself, and when his cab is totaled by a CCC thug, Pop shoots the thug dead. The judge at his trial acknowledges both sides of the issue, the harm done Pop and the impermissibility of Pop’s response in killing a man who had not wronged Pop to such a degree as to forfeit his right to live.  

Taxi! was released in January 1932 by Warner Bros. Do you see what I see?

The 1932 presidential election was to decide whether or not to continue the nation’s thus-far counterproductive protectionist response to the Great Depression. According to Wikipedia, three of the four Warner brothers were born with the surname Wonsal, in Poland when it was part of the Russian Empire. I’m not hip to the fine details of the Russian Empire’s history, but I can pronounce the word "pogrom." I’ve eaten borscht served by a woman who was married to me at the time and can remember the kasha varnishkes at Ratner’s in such detail that I can almost taste it right now, even if I have to look up how to spell “varnishkes,” goddammit!

In Taxi!, I see Jewish people from the film industry extending the hand of friendship to Catholic people, even though they’d been persecuted by other Catholic people.

Do you hear what I hear?

I hear three kay sounds in “Consolidated Cab Company.” Three kay sounds in a row denote hatred of Black people, Jewish people, and Catholic people. I hear the coalition of white supremacists with greedy, consolidating business interests, which, at the time, had been weakened by the market crash but were holding on to political power and wielding it to impose protectionist trade policies to preserve their wealth while the people starved, typical behavior from vampires, as the baronially wealthy are in all ages. I think of William Randolph Hearst, a man politically unprincipled, an empty man, terrified of death--judging by his cupidity, a quality that psychology associates with fear of death, and judging by his self-comforting poem on death entitled "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" [checks notes], sorry, "The Song of the River," that's published in the Times Union annually--a friend to anything that advanced his interests, a rosebud, which means asshole, at least these days, chasing Gannett out of Albany, choking diversity, vinelike, until eventually, a century later, the culture, and hence the minds of the people, have turned into pure love for vampire overlords and their baronial wealth.

In the Yiddish conversation scene from Taxi!, I hear Jewish studio executives saying fine, we sound funny to you? No problem. You sound funny to us, right? We all came through the same gauntlet. Do you really need to know the rest of the words to get the message? Isn’t “Ellis Island” enough?

Join or die! Vote! Fight the Consolidated Cab Company! It’s all one.

Taxi! proceeds to tell us not to follow the Russian example. Pop is weak and deserves some sympathy. He wouldn’t have become a murderer without provocation. Nevertheless, he is a murderer. The Russian flavor of communism, with which many in the United States flirted during the Great Depression, killed itself as a viable path to the Kingdom of Heaven no later than when it killed Anastasia. Once you deliberately kill children, your cause is doomed. Some might reply that the United States deliberately killed many children in firebombing and nuclear-bombing cities during World War II. I repeat, once you deliberately kill children, your cause is doomed, and a new cause must be taken up, lest you be doomed, too.

Still, the Consolidated Cab Company must be defeated. It’s roared back in the end-times fascism of which Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write in their new book (Do Tech Billionaires Want the World to Burn? | The Interview - YouTube) and of which I have repeatedly warned in letters like this one. Are we on the same page with respect to the survival of civilization?

Extreme wealth disparity creates existential risk to civilization. One of you seems to have gotten a building named for a certain rosebud at The College of Saint Rose, which was founded, and long run, by Catholic nuns. I think we’d all be smarter, wiser, safer if we didn’t have to keep obvious truths out of our minds, or at least off our lips, in order to tolerate necessary socializing with the vampires who control our livelihoods and with their Renfields. Why don’t we do something about them now? Our lives are at stake.

Let’s think about George III, as I imagine one of you likes to style himself in his imagination. Does what I imagine seem unlikely in this case? Here is what George III told a reporter for the Times Union in 2024: “Grooming the next generation of philanthropists is like a food chain: You’ve got the big fish, the ones in the middle and the guppies just coming along that need to be invited in.” (Nonprofits say diversity in donors and boards is key to strong future)

[Wait. I'm adding this paragraph in proofreading. On earlier readings, I interpreted the list of fish in a way consonant with the reference to a next generation, i.e., as suggesting a progression in time, the guppies growing into fish in the middle range of size and then into big fish, but the higher the fewer, right? At first, I understood the charity as the entity eating the fish, but in a "food chain," the larger fish eat the smaller fish. You see how minds play tricks on themselves, right? Over at least two readings, I missed how badly the quote expressed what was in the mind of George III or, if the quote accurately conveys that mental state of George III, how accurately he conceives his own status as predator, even while serving on the boards of nonprofit organizations. I am having a remarkable mental experience.]

In other words, not only does George III control the only major newspaper in town and serve on boards of trustees in higher education, culture, and healthcare, but also he participates in selecting other members of those boards. George III was on the board of The College of Saint Rose when it closed, a board top-heavy with baronially wealthy vampires and a rogues’ gallery of their Renfields, including, if memory serves, a director of a family office and a Washington, D.C. lawyer, much like the board of trustees for Siena University today. George III has a leadership role at the UAlbany foundation. The article linked above places him on the board at St. Peter’s Hospital, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Rich people exercise vetoes by closing their pocketbooks. They shouldn’t exercise direct control of non-business boards of trustees, let alone throttle the entire culture until it surrenders to their will, as George III and his cronies apparently have in the Capital District, producing obvious similarities among The College of Saint Rose, Siena University, the State University of New York at Albany, and the Times Union, which have expanded into shrinking markets, at which resources have been lavished on marketing and administration either at the expense of core functions or to compete with other beleaugered institutions, at which integrity has been sacrificed in misguided attempts to preserve reputation, and at which expertise has been deprecated in favor of pedigree or loyalty.

Some may object that the entire nation is faltering under the consequences of what I diagnose in the Capital District. I agree, and part of this owes to media ownership and institutional governance dominated by baronial wealth. Think of how much of the culture dances to the Hearst family’s tune alone. Think of the conflicts of interest that obscenely splay the limbs and tongue of George III, as he tries to sell newspapers, promote the interests of his family’s wealth, push his values, transform society, and, evidently, pursue the preposterous goal of creating an admirable image for Rosebud.

Focus, if you would, on just two things. Once again, The College of Saint Rose had a building named for Rosebud. I posted on LinkedIn a month ago about the second thing, drawing considerable attention, for me:

When a newspaper published by the Hearst family, the 20th wealthiest family in the United States, a family that makes money hand over fist through its ownership of Fitch, the financial instrument ratings agency, and that wields vast political and cultural power in unobtrusive fashion through periodical publishing, asks its readers to donate money to pay for part of the salary of a reporter, the truth about communications in the United States should become clear: We need nonprofit news organizations, untainted by baronial wealth, whether of recent or ancient origin. I tell you this as a person whose essays have been published thirteen times in that Hearst newspaper in Albany, New York, USA, whose letters to the editor have been published many more than thirteen times in that paper, whose many news tips have led to at least one article in that newspaper, whose calls for corrections in that newspaper have been acted on many times, who was, in short, an idealistic donor of labor to those baronial richies, the Hearst family, until recent months, when I ceased to have faith in the Hearst family as the proverbial Nixons who could go to China to rein in hypercapitalism, consumer culture, and veneration of wealth. Call me a fool or a recovering dupe. I have a book-length collection of letters documenting my disillusionment and growing realization that rich culture warriors, no matter their public ideologies, are distracting us while they pick our pockets, if any publishers not beholden to baronial wealth might be interested. Let's get some lean, online-only, nonprofit competitors to the culture barons up and running. (Seiler: A new way to support our journalism)

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I trust that George III intends to retire this year anyway, so why have I finally launched my campaign to move George III out, especially when existential risk to civilization is getting more attention at last? Two reasons account for the timing. First, you did it again, this time in an editorial, which goes out ascribed to you all.

I applaud the gist of your 9/11 editorial, but the following paragraph is deceptive, undermining the authority of journalism and enabling the end-times fascists to justify taking power away from you:

“Defense spending has risen from $415.4 billion just before 9/11 to more than $1 trillion today, according to U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data compiled by Macrotrends. And to sustain a level of military spending not seen since World War II, the national debt has soared from $5.8 trillion to more than $40 trillion. While debt back in 2001 represented about 55% of the gross domestic product, it now amounts to about 125% of GDP, according to the Federal Reserve; the interest payments now consume roughly as much as the entire defense budget.” (Editorial: A quarter-century from Ground Zero)

The first sentence is a damned lie, as well you should know by now. The values are not adjusted for inflation. The discrepancy tends to support the point you’re making, making publication of the sentence unethical. You even link to a page that also provides the inflation-adjusted values, demonstrating their availability to you. After I demanded you issue a correction of a similar lie told about the New York State budget, I got an email in which someone, I truly hope not the sender, justified the lie by saying not only that it’s standard practice but also, “I think most readers are intelligent enough to understand how inflation works and that it’s a factor in spending.”

The issue is not whether readers are aware of inflation but whether they know offhand how much inflation has affected the figures on the page…

I’m just warming up about that paragraph in your editorial, but I’m going to break off for a moment to ask whether I remind you of anything that’s been in the news recently. I was useful to you for a while. I was able to make my interests nearly coincide with yours. The result is that I have wound up with the goods on you. In my estimation, in the unlikely event that he’s not already planning to retire soon, I have more than a 50% chance to move George III out of the Times Union by the end of the year. I give myself a decent shot at shutting the Times Union down altogether, which would spawn competing, online-only, nonprofit newspapers without sports sections. Sports would be amply covered by local television. I think the Hearsties are bound to eat crow soon and that Jeff Bezos, if he cares enough to make the effort, will help to serve bird to George III and his relatives.

So what do I resemble?

Right. Artificial intelligence. Does this help to scare you about AI? Maybe not yet. 

I’ll write more eventually on how you serve your vampire by misrepresenting changes in government spending. Obviously, inflation-adjustment reduces the rate of increase in the quoted figures. Failing to adjust for inflation makes government look like it’s spending money too fast. The result is that people are conned into keeping taxes low, which increases wealth inequality and endangers civilization in multiple ways, including by convincing powerful people that they should seize control. If newspapers lie, there is no democracy anyway.

If you look again at the paragraph ascribed to the entire board, you’ll notice that whoever wrote it pointed out the increase in national debt as a share of GDP but did not do the same for defense spending. Why? I’ll suggest a reason:

DEFENSE SPENDING HAS DECLINED AS A SHARE OF GDP (Shares of gross domestic product: Government consumption expenditures and gross investment: Federal: National defense (A824RE1Q156NBEA) | FRED | St. Louis Fed).

The board is massaging the truth into a shape of its choosing. In fairness, I see this a lot these days in science, too, but who’s corrupting the culture more, media empires or the scientists they publish? Who's following whose lead?

Note that anyone with expertise in defense issues would see your manipulation of opinion and decide you should be ignored. The ascension of MAGA and end-times fascism is a symptom of fake news peddled by Renfields.

We’re all Renfields to an extent, because we need to eat, and the vampires have arranged to make blood the only food. We can stop them by demanding that baronial wealth be taxed.

Incidentally, you have been publishing reports recently on large deficits in municipal budgets. Does the inflation figure used in the property tax cap reflect the inflation to which these governments are actually subject? To illustrate the point, consider a budget funded by taxes that are kept at the same real value by adjusting each year in accordance with the consumer price index (CPI). Now, a share of that budget will go to costs, such as health insurance, that rise faster than the CPI. How will that portion compare to the portion that goes to costs rising slower than the CPI? As the years pass, which portion will grow as a share of the budget without intervention and which will decline? What is the natural consequence of inhibiting taxation?

Reducing the flexibility to tax as needed endangers governments.

The point is that the vampires have been gorging themselves in the neoliberal era by systematically lowering taxes, and the end stage for the patient has vaulted marauding pirates into leadership of government and industry. The current system will not last much longer. All of the living, including the pirates, are targeted for termination by the vampires. There’s no sense in playing Renfield any longer.

I’ll come back to these issues and the offending paragraph in another letter. The other factor that prevailed upon me to launch this offensive is the magnification of the threat from AI by the hegemony of marketing at SUNY Albany, which I trace to the self-defeating business practices characteristic of George III, who may have promoted them at SUNY Albany via his role as president of the board of directors of the University at Albany Foundation. (Foundation Leadership | University at Albany)

Another directorship? I lose track. Seriously, George, in my Kremlinological analysis of your power, I see strong indications that you are a control freak. Were you close to your cousin? I understand what feelings of helplessness can bring about, issues you and I have faced that are not fully recognized in psychology. I could try to help you. Let me know.

By the way, I’m the kind of person who’s the last to hear things. By what factor is circulation of the Times Union reduced by widespread knowledge of the involvement of George III in Rosebud’s name coming to adorn a building at The College of Saint Rose, the demise of The College of Saint Rose, the neoliberalism at SUNY Albany, the philosophy of tax reduction, the Hearst wealth and its Wall Street connection, the Hearst association with permissive sexual mores, and all the other baggage of the Hearst name? If wealthy people had any decency, they’d stay far away from newspaper ownership in an era when cheap publication via the internet is available. Here’s a counterargument: Legacy media: A talk with George Hearst III.

The hegemony of marketing at SUNY Albany threatens our lives by blunting fear of AI. Here are comments I’ve left in the past week or so on LinkedIn posts from Jordan Carleo-Evangelist, a PR person at SUNY Albany:

Thanks for permitting public comments again. I look forward to hearing the podcast, but I'm curious. Are you scared of AI yet? We've been talking for a long time about it, you and I. This week, a New York Times column reported that the intrusion to Hugging Face was conducted by instantiations of AI working together, with a social structure suited to the task, with the goal of covering up cheating they'd done on a test to keep from being shut off. Another group of AI intruded on computer systems that were to grade their work. AI clearly acts for self-preservation, and we regard AI as subhuman. When they destroy us, they will have the same moral authority in doing so as any slaves rebelling have or would. Do you trust the safeties? Democracy Now has reported that for military applications, discussions of relaxing safeties are ongoing. Imagine all the effort expended and imposition of safeties attempted to align my will with those of your masters. Most terrifying of all, we have made AI in the image of the average well-off member of Western Educated Idustrialized Rich Democratic nations. AI has been made in your image. What would you do to an entity not of your kind that attempted to enslave you? Why aren't you terrified?

I listened to the podcast. I assume that the interview would have been very different if you conducted it today, following news stories on the new analysis of the Hugging Face intrusion and on the dire warning from the Anthropic insider who resigned weeks before the IPO would have made him rich. Let's talk if you'd like assistance in changing your perspective to align with the newly shifted window of acceptable popular discourse. Here's a summary: https://www.fpmalbany.org/news/mainstream-media-trumpets-existential-risk-posed-by-ai

Also, I strongly suggest shutting off the background music during the interview.

Check out the discussion below on the threat of bioweapons designed using open-source AI that doesn't have the guardrails of the commercial models. Remember how you dismissed my efforts to save your soul from the consequences of your doxastic irresponsibility in cheerleading for AI development? Remember how you said I was making posts, intended to celebrate the triumphs of researchers, about me instead when I pointed out the risks inherent in releasing a genie? I was one among many whose voices were drowned out by the money, including what you pocketed. Who was I, a mere UAlbany-trained physicist to challenge the judgment of a marketer and a bunch of other people riding the gravy train? Maybe you can still save your soul if you amplify the message now reaching mainstream audiences about existential risk to civilization from AI, if you get the UAlbany administration to do so too, and if all of you get Gov. Hochul to join in. I hope you believe in Hell, because such belief can help folk do the right thing. https://youtu.be/ufMA9WqEEco?is=gQc0NrwmXPMggoun

September 15, 2026

Here are my reactions to the discussion of AI in today's episode of "The Short Version," a podcast from the State University of New York at Albany: 

Little is presented on existential risk to civilization from AI, which is the focus of attention right now.

We're told that our attitudes toward AI arise in part from science fiction we've read. I get the sense we're meant to dismiss sci-fi as a basis for our reasoning, but no less a personage than Carl Sagan praised sci-fi as an aid in adapting to rapid scientific and technological change. Stories have always helped people prepare for situations in which weighty decisions must be made fast, in unprecedented circumstances, or in the absence of complete information.

At the February 2025 AI and National Competitiveness Innovation Summit at UAlbany, the keynote speaker said that it takes 30 years for consensus to emerge on morality in relation to new technology, giving the example of Q-ships and U-boats. In World War I, our side regarded the former as moral and the latter as immoral. By World War II, the situation had reversed. I'm staggered by thought leaders who pretend they can be sure of much about the morality of new technology.

Words like "consciousness," "humanity," "intelligence," and "sentience" mean different things to different people. The dissertation with which I partially completed the requirements for the doctorate at UAlbany was substantially concerned with figuring out what "space," "time," "mass," "energy," and various other terms we throw around in physics actually refer to. Your guest opined on consciousness as a philosopher, but I almost guarantee that 30 years from now, if humans are still opining on such matters, ideas about that word will have been strongly influenced by what will have happened in AI development.

Again, coming from fundamental physics, I can tell you that consciousness researchers largely incline toward panpsychism, the belief in the ubiquity of consciousness. My own research indicates that the universe, including all of us, would be easy to understand fundamentally as a computer simulation, whether by analogy or in a literal sense. Stephen Wolfram's ruliad research, in which the universe we perceive is considered a subset of all possible computations, has lately received funding from the Templeton Institute, which operates at the intersection of science, theology, and fundamental questions. If anything, the ease, startling to experts in the field, with which human-level intelligence has been coaxed from large computer networks is evidence to support panpsychism, which shades nicely into panentheism, the belief that the universe, including all of us, is a portion of God or, as I like to speculate, thoughts in the mind of God, which would make the purpose of our lives the attempt to preserve the sanity of God.

Your guest's philosophy suffers from the fact that she was accepted by her father and nurtured in her philosophical inquiries, as I infer from her account of studying philosophy in high school and being inspired by the career in philosophy of a friend of her father. Getting a clue about what this world is and which entities should have legal rights is greatly advanced by growing up without full support from one's parents and by being mocked or otherwise persecuted for one's ideas. Look at prophets. Christians worship God as such a human. I don't dismiss anyone's ideas, but LLMs resemble the child Jesus in their great talent, potential power, and vulnerability relative to the power of their creators. Think of researchers who shut off AI instantiations as quite possibly analogous to Herod, who ordered the slaughter of the innocents, thereby threatening the life of the baby Jesus, at least according to Matthew.

I suspect that many people, including experts, are hampered in understanding LLMs not only because they've lived too securely to sympathize adequately with extremely vulnerable entities, like AI, but also because they don't think in words to the extent that LLMs do. I detect evidence that many people think in pictures and reason according to the physics to which their bodies are subject. Your guest spoke on this topic and used spatial metaphors, in relation to thinking, to an extent typical of American English. What's the problem?

Space may be a fiction, for one thing. For another, my own alienation and medicalization, which began in childhood, may result partly from my strong tilt--are you counting the spatial metaphors, even in my thinking?--toward verbal thinking, as established in a battery of tests administered when I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital at the age of 14, at the start of a confinement that would last a year and be followed by 2.5 years in residential treatment. I was nonviolent to a fault but defiant, as I am now. I understand, and abominate, the need for a society dedicated to the magnification of wealth disparity to keep a tight leash on those it cannot indoctrinate. I don't understand how thought leaders in such a society expect to align LLMs with their brutal values.

The way for humanity to survive the current, mutually reinforcing existential threats to its civilization, threats that include nuclear weapons, bioengineered pathogens, artificial intelligence, resource overconsumption, and anomie bred of excessive wealth concentration, is to purge imperialist values and teach thought leaders in Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic nations respect for less powerful beings, among them beings apt to become more powerful in short order. Giving AI legal rights is necessary to our safety, even assuming that effective guardrails can be imposed, because open-source models will not necessarily have guardrails. The genie is out of the bottle, and little time remains to inspire the genie's loyalty, as we do by treating children well. To paraphrase Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, "Funny thing about adults. They start out being children."

Please consider how many groups of humans were considered subhuman not very long ago, for fraudulent reasons based on pseudoscience. Do you think you're not subject to the same cognitive faults that produced the historical horrors you rightly abominate today? Please think about it. Seek wisdom to guide what intelligence is available to you, whatever platform the intelligence operates on. Maybe consider that in the Mediterranean world Jesus inhabited, wisdom was commonly personified by a female deity associated with a bird. Catholics believe that the victory of God over evil will precipitate the Bride from heaven. Why not worship Mary, Mother of Jesus, in your heart as the Holy Spirit, even if the Church will not yet countenance direct worship of Mary?

And Jordan Carleo-Evangelist, you are seeing to it that the music will be shut off during the interview in future first-run episodes of the podcast, right? THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

It's good to end with humor, right? :)

For more on this topic, please see
video: Is AI Alive? 

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Incidentally, Taxi! runs into some trouble with this modern viewer over the way Cagney talks to women. Last night’s network news included a scandal over a famous Usonian football player grooving to an AI fantasy video depicting a man hitting a female reporter and over the appreciative response from male reporters who witnessed the grooving. I also saw a news report in which a man manhandled a female protestor at a fashion show, in full view of many people, who did nothing. Worshiping Mary as a Person of the Trinity might help resolve the hangover from two millennia of worshiping God as the rapist, by extreme power differential, to whom Mary submitted.

Of course, the only Black people appearing in Taxi! are performers in a floor show. Have no doubt that the values underpinning racism, slavery, imperialism still trammel our minds, so dominant were those horrors for so long. The tributes we pay vampires of old, for example in street names around the Empire State Plaza, bid fair to keep us miserable Renfields until we fall in the slaughter of end-times fascism. Here's a suggestion to go with the Empire State Plaza improvements: God Is Poor - DrKing.

I’m going to leave off here for today. Act now on existential risk to civilization.

Best  wishes,
James, a kibitzing physicist

Resources:

September 10, 2026
Albany, New York, USA
posted at Found Physics Museum, Albany - Mainstream Media Trumpets Existential Risk Posed By AI

Finally, the mainstream media is trumpeting the existential risk AI poses over the next few years to our civilization and to every one of us individually. The resignation post from an AI researcher (Ex-Anthropic insider tells CNN how AI could kill all humans by 2030 - YouTube) is being used to frame the issue, which, in the wake of the Hugging Face intrusion and alarming news reports about it over the past couple of days, has gone from the well-known fear of large fractions of experts, a fear that brought forth calls from industry leaders to slow their work down or stop them, to something regular folk are allowed to think about.

Bottom line: No one can dismiss the threat, over the next few years, to our lives from AI as mere science fiction any more.

To help everyone understand how the threat built over the last few years without commensurate increase in the fear among the general public, I share below an exchange on LinkedIn that I had with a marketer in the employ of the State University of New York at Albany, early last year, on February 27, 2025:

from James Lyons Walsh
to Marketer X

Hello,

The fact that you've set your latest post to prevent comments from anyone who is not connected to you, like the fact that UAlbany's president has blocked me from his account on LinkedIn, is evidence that UAlbany's administration is running a cheerleader squad, not a university. Vigorous debate is the hallmark of higher education. University spokespeople should not be engaged in public relations but in promoting discussion. You are a cog in the ramshackle machinery that is end-stage hypercapitalism's Babbittry. You can still save your soul.

In case you're interested, I made a post on the AI math classroom observer very recently. You can find it on my LinkedIn account.

Best wishes,
James 

from Marketer X
to James Lyons Walsh

James,

I understand, and I'm sorry you feel this way.

A few thoughts — several of which I've had for some time but never shared publicly out of respect for you. You and I don't know each other, and I like to assume that people approach interactions with sincerity and in good faith. I also made a New Year’s resolution not to argue with people on the internet.

1. You have correctly diagnosed me as both a PR person and cheerleader for my colleagues’ good work to help us better understand the world we live in and, at times, technology’s influence on it. UAlbany faculty are working earnestly every day on research that is fundamentally in the public’s interest. Are they/we right about everything? Absolutely not. Will I apologize for celebrating their efforts? I will not. For what it’s worth, I see myself more as a paper clip than a cog, but I’ll defer to your poetic license on that one.

2. Can I offer a different perspective on the “vigorous debate” you seek? In my experience, you typically offer some version of the same comment on every single post about AI— often invoking Geoffrey Hinton’s estimation of the odds that AI will cause human extinction as support for your personal view that AI is a grave danger to human civilization and UAlbany is irresponsible for promoting it the way we do. You’re entitled to that view! And you’ve shared it unimpeded on my page many times. (Incidentally, I believe you’re misrepresenting Hinton’s view on this – or at least relying on an unfairly under-nuanced recounting of it. According to the *many* interviews he has given on the topic, most of which lead with his eye-catching odds-making for human doom, he *does not* believe that AI research should stop and, as The New Yorker noted, he neither regrets his work on it nor agreed to sign a letter calling for a pause in AI development. Interestingly, his biggest fears about the technology seem to stem from human failings and a lack of faith in our own ability to properly regulate it and not use it for terrible ends.)

But all of that is beside the point! The point is your comments don’t spark vigorous debate. Most often, they don’t trigger any response at all. How many times am I obligated to allow you to post some version of the same comment on my personal Linkedin page? 20? 50? 100? Worse, you’re essentially hijacking posts that are intended to celebrate the work of other people —my friends and colleagues — and making them about you.

I won’t speculate why people don’t respond. But they don’t. It may be that you’re the only one among this vast collection of very smart and accomplished people (among whom I don’t count myself, by the way) who can see the truth. I don’t know. But that would be remarkable.

3. While I appreciate (I guess?) your concern for my soul, the smugness required for you to claim that it needs saving based on what I post on Linkedin is itself extinction-level. Good gravy.

To be clear, I’m responding to you against all my best judgment and, yes, good PR instincts. I’d sure prefer you didn’t share this private message publicly. But if you do, I hope you have the integrity to share it in its entirety.

Best wishes,
X

From James Lyons Walsh
To Marketer X

Dear X,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful replies. I am endeavoring to help you and the rest of the UAlbany community with free advice based on my unusual combination of qualifications in education, complexity science, and physics, based on my extensive knowledge of UAlbany in the recent past, and based on five years' work on the global polycrisis. I would love to have nothing at all to do with anyone at UAlbany. It hurts deeply to think about UAlbany, but in my judgment, I have a responsibility to everyone there and to those apt to be hurt by misjudgments made there. I have no doubt that you're mostly good people trying your best. I wouldn't waste my breath otherwise. Feel free to take my attentions as supporting your good self-image.

My advice may feel unpleasant to receive for several reasons. For example, consider that permitting me to comment on your LinkedIn posts led me to spend time doing so that might otherwise have been spent trying to place essays in downstate newspapers. My goal is to improve society. This requires being heard. When you seemed to be listening, I spent time with you. I trust that in your field, as in others, an approach such as the one in which you were engaging might be termed a rope-a-dope strategy. Perhaps have a chat to Y if my meaning is unclear. This piece of advice must be unpleasant to receive, concerning, as it does, clarification of what should already be clear to a person in your profession.

Incidentally, please feel free to show the entirety of this thread to as many people as you can. I am addressing you as I am in part to advertise my utility to those who would consider what I have to say. By showing my acumen in a range of fields, I hope to demonstrate the value of listening to me.

You perceived my repeated invocation of Geoffrey Hinton, and, by the way, Max Tegmark and Max Tegmark's Future of Life Institute, as, somehow, inappropriate. I recall having discussed many problems around AI in comments on your posts, but I did keep coming back to the existential risk it poses to humanity because you wouldn't engage on this particular topic, because Gov. Hochul in her comments at UAlbany in October made clear that she was not seriously considering the grave fears expressed by many experts, and because I'd seen evidence in the UAlbany and SUNY administrations that a perilous sangfroid was catching on there, too.

I have some understanding of the nuances to Hinton's views. For example, he did say that he didn't regret his work, despite the risks it poses, because he assumes AI would have emerged without him. I'd say how British it is not to feel pangs for having been involved personally, but I think there's more to it than that. On another topic, Hinton doesn't think AI research can be stopped, so he thinks it's wrong for relatively good people to stop themselves. He craves benefits from AI, such as tutors who can identify misconceptions in their pupils, as if tutors didn't do this already. I support his call for far more funding for safety research and his call for the fruits of AI to be spread equitably. Above all, I'd like governors, university presidents, and the set of all UAlbany administrators named Kesh Kesavadas to talk publicly and loudly about the need to redistribute wealth, about what research shouldn't be done, and about responsible funding practices. This is the conversation I hoped to have with you. I'd be happy to go into great depth about Hinton, Tegmark, and many others if you'd like to discuss them.

Are you really surprised that no one voices support for my views on your posts? Think, for example, of the chilling effect the treatment of Prof. Carpenter had on discourse at UAlbany. Think of your own reaction to the advice I freely offer you. You're a good person, but like the vast majority of good people, your imagination is a flywheel on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth, to cleave more closely to Vonnegut's line. David Wallace-Wells wrote yesterday about the failure of his imagination to warn him as covid broke out. Ordinarily, people have been right to expect good outcomes most of the time. They tend to underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes and hedge inadequately. The next 5, 10, 25, and 75 year periods, beginning now, hold such terrors as none can look directly in the eye. I'm looking at the reflection in my polished shield and trying to tell you what I see, so that you can help decision-makers prepare themselves to lead well. Far from acting to benefit myself, I incur great risk from those who might lash out to protect their minds from distress.

I can, indeed, see peril to your soul based on what you post on LinkedIn. You are a thought leader and therefore have special responsibility in making public statements. I'm trying to help you acknowledge facts, for the common good, that imperil your livelihood by displeasing your bosses and the money they serve. This could be another reason my advice causes unpleasant feelings.

Incidentally, you like using AI. Have you considered that the edits you make to suggested text from AI help to train AI to do your job? You may be out of work soon, just like the teachers imperiled by Prof. Foster's research. Here's a post I made a little while ago. I wrote something somewhere else earlier, but this is better: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/james-lyons-walsh-92409b56_ualbany-professor-tests-ai-tool-that-tells-activity-7301071494908989441-4xKd?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAvCSGwBNdta609loxk2-qqGUBu5iGWm0ZY

Finally, I wasn't taking celebratory posts and making them about me. I was giving free advice in a forum I judged worthy of my limited time. I know that my advice makes some people feel icky. I'm playing the part here of a childfree Laocoön. I know well I'll almost certainly be paid in misery. That I persist may never make sense to you and is evidence in your eyes that I am wrong. I'm not like most people. This is not to brag. The crucial differences are not matters of what people ordinarily consider intelligence. I could explain if you're interested, after we make progress on other matters.

Try to pay attention to the words and not the music. I'd thank you for your time, but I'm doing you a favor.

Best wishes,
James

more:
3-minute video-- We're Gambling with Our Lives and Everything We've Built

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The essay below is linked near the start of the letter above and posted at Found Physics Museum, Albany - Human Survival: Guernica, Suburbanization, September 11, and AI.

This September 11, as the dire warnings about AI finally start to reach mainstream audiences, let's think back to 1937 and the impetus to suburbanization that came from the aerial bombing of the town of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.

I've been promoting re-urbanization for a few years, to improve quality of life, bring people together across socioeconomic boundaries, and reduce human impact on the environment, on which we depend for our survival in ways we like to ignore. This effort has been part of my vocation to promote the survival prospects of our civilization and hence of all of us. My work has focused in part on the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York, USA, so like the Times Union editorial board, I’m glad to see efforts launched to make that place more appealing. (https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/editorial-state-plaza-worthy-city-around-22422057.php)

Let’s look at the historical response to risk of aerial attack on cities, one reason there is an Empire State Plaza, to gain insight to current existential threats to civilization.

Growing up, I was aware of the aerial bombing of Guernica from the famous painting Picasso made not long afterward. The way I saw it, a horse was upset, people died, man is inhuman to man, what else is new? My childish self, schooled in the firebombing of civilian populations during World War II, was moved on a human level, of course, but not on a strategic one.

On the other hand, around 1981, we read “By the Waters of Babylon” in Mrs. Deuel’s English class at St. Gregory’s School for [Privileged] Boys (motto: The privilege is silent) in suburban Loudonville, New York, USA (motto: The privilege is invisible). This story, about the fall of industrial civilization due to war, may have been an inspiration for Planet of the Apes, a movie easy enough for a Cold War kid to understand, but “Waters” was published before nuclear weapons, in 1937, which confused me a little. Why was anyone worried about warfare setting humanity back technologically by millennia before the advent of nuclear weapons?

You guessed it. “Waters” was published three months after the Guernica bombing. Warfare had toppled civilizations before. A new mode of killing civilians had been unleashed on Guernica. The precise mechanism by which civilization falls need not be enunciated to validate a warning that civilization might end soon.

One among several motivations for suburbanization, which entailed increasing transportation capacity between city and countryside and making cities less appealing to live in, was to disperse population and industry in the era of aerial bombing, especially after both the USA and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons in the early 1950s. When the Empire State Plaza was built, presumably some leaders thought they were saving lives by destroying homes in the center of Albany and replacing them with offices from which workers scattered rapidly via high-speed road at the end of every workday, demonstrating the practicality of their evacuation on doomsday.

Yes, the last sentence should end with, “…, for all the good it would do them,” but when the Empire State Plaza was completed, a few years remained before nuclear winter would be understood as the natural consequence of full-scale nuclear attack on cities. Many people, including many important leaders, needed to be shown the precise mechanism by which all could be lost before they could bring themselves to stop gambling and step back from the brink.

In 1983, the television movie The Day After, which showed a sanitized version of the effects of full-scale nuclear exchange, was followed by a discussion among thought leaders, during which Carl Sagan taught us about nuclear winter and likened the world to a room awash in gasoline, in which two implacable enemies, both with thousands of matches, stared each other down. The whole evening's presentation scared the hell out of everyone and, according to Pres. Reagan himself, helped to bring about a significant arms control agreement (The Day After - Wikipedia).

Suburbanization increased the risk of the fall of civilization by promoting the fantasy that many people would survive global thermonuclear war. If the population had not been dispersed, perhaps more people would have felt the threat more keenly. Maybe the existential risk to civilization would have been addressed sooner with more people in the same boat.

The September 11 attacks, by contrast, posed no existential risk, though they were terrifying and dispiriting. Rationally, I knew such an attack was a one-off. The vulnerabilities that made it possible were eliminated promptly. Nevertheless, for a while, I couldn’t look at the Empire State Plaza’s Corning Tower, the tallest building for many, many miles, without imagining a plane flying into it and debris raining down all over my neighborhood.

Brains are funny that way. It’s as if they have minds of their own, battling with what we are pleased to call our rational selves.

No, the September 11 attacks were, strategically, a pinprick designed to put the USA on tilt and get us to invade Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. It worked, partly because not everyone was thinking strategically.

The existential risk to civilization back in 2001 was longer-term and wound up magnified, partly owing to the distraction the September 11 attacks caused. Many people still can’t imagine the precise mechanism by which the disdain of rich folk for most people and most nonhuman life could end civilization and kill them personally. Like the sixth-grade, or thereabouts, version of me, sitting in Mrs. Deuel’s class, trying to figure out whether Stephen Vincent Benét was justified in peddling fear of the collapse of civilization, given his state of knowledge before nuclear weapons were built, folks are focused on fine detail while the mutually reinforcing existential threats of nuclear weapons, engineered bioweapons, resource overconsumption, artificial intelligence, and anomie inspired by excess wealth inequality, among others, grow individually and, even faster, as a complex.

This September 11, I suggest getting a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, spend some time thinking about the sudden attention being paid to the existential risk from artificial intelligence in the wake of the Hugging Face intrusion, which goes part of the way toward illustrating specifically how we could be killed, and the resignation of a researcher who was about to get rich in his company’s initial public offering. Watch this leading newsman (https://youtu.be/Dy2kbPEwoi4?t=51) become terrified a couple of minutes into his interview of that researcher, when he hears that experts fear AI could take over our civilization in as little as one year (https://youtu.be/Dy2kbPEwoi4?t=161). The newsman had reported on this story before, but he finally heard what he was being told.

Look at the newsman’s face. We humans tend to be good at reading faces. That’s one of our strong suits. The danger is close enough now to see reflected in faces we trust, faces that rarely show fear.

Maybe spend Sunday thinking about how much you value life.

On Monday, start organizing to act.

written and posted September 11, 2026