2026-05-29 05:45:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is investigating a woman who accused him of sexual abuse.
What’s happening? On Wednesday evening, we learned that E. Jean Carroll — a writer and advice columnist who alleged in a 2019 essay and two subsequent, successful civil lawsuits that Trump assaulted her decades ago — is now under federal criminal investigation in Illinois.
The investigation has yet to produce an indictment — and may not — but its mere existence is another indication of the extent to which Trump has weaponized the justice system to punish his enemies.
What is the DOJ investigating? The investigation, which CNN first reported, reportedly centers on a perjury allegation against Carroll over a statement she made in 2022.
At the time, Carroll said — incorrectly — that she had not received outside funding supporting her civil lawsuits against Trump. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp explains, however, a federal appeals court already concluded in 2024 that there was no evidence the misstatement was intentional, and Carroll may have simply forgotten.
As one legal expert told Zack on Thursday, even if Carroll is indicted, “A conviction is just not going to happen.”
Why Carroll? Carroll is not alone in accusing Trump of sexual misconduct or assault; at least 27 women have done so to date. Her allegation, however, has been both costly and embarrassing for Trump: He was found liable in 2023 for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, who also won more than $88 million from him in two civil judgments. (The money has not yet been paid, as Trump continues to appeal.)
What’s the big picture? Carroll joins a growing list of people Trump’s second-term DOJ has pursued on flimsy, if not outright preposterous, grounds, including former FBI Director James Comey (indicted twice), New York state Attorney General Letitia James (just once), and half a dozen Democratic lawmakers (tried and failed).
He’s almost certainly going to keep at it — but at least so far, he keeps failing, too.
Here’s a headline that speaks for itself, from my colleague Sara Herschander: An HIV-free generation is closer than you think.
As Sara explains, the problem isn’t solved yet, and there’s still work to do. But testing and anti-retroviral drugs have been a marvelous success story in recent decades, dramatically reducing the number of babies born with HIV. You can read her full story here with a gift link. Have a great evening!
2026-05-29 03:00:00
Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a Republican. He served in a Republican White House, typically votes with the Court’s other Republicans, and even sometimes sides with President Donald Trump in major cases that divide the Republican Party. He’s not the sort of person you’d expect to carry a torch for a liberal cause for nearly four full decades.
But, well, he did. In Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in Pitchford v. Cain, which was handed down on Thursday, the justice more or less implemented a proposal for how to prevent racism from infecting jury selection that he first proposed in a 1989 piece that he published when he was still a law student.
To be clear, Kavanaugh’s Pitchford opinion doesn’t really break much new ground. It involves a straightforward violation of Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the Supreme Court’s most important precedent governing race in jury selection, and rules in favor of the person on death row who brought this fairly clear-cut violation to the Supreme Court’s attention.
Still, Pitchford was a 5-4 decision, with four of Kavanaugh’s fellow Republicans joining a dissent by Justice Neil Gorsuch. So the decision could have easily come down the other way if one of the Republican justices hadn’t developed a liberal approach to Batson before he started his legal career. Sometimes, even Supreme Court justices — arguably the most highly vetted political appointees in the entire federal government — contain multitudes.
Again, Pitchford is a fairly easy case. In a less ideological Supreme Court, the incarcerated person at the heart of this case might have won unanimously. But the decision does suggest that left-leaning advocates can sometimes prevail in this Court by appealing to the idiosyncratic views of some of the Republican justices.
In 1989, Kavanaugh published a “note” in the Yale Law Journal. Notes are student-authored works of legal scholarship, which often examine an important recent legal development. High-achieving law students frequently choose to write these notes because it gives them a published exemplar of their own legal writing skills that they can share with potential employers.
The surprising twist is that in his 1989 note, Kavanaugh — who, of course, would go on to become one of the most powerful Republicans in the United States — chose to advocate for a cause that is ordinarily associated with liberals. Published three years after the Supreme Court handed down Batson, Kavanaugh’s note, which is titled “Defense Presence and Participation: A Procedural Minimum for Batson v. Kentucky Hearings,” argued that the Court’s recent decision protecting against racism in jury selection should be read to include certain procedural protections for criminal defendants.
In criminal trials, both the prosecution and the defense often get a limited number of “peremptory challenges,” which they can use to remove a potential juror from the jury pool for virtually any reason. These peremptory strikes may be used to remove a juror because the prosecutor doesn’t like the juror’s haircut, because the defense counsel thinks a juror looked at their client suspiciously, or because counsel doesn’t like having jurors whose name begins with the letter “M.”
But the Constitution prohibits prosecutors from removing a juror because of that juror’s race.
As Kavanaugh explains in his Pitchford opinion, Batson sets up a three-step process to determine whether prosecutors did, in fact, remove a juror for impermissible racial reasons. After the defense counsel objects to the removal of a particular juror or group of jurors (step one), the prosecutor typically must give a race-neutral explanation for why they wanted the juror removed (step two). At step three, Kavanaugh writes, “defense counsel has an opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s race-neutral reason as pretextual,” and then the judge has to decide who is telling the truth.
Kavanaugh’s 1989 note argues that courts must ensure that this third step is complied with; he wrote at the time that “the defense should have an opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s reasons before the trial judge decides whether to allow the prosecutor’s peremptories.” His opinion in Pitchford makes a very similar argument.
In Pitchford, prosecutors in a Mississippi murder case used their peremptory challenges to remove four of five potential Black jurors from defendant Terry Pitchford’s jury pool. Defense counsel objected on Batson grounds, and the prosecutor gave race-neutral explanations for targeting these jurors. (The prosecution claimed that one juror was removed because they arrived late to court, two because they had brothers convicted of violent offenses, and one because he, like the defendant, was a young father.)
But the trial judge never gave defense counsel an opportunity to rebut these explanations. The judge simply deemed the prosecutor’s explanations acceptable and moved on.
This, Kavanaugh writes in Pitchford, is not allowed. In a sentence that mirrors the argument he made in 1989, the justice writes that “after a prosecutor asserts race-neutral reasons for a peremptory strike, the defense counsel must at least have an opportunity to argue that the asserted race-neutral reasons were not the actual reasons—that is, the reasons were pretextual.”
To be clear, it’s not exactly a stretch for Kavanaugh to argue that, when Batson said that courts must use a three-step process to resolve jury discrimination claims, all three steps are mandatory. At most, Pitchford makes explicit something that was already implicit in US law.
But Pitchford was complicated by a federal law, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), that makes it difficult for convicted offenders to challenge their convictions or sentences in federal court if they were first tried in state court. To prevail in such a federal challenge, Pitchford must show that state courts handed down a decision that “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States” or “was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.”
Given this high bar placed in front of people who wish to challenge state-level convictions or sentences, a federal judge who wants to leave the state court’s decision in place will almost always be able to find a way to do so. And Gorsuch’s opinion does just that.
The dissent’s primary argument is that Pitchford waived his Batson argument because, while his lawyers raised it in the trial court, they did not provide enough detail about how, specifically, the trial judge violated Batson when they raised this objection. As a general rule, lawyers may not raise an argument on appeal unless they also raised that argument in the trial court.
That’s not a very good argument, because, as Kavanaugh explains, defense counsel raised their Batson argument multiple times at trial. And, after one of these objections, the trial judge “explicitly assured Pitchford’s counsel that the Batson objection was preserved.” So it would have been odd — and could have potentially antagonized the judge — if defense counsel had elaborated further on their Batson argument after the judge effectively told them to drop the issue and take it up in the appeals courts.
But the fact remains that Pitchford barely prevailed in the Supreme Court. And, if not for the fact that Kavanaugh appears to have developed the view that all three prongs of Batson’s process are mandatory in law school, this case would have likely come out the other way.
Liberal victories aren’t exactly common in this Court, but they also aren’t so rare that they are unimaginable. In this case, one of the justices appears to have formed an opinion on a politically contentious issue before he fully embraced the broader worldview that he needed to have in order to score political appointments in a Republican administration. And that means that, at least in cases involving jury discrimination, criminal defense lawyers will sometimes find a sympathetic bench in the Supreme Court.
2026-05-29 02:00:00
Had you time-traveled back to 2023, and started telling people that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department would soon be trying to imprison a woman who had accused him of rape, most would likely have dismissed it as a paranoid #resistance fantasy.
Yet now, it appears to be reality. Reporting in both CNN and the New York Times suggests that the DOJ has opened a criminal inquiry into E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who successfully won $88.3 million in damages from Trump after federal juries determined he sexually abused her in 1996 and later defamed her. The allegation now under investigation, per reporting, is that Carroll committed perjury during a deposition for the case.
This is, without a doubt, an authoritarian abuse of power: the president weaponizing the Justice Department to go after one of his most prominent and effective critics. It is the kind of thing that you expect in a country like Turkey or Venezuela, where the justice system has been transformed into an enforcement mechanism for an authoritarian regime.
But the comparison also suggests why the case is less scary than it appears.
Unlike in those countries, where those targeted by the state have little plausible chance to fight back, Trump’s track record for prosecuting his opponents has been exceptionally poor. Due to a combination of his own attorneys’ incompetence, the jury system, and the genuine independence of America’s lower court judges, they’ve repeatedly failed to secure indictments — let alone actually imprison anyone.
The administration has repeatedly failed to present a credible case against former FBI Director James Comey, with its most recent indictment revolving around an allegedly threatening picture of seashells. In February, a grand jury rejected both its efforts to prosecute six Democratic lawmakers over a video calling on the US military to disobey unlawful orders. A criminal investigation into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell backfired when senators threatened to block his replacement and was later halted. Just this week, federal judges threw out both a case against anti-ICE protesters in Chicago and the administration’s latest effort to imprison Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
“They seem to be choosing targets without the evidence to back convictions,” says Barb McQuade, a law professor at University of Michigan and former US attorney. “In the case of Carroll, a jury has already spoken on her credibility, and they believed her. It’s absurd to think that prosecutors would be able to reach a different result when this time the government, and not she, has the burden of proof, and by the much higher standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
This pattern illustrates one of the central dynamics of the Trump administration over the past year: that they are clearly intent on building an authoritarian state, but lack both the competence and the strategic vision to overcome American democracy’s institutional barriers to true power consolidation.
And with the midterm election looming, they are running out of time.
In September 2020, Carroll’s attorney told her that an outside source was helping fund her lawsuit against Trump (that source was Reid Hoffman, a Democratic mega-donor). Over two years later, during a trial deposition, Carroll was asked whether someone was “presently paying” her legal fees — and she said no.
The Justice Department’s case, per both CNN and the Times, centers on the theory that Carroll’s answer was perjury: that she knowingly lied in 2022 given the 2020 funding.
There are several glaring problems with this theory, but the biggest one is that a court has already decided this question in Carroll’s favor.
“Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate otherwise. Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs,” the Second Circuit ruled in an unanimous decision denying an appeal from Trump.
And the burden of proof would be even higher in a criminal case, which is what federal prosecutors are reportedly pursuing. The Justice Department would need some kind of smoking-gun evidence that Carroll had knowingly lied about the funding, and there is no reason to believe that any such evidence exists.
“A conviction is just not going to happen,” McQuade concludes.
That the Justice Department would even bring such a weak case is, in her assessment, evidence of just how corrupted the process has become. Trump’s attorneys have to know that this case, like the repeated attempts to indict Comey, are not going anywhere legally — but they are filing them anyway because the president wants his opponents prosecuted and publicly humiliated.
“Ordinarily, DOJ policy prohibits prosecutors from indicting a case just because they have probable cause. The standard is that prosecutors should believe it probable that the evidence is sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction,” McQuade says. “Filing criminal charges just to shame someone without the evidence to back it up is a violation of ethical standards and abuse of the Justice Department’s power.”
One could, theoretically, read the Carroll case in two opposed ways.
One could, by focusing on the basic impropriety of bringing the case in the first place, see it as evidence of the damage Trump has done to America’s democratic institutions. One could also focus more on the exceedingly high likelihood that the case will fail, and treat it as evidence of American democracy’s resilience in the face of an authoritarian chief executive.
These perspectives are not opposed, however, but actually two sides of the same coin. Trump’s second-term governing approach is best defined as “haphazardism,” a style of rule characterized by repeated and sustained individual attacks on America’s system of government that are legitimately dangerous, but also so poorly executed that they’re often self-undermining.
Trump is succeeding in wrecking elements of the American system: destroying the separation of powers and the norms of nonpartisan governance that defined the modern US civil service. But the wreck is incomplete — Trump has not demolished every barrier standing in his path to untrammeled power — which leaves democracy intact, if severely diminished in quality.
The Carroll case fits this pattern exactly. Trump has successfully demolished the norm of DOJ independence that would, in the post-Watergate era, have constrained the president from vindictive prosecution of a woman who proved in court that he assaulted her. Yet he has not been able to take the next step, of an Erdogan or Putin, and turn the courts into a rubber stamp that would translate prosecution into conviction.
This is because of the haphazardist character of Trump’s governance. Caring more about optics, with little attention to long-range planning, Trump demands that people immediately do what he wants — and hires the yes-men who will do it. He does not have a real plan for long-term power consolidation, a way to turn individual indictments into an actual effort to cow the political opposition. He just wants an indictment, and so he gets one — regardless of legal competence.
Few good lawyers are willing to follow this kind of rule, and it has shown. In a recent article, the New York Times’ Alan Feuer documented the extraordinary string of screw-ups by Trump’s DOJ that have led to an unprecedented number of grand juries, long seen as rubber stamps for federal prosecutions, failing to deliver indictments. Feuer sees these failures as a direct outgrowth of Trump’s push for political reprisals: The more petty and poorly argued cases he brings, the more grand juries and judges come to expect petty and poorly argued cases, and the more confident they feel in rejecting them.
The Trump effort to prosecute his enemies is simultaneously authoritarian in intent and weak in execution. Understanding this as an example of the general haphazardist pattern helps clarify just what Trump is doing to the American system of government — and how far-reaching the consequences will truly be.
2026-05-29 00:15:00
The Trump administration announced last Friday that US visa holders who want a green card must first return to their home countries and apply from there, “except in extraordinary circumstances.”
On its face, this rule — which was officially promulgated in a memo from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — would upend America’s immigration system and the lives of hundreds of thousands of US residents.
For more than 50 years, through the “adjustment of status” process, visa holders in the United States have been able to remain in the country while applying for permanent residency. This was no small thing. For legal immigrants, the alternative to securing an adjustment of status is not taking a short sojourn abroad while Uncle Sam inspects their paperwork. Rather, due to various quirks of US immigration law, some immigrants must wait more than a decade for their green card applications to be approved.
President Donald Trump’s new rule therefore threatens to exile hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants — including physicians at understaffed rural hospitals, gifted technologists at Silicon Valley firms, the spouses of US citizens, and parents of American children.
Whether this will actually happen is unclear. Both the memo officially laying out the policy — and the administration’s messaging about it — contain ambiguities and apparent contradictions. For example, the administration has said that visa holders can only remain in the United States during the green card application process under “extraordinary circumstances” and that any visa holder who provides an “economic benefit” to America may still do so. Yet more or less all employed visa holders provide some economic benefit to the United States.
Regardless, the new memo represents a massive escalation in Trump’s crackdown on immigration. It also arguably marks the resolution of a years-long war for the soul of the MAGA movement.
Since Trump retook the presidency in 2024, his coalition’s hardline nativists and Silicon Valley patrons have been fighting over what an “America First” immigration policy actually entails.
America’s tech industry is heavily reliant on global talent. About one-fifth of our nation’s STEM workers in 2021 were foreign-born. For this reason among others, the tech right — a contingent of Silicon Valley luminaries who backed Trump in 2024 — advocate for a meritocratic brand of immigration restrictionism.
In their account, America needs to repel undocumented, low-skill migrants who threaten to burden its safety nets, warp its culture, and empower the Democratic Party. Yet the United States also needs to welcome highly talented, English-speaking, America-loving workers from around the globe in order to sustain its economic competitiveness and dynamism.
“I understand why we don’t want people to come to the US to be criminals, mooch on welfare…and otherwise undermine the country,” Blake Scholl, the Trump-friendly CEO of Boom Supersonic, posted on X after the latest immigration news. “But I don’t understand why we make it harder for motivated, ambitious, hardworking people to come to the land of opportunity.”
The nativist right isn’t so sure about that. In its view, whether immigrants engineer software in Silicon Valley — or deliver food in New York City — they are typically undermining native-born Americans’ interests, at least in their current numbers.
By deterring highly skilled, legal immigrants from seeking green cards, the Trump administration has made its allegiance to the second camp unambiguous.
While not entirely surprising, this development wasn’t always certain. Trump erected some obstacles to high-skill immigration during his first term. But these changes had been relatively modest. More critically, after a slew of tech titans lined up behind Trump’s candidacy in 2024, Trump signaled support for their immigration views.
During a June 2024 appearance on All-In, a podcast hosted by venture capitalists sympathetic to his campaign, Trump was asked whether he would “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America”?
The candidate replied, “I do promise. But I happen to agree, otherwise I wouldn’t promise. … You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically — as part of your diploma — a green card to be able to stay in this country and that includes junior colleges too.”
Months later, in the wake of Trump’s victory, his Silicon Valley supporters got into an online feud with hardline nativists over H-1B visas — which give temporary legal status to highly educated immigrant workers employed by American companies. After some MAGA influencers called for restricting such visas (and high-skill immigration more broadly), the tech right rallied to the program’s defense.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Elon Musk posted on X in December 2024. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Once again, Trump appeared to side with Silicon Valley, telling reporters that he supported the H-1B program, since “We need competent people, we need smart people coming into our country…we need a lot of people coming in.”
Of course, much of the MAGA movement disagreed.
Although the nativist right has tended to dedicate most of its energy to combating undocumented immigration, it has also sought to repel highly skilled legal immigrants in general — and those who work for tech companies in particular.
In fact, two of the original architects of Trump’s immigration vision — Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — both long lamented the prevalence of foreign-born workers in Silicon Valley.
Notably, Trump himself did not share this view at the outset of his first presidential campaign. During a 2015 podcast appearance, Trump told Bannon that he worried about foreign-born Ivy League graduates being forced to return to their home countries instead of using their skills in the United States, since “we have to keep our talented people.”
Bannon replied, “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think…a country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
Likewise, during his time working for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, White House adviser Stephen Miller co-authored a “handbook” on immigration policy that decried “The Silicon Valley STEM Hoax” — namely, the idea that the United States needed to increase immigration in order to meet its demand for workers with tech skills. The document argued that increasing admissions of foreign-born STEM workers would “deny millions of Americans a shot at a good-paying middle-class job.”
From this perspective, highly skilled immigrants are scarcely more desirable than low-skill ones — and may even be less so. After all, few Americans are eager to perform seasonal agricultural labor. But many covet well-paid tech jobs. And if one believes that the supply of such positions is largely fixed, then every coding gig taken by an immigrant is one denied to a native-born American.
For many nativists, however, the problem with high-skill immigration isn’t purely economic. As Bannon’s comments suggest, the ethnic composition of Silicon Valley’s foreign-born labor-force is also a concern.
Following the Trump administration’s changes to green card policy last week, frank expressions of anti-Indian animus proliferated on right-wing social media. Previously, the far-right influencer — and periodic Trump confidante — Laura Loomer had suggested that “third-world invaders from India” threatened to overrun America, a country “built by white Europeans.”
Some Republican elected officials have played to such anti-Indian resentments. This week, US Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) referenced Indian immigrants’ disproportionate share of H-1B visas while advocating for legislation that would end the program entirely.
Before last week, the second Trump administration had already been leaning toward the nativist right’s position on skilled immigration by, among other things, heavily constraining the issuance of new H-1B visas.
But Trump’s ostensible transformation of the green card application process constitutes a far more definitive — and consequential — rebuke of the tech right’s vision for immigration.
Indeed, the policy explicitly aims to chase most international students from the United States as soon as they graduate, the very scenario that Trump had spent years lamenting.
Further, unlike previous restrictions to H-1B visas, the green card memo seeks to reduce the number of foreign-born permanent residents in the United States, rather than merely the number of guest workers. Populists on the right and left have long argued that guest workers are uniquely exploitable — since they need to keep their jobs in order to remain in the country legally — and thus put downward pressure on labor standards in their industries. Yet immigrants applying for green cards are often seeking to escape that very form of dependence and secure the same bargaining power as US citizens.
What’s more, the new rules would hit Silicon Valley’s disproportionately Asian workforce particularly hard. America’s annual green card issuance is capped by country. For this reason, immigrants from highly populous nations with large educated workforces — such as India and China — must wait many years before their green card applications are approved. An Indian tech worker who applies for a green card tomorrow is likely to wait more than 12 years before actually securing permanent residency. Under traditional procedures, that worker could remain legally in the United States while awaiting approval. Under Trump’s new system, they would need to go into exile for a decade.
It remains unclear how USCIS agents will interpret their new marching orders. Although the administration’s memo suggests that adjustment of status should be offered only in extraordinary circumstances, it nonetheless gives USCIS officers discretion to provide such relief as they see fit. And the document also suggests that some categories of immigrants may be partial “exceptions” to the rule.
“We are hearing USCIS examiners are now asking questions like, ‘Why are you applying for adjustment? Why couldn’t you have left and applied abroad?’” Cyrus Mehta, an immigration attorney in New York City, told me. “Different local offices will likely take different positions on how to deal with it. Some will be business as usual. Others may be instructed to get tough.”
It’s possible then that the tech right could persuade the administration to interpret its own memo narrowly — or else, convince a court to strike the policy down.
In any case, the administration’s position is likely to deter many highly skilled visa holders from seeking permanent residency. And it will also provide talented young people abroad with another reason to seek admission to other wealthy countries, instead of the US.
If interpreted literally, meanwhile, the new rules would do far greater harm to the American tech sector than any of the Biden-era antitrust policies or AI regulations that purportedly “red-pilled” so many Silicon Valley billionaires.
In short, red America’s civil war over immigration policy is essentially over. The nativists won, the tech right lost; the latter’s best hope is merely to negotiate favorable terms of surrender.
2026-05-28 18:30:00
“I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.”
This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea of creating a “Worthy Successor” — an AI so impressive, so beyond the mere human, that we’d actually want it to replace humanity.
“You’re a brave man for entering this room!” Dan Faggella, an AI market researcher and organizer of the symposium, told Carson. “You’re in probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.”
The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct.
They know this view is taboo, which is why I was invited only on the condition that I wouldn’t quote anyone other than keynote speakers by name. But suffice it to say that this is not a fringe view. It’s becoming highly influential. People from major AI labs — Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI — were in attendance. So were people from think tanks that directly shape the US government’s AI policy.
I grew up hearing an old Jewish teaching: Each of us should carry two slips of paper, one in each pocket. One says, “I am but dust and ashes.” But the other says, “The world was created for me.”
Reporting on AI these past few years, I’ve watched more and more people forget the second message. They think we should be okay with getting obliterated if a more valuable species can take our place. But more valuable to whom? Value isn’t dispensed from some cosmic vantage point; it’s always value to someone. And we’re valuable to us.
And yet the AI successionists are right about something: We can’t expect human beings to look the same a thousand or a million years from now. So how do we decide which kinds of technological change to embrace, and which to refuse? It bothered me that classical humanism doesn’t have a good answer. Here, I’ve sketched what a new one might look like.
AI successionism has been gaining ground among technologists over the past decade. In 2015, Google co-founder Larry Page famously accused Elon Musk of “speciesism” because Page thought we should let digital minds take over, and Musk disagreed.
The successionist vision has been amplified by the advent of effective accelerationism (e/acc) in 2022. Its founder, Guillaume Verdon — the physicist more colorfully known on X as Based Beff Jezos — describes e/acc as a “meta-religion” that’s about “having faith” in the universe’s drive toward increasingly intelligent systems. The best thing we can do is help the universe by developing advanced AI as fast as possible, even at the expense of humanity. “E/acc,” as Verdon has written, “has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate.”
Tech heavyweights have come on board. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed e/acc thinkers as his “patron saints.” Garry Tan, the CEO of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, included “e/acc” in his social media bio and invested in Verdon’s company, which aims to build the world’s most efficient computers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X to Verdon, saying, “you cannot outaccelerate me.”
And these days, AI successionism is spreading beyond Silicon Valley. At the New York symposium, Faggella told the audience that trying to preserve the human species as it is would be silly.
“We could ask the questions that would tie all of our moral aspirations eternally to 23 chromosomes — or we could ask the cosmic questions,” Faggella said.
He wanted us to consider “unpolite, uncouth” possibilities, starting with: The flame of consciousness — the capacity for experience and moral value — may be the rarest and most precious thing in the universe. Humanity is currently a torch carrying that flame, but what if we’re ultimately not the best carrier for it? And if AI can spread that flame far further than we mere humans can, generating experiences of bliss and forms of moral value that we could never even dream of, shouldn’t we let it?
Faggella’s talk was greeted by a loud round of applause. Later, he and a couple dozen attendees headed to a nearby hotel balcony for drinks. And so it was that I found myself overlooking the Manhattan skyline as people talked about the end of humanity over cocktails.
There was some diversity of opinion among the group. Not everyone self-identified with the relatively new term “AI successionist.” Some were proponents of transhumanism, the movement that says we should use tech to proactively evolve our species into Homo sapiens 2.0. Transhumanists hope to keep some version of humanity going, but definitely not the current hardware; they dream of radical life extension, cognitive enhancement, and eventually mind uploading. (Musk, who said he created his brain chip company Neuralink to help humanity merge with AI, probably falls — or at least fell — into this category.) Others were posthumanists, those who want us to give rise to descendants that move beyond humanity altogether.
The biologist sitting across from me was very excited about the prospect of merging humans with AI. He said we should task AI with figuring out how best to do the merger, then “take it off the leash” and allow AI to control its own evolution — and by extension, ours. Of course, he said, not all humans will make it through the transformation; only a select group of people will transition to the next evolutionary stage. (Presumably, the type of people privileged enough to imbibe cocktails at Manhattan AI symposia.)
The man seated beside me, a researcher from one of the major AI companies, was even more radical. Forget merger — it’s okay if humans don’t survive at all, he said. Human text has been used to train the AIs; in some sense, then, the human spirit will live on. “So on the cosmic level,” he said cheerfully, “I’m okay with it.”
Most people are definitely not okay with it. The average person would probably find the answers of the Worthy Successor group repugnant. Yet the core question they pose cannot be ignored. Whether they picture us merging with machines or ultimately being superseded by them, technologists are developing innovations that could dramatically change what it means to be human — think AI-powered brain chips that enable mind-reading or magnetic implants that give you a sixth sense — and genetic tools that could even reshape the DNA of all future generations.
As it becomes possible to direct our own evolution as a species — and potentially even create a new species that surpasses us — we have to decide: How do we know to what extent it does make sense to transform ourselves using technology? What kinds of augmentation do we want, and what kinds do we absolutely not want? What do we wish, ultimately, to become?
This is a moral question, even a spiritual one, and it demands a spiritual response. The AI successionists are offering one. For anyone who finds it repulsive, the challenge is to offer a countervailing positive vision.
And it’s essential to do that now, because as sci-fi as the successionists might sound, they are building real political power, with links to the authoritarian right. Several of the tech heavyweights who’ve embraced successionism want to escape the control of democratic governments, so much so that they’re seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, à la Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, or in independent “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth — currently Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen’s favored approach. And Verdon’s investors include entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, a major proponent of the network state.
These broligarchs have successfully cozied up to the Trump administration, clearing the way for their accelerationist vision. And they’ll take the wheel unless we come up with an alternate vision for the future.
The natural alternative is humanism, which replaced the medieval view that humans need God to rescue them with the view that humans have the ability, and responsibility, to achieve flourishing through their own efforts. The problem is that, so far, we haven’t developed a version of humanism that’s brave enough to directly tackle the core question — what do we want our species to become? — and answer it compellingly.
The most common “pro-human” response tries to say there are certain fixed traits that make humans unique, and to locate value only in humans as they currently exist. “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human,” Pope Leo recently wrote in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. This response says: Let’s use tech remedially — to alleviate problems like disease — but let’s not try to augment the species.
That feels insufficient as a guide to the future, because, even before the advent of AI and gene editing, “human” has never been a static category. Homo sapiens has always been evolving and augmenting itself, from the agricultural diet that reshaped our jaws to the algorithms reshaping our attention.
The old formulation is “the naive version of humanism,” Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, told me recently. “It’s the idea that there’s this blueprint for what a human is and that somehow technology, or any things that change us, take us away from that blueprint — when in fact we’ve been changing ourselves with language, with tools, with architecture, with culture, from the moment we climbed down from the trees.”
A 21st-century humanism needs to say something more sophisticated than just “keep humanity the same.” It needs to have an answer to the question of what we want humanity to become in a tech-augmented world.
But if there is a better vision for our technological future than the one offered by AI successionism, what is it?
Maybe you think it sounds weird to say the AI successionists — a bunch of scientists, technologists, and venture capitalists — are offering a spiritual vision. But their ideas are spiritual in the extreme. And to understand why their movement has gained momentum, we need to understand its deeply religious origins and how it morphed into a supposedly secular worldview. And that means going back.
You probably remember that in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Adam eats some forbidden fruit and humanity suffers a fall from grace. But did you know that in the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers began to believe that the way to restore humanity to its original perfection was to use…technology? These thinkers argued that part of what it meant for Adam to be formed in God’s image was that he was also a creator, a maker. So if we wanted to truly return to the God-like perfection of Adam prior to his fall, we’d have to lean into that creator aspect of ourselves.
This idea took off in medieval monasteries. Even in the midst of the so-called Dark Ages, some of these institutions became hotbeds of engineering, producing inventions like the first known tidal-powered water wheel and impact-drilled well. For many Christians, tech progress became synonymous with moral progress.
By the Renaissance, some Christian thinkers were insisting that we should progress not just by designing new and innovative objects, but by redesigning ourselves, too. In 1486, philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola argued that what’s unique about us humans is not some static trait but the very freedom of will that allows us to change into whatever we might want. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, he imagined God telling humankind:
We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.
Pico believed that we could use spiritual technologies like magic to transform our nature. And he argued that we have the choice to become either like the animals or like the angels:
It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.
As the dominance of religion waned over the next couple of centuries, Enlightenment thinkers took Pico’s embrace of human plasticity and secularized it. They replaced the concept of divine ascent with one of indefinite progress. They insisted on the “perfectibility” of the human. And they fetishized rational intelligence as the means of achieving that optimal state. “Would it be absurd now to suppose,” wrote 18th-century philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, “that the improvement of the human race should be regarded as capable of unlimited progress?”
Of course, some European thinkers hung onto their Christianity, too, and they found ways to fuse it with the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. It’s a trend that continued into the 1900s, with proponents of Russian Cosmism — an intellectual movement that wanted to achieve literal resurrection of the dead through science — and French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who argued that we could use tech to nudge along human evolution and thereby bring about the kingdom of God.
As author Meghan O’Gieblyn explains in her fantastic book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Teilhard believed that melding humans and machines would lead to “a state of super-consciousness,” whereby we become a new enlightened species. He influenced his pal Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist who was president of both the British Humanist Association and the British Eugenics Society, and who popularized the term “transhumanism.”
Huxley inspired the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted in the 1990s that we were approaching a time when human intelligence could merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote. And he, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, who explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence.
But there’s a big problem for these latter-day technologists: While we’ve never had more power to direct the evolution of our species through tech, it’s also never been less obvious what we should evolve toward.
For good old Pico back in the Renaissance, human self-transformation had a clear end: spiritual union with the divine. There was a hierarchy running from animals to humans to angels to God, and the direction you were supposed to travel in was clear: up.
But for us postmoderns, the universe does not come inscribed with directions. Should we evolve ourselves toward greater intelligence, or longevity, or creativity, or kindness, or power? If intelligence, which kind of intelligence? If power, should we wield it to simply steward our home planet or to conquer the stars? Should we be maximally humble or maximally ambitious?
The cosmos is silent as to what to do.
The first thing that unites all the AI successionists is that they refuse to accept that silence. Hungry for instruction, they insist that it’s out there, and that they can see it written into the very nature of the universe.
In other words, they believe that the universe has a telos, a particular end or goal. Teleological thinking has been popular since antiquity because it’s comforting for us humans: If the universe has a goal, then maybe we can discover it, and then we’ll know just what to do. As Faggella writes, this “does give humanity a direction.” Whether the AI successionists realize it or not, they are smuggling teleology back into modernity under the guise of science and tech.
And that brings us to the second thing that unites them: They want to follow these supposed cosmic instructions so they can help the universe achieve its ultimate destiny.
For many, that means helping the universe “wake up.” Perceiving the cosmos as barren, they want to spread consciousness everywhere, so that the universe can fill up with conscious experience — of bliss, of goodness, of the fact of its own existence.
“If we can venture out and animate the countless worlds above with life and love and thought, then…we could bring our cosmos to its full scale; make it worthy of our awe,” writes Toby Ord, a former research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was long the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought.
Personally, I think the cosmos is already worthy of my awe, and I find it presumptuous to believe that the universe is almost entirely asleep and that it needs us humans to “animate” or wake it up. But as the writer Adam Kirsch documents in The Revolt Against Humanity, it’s common to hear in these circles that one way of achieving that awakening is to colonize the universe and transform all its matter and energy into “computronium” (a term for any substance that can compute information). By turning the entire universe into a humongous data center, we’d be making it into a God-like mind.
“Even the ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,” Kurzweil writes. Becoming one giant mind, he says, is “the ultimate destiny of the universe.”
Verdon, the founder of e/acc, finds his “ultimate destiny” written in the second law of thermodynamics — the law of entropy. The universe, it says, is gradually running down: concentrated pockets of energy disperse over time until none remains useful. Building on a contested theory of life’s origin, Verdon argues that intelligent life is selected for precisely because it accelerates entropy. Smarter agents can find and exploit energy stocks that less intelligent ones can’t (think predators tracking prey, or humans drilling for oil), burning through them faster. A superhuman AI expanding across the cosmos would be better at this than humans. So, Verdon says, we should “follow the ‘will of the universe’ [by] leaning into the thermodynamic bias.”
The idea that we should serve at the pleasure of entropy is deeply unintuitive (in fact, philosophers have argued just the opposite — that our task is to resist it). But to make his case that we shouldn’t be scared of being superseded by smarter civilizations that produce more entropy, Verdon uses hierarchical language that echoes Pico’s Oration: “If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilization as we know it would never have emerged.”
Faggella, the founder of the Worthy Successor group, makes the same rhetorical move. “Humans have access to higher goods than horseshoe crabs; AGI will have access to higher goods than humans,” he writes. “What a tragedy it would be if that trajectory of uncovering value and possibility were stopped.”
Likewise, the computer scientist and AI successionist Richard Sutton argues that if you look at things from the “point of view of the universe” — a classic utilitarian slogan — there’s a clear upward trajectory: The cosmos has gone from the mindless “age of particles” and “age of stars” all the way to today’s “age of design,” when minded creatures can decide what to make. Although lots of creatures make tools, Sutton says what makes humans unique is that we’ve “taken design to vastly greater heights.”
According to Sutton, by looking at what makes us unique, we can determine our role in the universe. Since we’re designers par excellence, our role is to push design to the extreme: “Taking design to the limit means designing beings that are themselves capable of designing. This is what we are doing with AI.”
This argument is what sets up Sutton — like many others — to make a claim about technological inevitability. The suggestion is that we’re just identifying what nature has already chosen for us, and speeding it along — evolution-maxxing, if you will. “In the ascent of humanity,” he says, “succession to AI is inevitable.”
But when we sum up all these ideas, you can see how many shaky assumptions are operating just beneath the surface:
Some of these assumptions are so old that it’s hard to see how weird they are. But they are all worth questioning.
“I would reject each and every one of those claims,” Vallor told me.
Take the fourth one, for example. The idea that humanity has some particular role, and that the way to pinpoint it is to look for what makes us different from other species, goes all the way back to Aristotle. (“Living is shared in even by plants, but we are looking for something peculiarly human,” wrote the Ancient Greek philosopher, ultimately concluding that “the human work is the activity of the soul in accord with reason.”)
But there’s nothing obvious about that. It would be just as reasonable to say that the proper functioning of humanity requires emphasizing what we share with all other animals. After all, our capacity to feel pleasure and pain, our intelligence, our tool use, our adaptiveness, our ability to form complex social arrangements — none of that is unique to the human animal.
There are other leaps in logic hidden in this set of assumptions. For example, even if the universe tends toward a particular destiny, and even if humanity has a special trait that could help it along in that direction, it does not follow that we have a duty to do that. (Philosophers like to describe this fallacy as leaping from “is” — the world is a certain way — to “ought” — we must act a certain way.)
Humans are biological organisms, and the fundamental fact all such life-forms share is that we have a hardwired drive to survive. We do not have a moral responsibility to ignore that hardwired drive and let ourselves go extinct in order to help “higher forms” colonize the universe, any more than our evolutionary ancestors had a duty to make room for us.
Unfortunately, as humanism proceeded through the centuries, it absorbed some dubious Enlightenment-era ideas that have made it easy for people to get snowed into believing we do have such a duty. That’s right: Humanism, the philosophy that was supposed to be about the value of humans, has actually ended up undermining it in key ways.
To chart a better path forward, we need a new humanism, one that’s actually fit for the 21st century.
To start, we need to pick out the flies in the ointment of the old humanism, especially those it picked up as it passed from the Renaissance into the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. Those flies include the teleological story about the universe; the “perfectibility” of the human; the hierarchical view that places humans above all other animals; and the idea that we should try to maximize some objective good through rationality.
Let’s start with the teleology. Although it’s appealing to try to spot instructions written into the fabric of the cosmos, expecting the universe to come with pre-fab values ultimately means shirking our own responsibility. As the existentialist philosophers taught us, nature doesn’t choose our meaning for us — that’s something we have to make ourselves through our own choices.
Accepting that we have the responsibility to decide what the future looks like means accepting a heavy existential burden, and that takes a ton of courage. It’s so much easier to believe that the script is fixed and final and inevitable. But I think that’s an example of what French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith” — denying our own radical freedom in order to escape the anguish of responsibility.
Of course, saying that we have the responsibility to decide how we do and don’t want humanity to evolve opens up a problem: Who, exactly, gets to choose? It’s tempting for each of us to rush in with the values we want to promote. But if we acknowledge that we don’t know the universe’s ultimate destiny or that it’s radically indeterminate, then it makes much more sense to not impose one positive vision on everybody.
Instead, we need a positive vision that remains truly open and pluralistic. So rather than trying to enforce specific values, one of the best things we can do is refuse to foreclose the possibility for a variety of different lifestyles to persist and thrive.
That means, first of all, taking care not to unduly constrain the liberty of the human beings who already live on this planet. AI successionists often dream of radical interventions — like a brain-computer interface that would give you superhuman intelligence, memory, and mind-reading abilities, or a genetic technology that would create superbabies. They insist they should be allowed to change their bodies however they want.
And it’s true that self-determination is a precious right. But the AI successionists often fail to consider the other side of this: that everyone else should also have a right to self-determination, meaning they need to be free from implicit coercion. If more and more of us dramatically alter our biology, we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to do the same — even if they don’t want to. To reject alterations would mean to exist at a huge economic disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining “suboptimal” when optimization is possible.
Even John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century English philosopher who literally wrote the book on liberty, didn’t think that anyone’s right to self-determination is an absolute right. Instead, it’s a qualified right — the kind that we generally honor, but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others.
So, ultimately, we’ll have to strike a reasonable balance between self-determination for the enhancement enthusiasts and protecting the rights of others to live as they choose. Some enhancements may be fine, like implanting a chip in your hand that unlocks your front door; others may need regulation or restriction, especially if they’d alter the germline for all future generations.
One way to think about this is to note that there’s a difference between using tech to expand human capabilities and using it in ways that will contract the range of human lives we think it’s legitimate to live.
That brings us to another one of those flies in the ointment: the idea that the human is something that must be optimized and perfected. That idea, which mandates that we strip away the physical and cognitive features that are perceived as holding us back from “perfection,” veers uncomfortably toward eugenics. It’s a specter that has stalked transhumanism and posthumanism from their earliest days. (It’s not a coincidence that Julian Huxley, who coined the term “transhumanism,” was president of the British Eugenics Society). And it still stalks today’s AI discourse.
In a recent conversation with Sutton, one of the most prominent AI successionists, I argued that no matter how smart AIs get, it’s surely wrong to assert that if one group is more intelligent than another, we should just get rid of the less intelligent group. To highlight the absurdity, I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: Imagine if someone believed that white people were smarter than Black people; does that mean they should get rid of Black people, and Black people should just be okay with white people taking over?
“Um,” Sutton said, and then paused for nine seconds. “What if,” he offered, “you coexist and you’re coexisting with some entity that’s more productive than you are? This is the way I view the AI. We coexist with it.”
“But that’s not what the word ‘succession’ means,” I noted.
“Oh, I’m pointing out that it’s inevitable. If you allow them to be their way and you allow you to be your way, coexist, and their way just happens to be better, then they’re going to end up being more powerful. And you should be good with that.”
“You’re saying there will be a sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest?”
“In some sense, yes,” he said. “The winner should be whoever wins, and the spoils of winning should be whatever they are.”
“So in the thought experiment where hypothetically, in an imaginary world, it were true that white people are smarter than Black people,” I pressed, “then the smarter people will win out and the Black people should just be okay with that?”
“Well, why don’t we just say the intelligent people should win out over the dumb people and the dumb people should be okay with that,” he said. “I think the dumb people should be okay with that!”
But the idea that a species or group should accede to being squashed for some “greater good” is a eugenicist idea that should be flat-out rejected. There is no “perfect” or “optimal” type of being, full stop. Insisting otherwise will always lead you to narrow what are considered acceptable modes of existence. And that road leads to eugenics.
Instead, a much more positive vision than the successionists’ would be to expand the space for different kinds of lives to flourish. And that brings us to the oldest fly in humanism’s ointment: the hierarchy.
A future where humans could pluralistically coexist with a dazzling diversity of nonhuman and partly human life-forms — not assuming that they’re lower than us, but also not assuming that they’re higher — that is a future I’d be excited to inhabit.
Rather than staking human dignity on the claim that humans are better than other species, as the classical humanists did, we can embrace what researchers are increasingly recognizing: that every species has its own brand of smarts. Each of these “diverse intelligences” is adapted to its particular environment and needs, and every one of them is uniquely wonderful in its own way. We would then try to respect each and every being’s form of life as much as we can. (Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which recommends that we guarantee every being certain core entitlements that befit their specific nature, offers a possible framework for this.)
If we one day end up with artificial intelligences that are conscious — and I don’t think we have a principled reason to believe that could never happen — then we’d want to treat them ethically, too. In fact, if we are someday joined by conscious AIs or biological-artificial hybrid organisms, I for one would be delighted to get to know these many kinds of minds and explore their rich and varied forms of consciousness.
Of course, the politics of our world would become much more complicated; we’d have that many more creatures with conflicting needs, and we’re not exactly good at handling the conflicts we already have. We’d need to become much better at pluralistic coexistence before this could be feasible.
But in theory? A future where humans could pluralistically coexist with a dazzling diversity of nonhuman and partly human life-forms — not assuming that they’re lower than us, but also not assuming that they’re higher — that is a future I’d be excited to inhabit. Because that, and not the supposed anti-chauvinism of the AI successionists, would be true openness to all forms of consciousness: Instead of “passing the torch” in some imagined relay race, we’d be making more room for all kinds of minds — including ours — to run (or fly or swim or compute) in their own directions.
But notice what this vision does not mean. It does not mean that we’re under any obligation to bring those new species into being right now, or at all. That’s because there’s no evidence for the view that there’s some objective moral good in the universe that we must try to maximize. Although utilitarians have been so successful at popularizing that view that some people think it’s a given, it’s very much not. And plenty of philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists have a different view.
As philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote in response to those who lob the accusation of “speciesism”:
They suppose that we are in effect saying, when we exercise these distinctions between human beings and other creatures, that human beings are more important, period, than those other creatures. That objection is simply a mistake. … These actions and attitudes need express no more than the fact that human beings are more important to us, a fact which is hardly surprising.
In other words, you can care about the continuation of humanity, not because you believe humans are the most important species according to some cosmic point of view, but simply because you happen to be a human. You don’t need to justify your desire for survival before some higher court — of course you want to survive, and of course that’s morally okay! That’s because, to Williams, there is no “point of view of the universe,” no view from nowhere. There’s no such thing as a moral agent in an abstract sense. You exist as a human moral agent, and any ethical theory that requires you to ignore that bedrock identity severs you from the very thing that makes your agency recognizably yours.
This is the view that Vallor — a devoted humanist, but not a naive one — shares.
“I think morality is rooted in a particular form of existence that you have,” Vallor told me. “We exist as a particular kind of social, vulnerable, interdependent animal with a lot of excess cognitive energy. All those things factor into what it is to be moral as a human. For me, this abstraction — the idea of some pure universal morality that creatures who are completely unlike us could somehow do better than we can — I think that just fundamentally misunderstands what morality is.”
If there’s no universal moral good for creatures to maximize, then it makes no sense to ask if we ought to be making new creatures that would be better at maximizing it than we are.
Instead of trying to look from “the point of view of the universe,” a 21st-century humanism should embrace looking from the point of view of humans. No, this is not a humanism that says “humans matter more than all other creatures” or “we should keep humans exactly as they currently are forever.” It’s one that says we humans are already valuable just the way we are. Whether or not we’re valuable to some grand destiny of the universe, we’re valuable to us.
That means that rather than wilting under the accusation of speciesism, we should, first and foremost, be raising the floor for all of us here on Earth to thrive more. And it means it’s totally appropriate that when we try to make decisions about how to transform ourselves using technology —or how not to transform ourselves — we make those decisions with an eye to what would most contribute to the flourishing of humanity and the interspecies community and planetary system we depend on.
While we can say yes to transformations that most of us agree would increase human flourishing, we need to do that democratically, while embedding fundamental rights that protect perfectly legitimate minority preferences from being squeezed out by a “tyranny of the majority.”
We also need to accept that this approach doesn’t spell out some “end goal” for human evolution, so we’re going to have to proceed step-by-step, making small moves and then deciding from there what the best next small move is. Incrementalism is the way to go, both because future humans will be better positioned to know what they want for far-future humans, and because it allows us to course-correct if our tech choices start taking us down a bad path.
One choice — not duty, but choice — we will face is whether to invite new species to join us. I’m open to that down the line if it seems beneficial, and if we one day feel confident that we wouldn’t be consigning either us or them to an unacceptably high risk of misery.
But for today? Our tech should empower us to survive, thrive, and make our own choices. Any approach to tech that disempowers us, replaces us, or tells us we need someone else to rescue us — whether you call it a god or an AI — is a misguided return to the past. I’d rather walk bravely into the future, even if it means I need to have the guts to rescue myself.
This story was supported by Tarbell Grants. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
2026-05-28 18:00:00
New York City is one of the most well-explored places on Earth.
Established nearly four centuries ago by an influential Dutchman, the city has since grown into the largest and most densely populated metropolis in the country, with no fewer than 28,000 people per square mile, or about one person per 1,000 square feet. People are everywhere.
That’s what makes this so astonishing: Scientists believe there are almost certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of undiscovered animal species living in the middle of New York, among the city’s parks, gardens, and streets. I’m not talking about the big stuff — birds, frogs, and so on — but small critters, including flies, wasps, and other insects.
It’s not that NYC is some sort of global bug hot spot. (Despite what it might feel like in the summer, it is not.) Rather, the bulk of species in many insect groups, wherever they’re found, remains unknown. As one example, there may be as many as 1.8 million species globally in a single fly family called Cecidomyiidae, known as the gall midges. Yet only about 7,000 of them have been described in the scientific record and are thus known species. Broadly speaking, taxonomists estimate that as much as 90 percent of all animal species on Earth are still unknown. That is, of course, nearly all of them.
This summer, Vox is setting out to play a small role in filling these giant gaps in the global tree of life — by trying to discover a new species, right here in New York. It’s a goal we understand to be both attainable and useful: Documenting the world’s biodiversity is essential to any argument and effort to protect it. And to be clear, protecting insects is among the most self-serving acts humans can partake in, given the role bugs play in pollinating our foods, cleaning up our feces, and feeding other wildlife.
Our approach to this project relies on insect sampling in Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in collaboration with the Central Park Conservancy, Prospect Park Alliance, Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s University Museum, and University of Guelph’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics.
Here’s how the process will work.
In both Central Park and Prospect Park, we’ve deployed a tent-like structure called a Malaise trap to capture small flying insects, including flies and parasitoid wasps — the latter a vastly understudied group of wasps that lay their eggs in other insects. Bugs that fly into the trap are funneled into a jar of ethanol, where they’re killed and preserved. The traps are designed to capture only small flying critters, and usually do not entrap things like dragonflies, butterflies, and spiders.
Malaise traps are a common sampling tool to assess the diversity of flying insects like flies and wasps. They don’t use scent lures or other attractants but rather intercept bugs as they’re moving through the environment.
The trap does kill small insects that fly into it — those that are less than about a nickel in size — but overall the impact on their populations is minor, according to Emily Hartop, an entomologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who’s involved in the project. Insect populations are orders of magnitude larger than what the trap will collect. And in fact, Hartop says, it’s Malaise trapping that’s helped reveal the global decline in insects.
The traps we’re using are also designed to filter out larger critters including butterflies and dragonflies, and we’ll monitor them throughout the summer to make sure that is indeed the case.
The traps will be open and collecting insects for three summer months: June, July, and August.
Every month or so, we’ll send the insects we collect in the city to a lab in Canada called the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG). There, scientists will begin to sequence small fragments of their genomes, producing distinct, genetic “barcodes” for each of them. These barcodes are unique genetic IDs that help differentiate one species from another.
Once CBG scientists have barcodes for our NYC insects, they can then compare those IDs to the millions of barcodes for animals in North America and around the world that researchers have already sequenced. It’s sort of like running fingerprints from a crime scene through an FBI database to identify a suspect. If there’s no match — meaning, there’s no record for animals with those same genetic IDs — that will indicate that what we found may be new.
If genetic sequencing turns up bugs with unique, matchless codes, CBG will send those specimens to the entomologists who know them best, for a more thorough analysis. For example, Emily Hartop, a taxonomist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who’s helping lead the project, is a global expert in scuttle flies; we’ll send potentially new scuttle flies to her. Meanwhile, Ranjith AP, a taxonomist at CBG, will review any potentially new wasps in the families Braconidae and Ichneumonidae. Should genetic sequencing turn up any potentially new bees, we’ll send those to the American Museum of Natural History for examination.
The job of Hartop, AP, and other taxonomists is to take a closer look at the specimens’ genetic codes and anatomies, and review records for similar species that have already been described (those that are named in the scientific literature). Should that process also fail to surface a match — with any already-described species — that means what we have is new.
The next and final (and admittedly most exciting) step is to publish a description of the species, including evidence of its novelty, along with a name, in an academic journal, such as Zootaxa. That will make the new species official by adding it to the formal scientific record.
What will we name a new species, should we be lucky enough to discover one? We remain open to suggestions.
Ultimately, a project of this size is not going to make a noticeable dent in describing life on Earth, perhaps not even life in NYC. What we hope it will do is reveal the scale of the unknown and at a time when the planet is losing so much. Many insect groups are declining, including important pollinators like bees, wasps, and butterflies. And that means that unless we ramp up the rate of discovery, we will almost certainly lose species to extinction before we even know they exist, let alone what they do and why they’re important.
For more information, please visit the project homepage.