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In 2023 the heads of OpenAI and Google DeepMind signed a warning that ranked AI's extinction risk alongside pandemics and nuclear war, yet in a 2025 Pew survey half of Americans said AI will worsen people's ability to form meaningful relationships, and only 5% expected it to improve

AI's leaders warned of extinction while ordinary people worried about friendship and work, and thinkers from Norbert Wiener to Hans Jonas help explain why both are moral questions.

By Graeme Brown · October 24, 2026

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In 2014, customers at a Florida Starbucks paid for the next person's coffee in at least 378 consecutive transactions, but when the chain started again the next day, a local blogger deliberately ended it, saying it was guilt, not generosity

Research suggests a meaningful life and a happy one are not the same thing: the people who rate their lives most meaningful often report more stress and worry, because meaning grows out of the very commitments that make an ordinary day harder

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In a 2010 study of 2,250 adults, minds were wandering in nearly half the moments people were asked about, and what they were thinking about explained more of their happiness than what they were doing

Parents usually feel closer to their grown children than their children feel to them, and it isn't a sign something went wrong but proof something went right, because a child who needs you a little less is exactly what you spent 20 years raising

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Descartes said animals were machines. Scientists now say the question isn't whether they feel.

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Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Epictetus: “Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions, which they form concerning thing.”

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In 2023 the heads of OpenAI and Google DeepMind signed a warning that ranked AI's extinction risk alongside pandemics and nuclear war, yet in a 2025 Pew survey half of Americans said AI will worsen people's ability to form meaningful relationships, and only 5% expected it to improve

Explore the library

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Philosophers A–Z

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From the magazine

In 2014, customers at a Florida Starbucks paid for the next person's coffee in at least 378 consecutive transactions, but when the chain started again the next day, a local blogger deliberately ended it, saying it was guilt, not generosity

In a 2010 study of 2,250 adults, minds were wandering in nearly half the moments people were asked about, and what they were thinking about explained more of their happiness than what they were doing

Descartes said animals were machines. Scientists now say the question isn't whether they feel.

Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Epictetus: “Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions, which they form concerning thing.”

New to philosophy? Start here.