The shared dream of techno-optimizers, feminist liberators, and the kindly grandpa from Jurassic Park is getting closer to reality.
Zoning Alone
A hundred-year-old experiment in telling people what to build and where is part of why Americans have become so isolated. The Supreme Court may soon bring it to an end — and help bring back real neighborhoods.
The Pro-Human AI Declaration
A statement endorsed by The New Atlantis
In March 2026, a coalition of interest groups and individuals, organized by the Future of Life Institute, issued the following declaration at HumanStatement.org.
As companies race to develop and deploy AI systems, humanity faces a fork in the road. One path is a race to replace: humans replaced as creators, counselors, caregivers and companions, then in most jobs and decision-making roles, concentrating ever more power in unaccountable institutions and their machines. An influential fringe even advocates altering or replacing humanity itself. This race to replace poses risks to societal stability, national security, economic prosperity, civil liberties, privacy, and democratic governance. It also imperils the human experiences of childhood and family, faith, and community.
A remarkably broad coalition rejects this path, united by a simple conviction: artificial intelligence should serve humanity, not the reverse. There is a better path, where trustworthy and controllable AI tools amplify rather than diminish human potential, empower people, enhance human dignity, protect individual liberty, strengthen families and communities, preserve self-governance and help create unprecedented health and prosperity. This path demands that those who wield technological power be accountable to human values and needs, in support of human flourishing.
1. Keeping Humans in Charge
Human Control Is Non-Negotiable: Humanity must remain in control. Humans should choose how and whether to delegate decisions to AI systems.
Meaningful Human Control: Humans should have authority and capacity to understand, guide, proscribe, and override AI systems.
No Superintelligence Race: Development of superintelligence should be prohibited until there is broad scientific consensus that it can be done safely and controllably, and there is strong public buy-in.
Off-Switch: Powerful AI systems must have mechanisms that allow human operators to promptly shut them down.
No Reckless Architectures: AI systems must not be designed so that they can self-replicate, autonomously self-improve, resist shutdown, or control weapons of mass destruction.
Independent Oversight: Highly autonomous AI systems where controllability is not obvious require pre-development review and independent oversight: genuine authority to understand, prohibit, and override, not industry self-regulation.
Capability Honesty: AI companies must provide clear, accurate and honest representations of their systems’ capabilities and limitations.
2. Avoiding Concentration of Power
No AI Monopolies: AI monopolies that concentrate power, stifle innovation, and imperil entrepreneurship must be avoided.
Shared Prosperity: The benefits and economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly.
No Corporate Welfare: AI corporations should not be exempted from regulatory oversight or receive government bailouts.
Genuine Value Creation: AI development should prioritize solving real problems and creating authentic value.
Democratic Authority Over Major Transitions: Decisions about AI’s role in transforming work, society, and civic life require democratic support, not unilateral corporate or government decree.
Avoid Societal Lock-In: AI development must not severely limit humanity’s future options or irreversibly limit our agency over our future.
3. Protecting the Human Experience
Defense of Family and Community Bonds: AI should not supplant the foundational relationships that give life meaning — family, friendship, faith communities, and local connections.
Child Protection: Companies must not be allowed to exploit children or undermine their wellbeing with AI interactions creating emotional attachment or leverage.
Right to Grow: AI companies should not be allowed to stunt children’s physical, mental or social growth or deprive them of essential experiences for healthy development during critical periods.
Pre-Deployment Safety Testing: Like drugs, chatbots must undergo pre-deployment testing for increased suicidal ideation, exacerbation of mental health disorders, escalation of acute crisis situations, and other known harms.
Bot-or-Not Labeling: AI-generated content that could reasonably be mistaken for human-generated must be clearly labeled as such.
No Deceptive Identity: AI should clearly and correctly identify itself as artificial, nonhuman, and not a professional, and it should not claim experiences it lacks.
No Behavioral Addiction: AIs should not cause addiction or compulsive use through manipulation, sycophantic validation, or attachment formation.
4. Human Agency and Liberty
No AI Personhood: AI systems must not be granted legal personhood, and AI systems should not be designed such that they deserve personhood.
Trustworthiness: AI must be transparent, accountable, reliable, and free from perverse private or authoritarian interests.
Liberty: AI must not curtail individual liberty, freedom of speech, religious practice, or association.
Data Rights and Privacy: People should have power over their personal data, with rights to access, correct, and delete it from active systems, AI training sets, and derived inferences.
Psychological Privacy: AI should not be allowed to exploit data about the mental or emotional states of users.
Avoiding Enfeeblement: AI systems should be designed to empower, rather than enfeeble their users.
5. Responsibility and Accountability for AI Companies
No Liability Shield: AI must not be able to act as a liability shield, preventing those deploying it from being legally responsible for their actions.
Developer Liability: Developers and deployers bear legal liability for defects, misrepresentation of capabilities, and inadequate safety controls, with statutes of limitation that account for harms emerging over time.
Personal Liability: There should be criminal penalties for executives responsible for prohibited child-targeted systems or ones causing catastrophic harm.
Independent Safety Standards: AI development shall be governed by independent safety standards and rigorous oversight.
No Regulatory Capture: AI companies must not be allowed undue influence over rules that govern them.
Failure Transparency: If an AI system causes harm, it should be possible to ascertain why as well as who is responsible.
AI Loyalty: AI systems performing functions in professions with fiduciary duties, such as health, finance, law, or therapy, must fulfill all of those duties, including mandated reporting, duty of care, conflict of interest disclosure, and informed consent.
Monday, September 21, 2026 · The Nature of War Debate
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A world war is raging at this moment, with millions dying every week on fronts that never make the news. The soldiers are ants — and their war may explain our own.
The Thesis — Mark W. Moffett, The Washington Post
THE ARGUMENT
In the Washington Post, Smithsonian entomologist Mark W. Moffett — who earned his doctorate under E.O. Wilson — opens with a jolt: a world war is raging at this very moment, millions dying each week along battlefronts that never make front-page news. He means the Argentine ants, whose wars, he argues, cast surprising light on human conflict. As Moffett documented in The Human Swarm, one of their supercolonies stretches from the Mexican border past San Francisco, with others along some 2,000 miles of European coast — and where rival supercolonies meet, the borders are battlefronts. His larger claim: ants and humans are the rare species that form anonymous societies, strangers cooperating under shared markers — chemical for them, cultural for us — and with sharply marked societies come sharply defended borders. The us-versus-them that fuels war, on this view, runs deeper than politics.
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THE ANSWER
Rutgers anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, after four decades studying war’s origins, argues in “War Is Not Part of Human Nature” (Scientific American) that the biological story fails on the evidence. Humans have an obvious capacity for war, he writes, but no hardwired propensity: homicide is not war — war is social, groups organized to kill other groups — and if it expressed an inborn tendency, the archaeological record should show it everywhere, always. It doesn’t: whole regions, including the American Southwest and Great Plains, show no evidence of war until roughly 2,000 years ago. On this view, war emerged with changing social conditions in recent millennia — an institution, not an instinct. Ants may be prisoners of their chemistry; we are not.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Nobody disputes that the ants are at war; the fight is over whether the analogy travels. Moffett’s case is structural: ants and humans solved the same problem — cooperation among strangers — and inherited the same shadow, the defended border. Ferguson’s case is historical: a true instinct doesn’t skip whole continents for millennia. And the stakes are the largest imaginable. If Moffett is right, hostility to outsiders is the standing price of anonymous society, and peace is a discipline we must maintain against our grain. If Ferguson is right, war is an invention — and what was invented can, in principle, be unmade. Read Moffett for the vertigo; read Ferguson for the reprieve; then decide which one you find harder to believe.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
When you feel that flash of us-versus-them — at a border, a stadium, a comment section — is that the ant in you, or a habit you were taught?
One in 10 Americans experiences migraine headaches, which can be incapacitating. But there may be a light on the other side of your blackout curtains. Currently, doctors diagnose migraine based on patient description and treat the headaches based on frequency—episodic or chronic (more than 15 days per month). Treatment decisions are “worse than trial and error,” clinical professor of neurology Robert Cowan told Stanford Medicine. “It’s darts in the dark.” What’s more, guidelines recommend preventative, daily medication only for people with chronic migraine. But including severity may improve treatment options. In the largest study to date to categorize migraine patients, Cowan and data analyst Jaiashre Sridhar used functional MRI data to identify two biological subtypes. One group of patients had more severe headaches—they tended to last longer and caused more bothersome symptoms (nausea, noise sensitivity, etc.).
Biblio File: What to Read Now — Autumn 2026
New releases on our shelves and in our bookbags.
In Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes from Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown(Sourcebooks), science journalist Roberta Kwok, ’00, witnesses the “messy middle” of science between researchers’ initial query and possible final discovery. The nine projects she investigates, from sex-role reversal in male guardian frogs to a quest to find an exomoon, depict the slow, frustrating, and focused work of scientists.
