Weekly Roundup
Reading, watching, & listening list
FAIR and the AI Revolution: Guiding Technology That Serves Our Shared Humanity
For FAIR’s Substack, Executive Director Monica Harris writes about how we can influence whether artificial intelligence will serve our highest values or our lowest impulses, and FAIR’s role in this emerging landscape.
Our commitment to nonpartisan, pro-human principles provides exactly the unifying framework that AI ethics desperately needs. While others approach AI through the lens of Left versus Right, or one identity group versus another, we approach this technology through our shared humanity. This perspective is precisely what our divided nation needs as we navigate the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence.
Righteous Lies: When DEI Justifies Falsehood
For Discourse Magazine, FAIR Advisor Erec Smith writes about how false testimony is a trend among activists for whom moral certainty overrides factual responsibility.
It does not matter that I, too, want justice for the downtrodden. What matters is that my tactics align too closely with the status quo, with the negative connotations of “cishet white males.” The fact that I am Black barely came up in the DEI officers’ response to my testimony, and when it did, no real significance was attributed to it. Readers may come away thinking I am a white liar, or a nonwhite liar who wants to be white, thus damaging my ethos, which is the entire point.
This will not do. We cannot allow justice to be redefined as whatever advances an ideological agenda. That’s too simplistic. A society in which people are punished for things they didn’t do, where truth is subordinated to narrative, is not simply wrong and illiberal. It’s dangerous.
Stop Telling Kids the World Is a Terrible Place
For The Next 30 Years, FAIR Advisor Robert Pondiscio adapts a chapter from his forthcoming book, Mind the Children: How to Think About the Youth Mental Health Collapse.
In K–12 education, this trend toward portraying the world as broken and unjust has become especially visible in the literature we assign and the civic posture we model. A century ago, textbooks like the McGuffey Readers instilled values like thrift, modesty, and perseverance. But beginning in the 1960s and accelerating over the last two decades, young adult literature has veered sharply into darker, more pathologized territory. Novels like Thirteen Reasons Why, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Hate U Give have become classroom staples. Many schools now treat themes of depression, abuse, suicide, and systemic injustice as not only appropriate but essential to engage students and prepare them for the world.
Trump’s Attacks Threaten Much More Than Harvard
For The Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff writes about the potential consequences if the government succeeds in bullying the richest university into submission.
In other words, a state may not sidestep the First Amendment and unlawfully browbeat private actors into doing their bidding. Likewise, the government may not reject thousands of blameless foreign students, demand mass surveillance of political speech, or micromanage hiring and admissions on threat of bankruptcy.
The irony here is rich. Conservatism once warned against the dangers of unilateral executive power. But today’s Republican White House happily wields that very power to crush its cultural rivals.
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After strenuous efforts to get Donald Trump elected, FAIR now publishes Lukianoff's article warning about the political destruction of free speech in the university. Please stop trying to appear even handed.