Everything You Need To Know About AI

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AI is everywhere right now — in the news, in pop culture, and in the constant claim that it’s either going to take everyone’s job or kill us all, with the heads of firms like OpenAI and Anthropic floating a supposed “10% chance” that artificial intelligence wipes out humanity. Imam Marc Manley pushes back on that framing: AI cannot act independently of human input, so any doomsday scenario is really a human being instructing a machine to do something — and that’s already happening today, with AI already deployed by companies like Palantir in real theaters of war and even genocide, which means we don’t need to wait for some future breakthrough for AI to have deadly consequences. He argues the “10% doom” talk conveniently surfaces right as these companies chase trillion-dollar valuations and face real competition from Chinese open-source models that now run on ordinary consumer hardware instead of massive, water-hungry data centers — a shift that threatens the subscription-and-API business model those companies are built on, and a plausible reason to manufacture a boogeyman that keeps people paying and paying attention. Drawing on his own experience running local AI models (from the Chinese company Alibaba’s Qwen line) on his personal laptop, he explains that an “agent” is simply a script that runs in a loop, executing small tasks and passing results along — not a sentient actor, but something bounded by guardrails, however sophisticated. He’s used that setup to automate a large share of Middle Ground’s administrative work, from updating the website and prayer times to drafting the newsletter and social media, simply by giving it plain-language instructions. His conclusion: AI itself isn’t inherently good or evil, but the companies and marketing campaigns hyping its dangers are worth real scrutiny — and the panic they’re selling may be less about safety than about justifying another massive transfer of wealth.

“In the short term humans don’t change unless they see a crisis. My only question is: how big of a crisis do we need for people to wake up and change their ways?”