The media needs to start taking AGI seriously

An essay for Nieman Lab's 2025 Predictions series

Hello — I hope you’re all having a very happy holidays. Transformer is still on a break (we’ll be back next week), but to tide you over I thought I’d share highlights from an essay I recently wrote for Nieman Lab, on the need for journalists to start reckoning with the possibility of AGI.

In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Senate that man-made climate change was real, imminent, and potentially catastrophic. It was a perfect opportunity for the media to start covering the issue with the importance and urgency it deserved. Yet journalists did not rise to the occasion. For decades, they peddled both-sidesism, failing to take seriously the scientific consensus and not adequately discussing how to tackle the problem.

In recent years, newsrooms have begun to cover the climate crisis properly. But that delay has been costly: Journalism’s failure has undoubtedly led the public and policymakers to take the issue much less seriously than they should have. Had we been faster to heed Hansen’s warnings, perhaps we wouldn’t find ourselves in such a mess today.

I fear we may be making the same mistake with artificial general intelligence.

Bring up AGI to most journalists and you’ll get an eyeroll and a scoff. The idea of imminent, human-level AI, many say, is just a marketing stunt dreamt up by tech executives. It’s a sci-fi fantasy — certainly not something to take seriously.

But talk to the people actually working at AI companies and you get a different story … These people are sincerely trying to build computers that can do everything humans can do. And they expect to succeed soon … we ought to seriously consider the possibility that they are right.

If such change is on the horizon, the public ought to be involved. But right now, almost everyone seriously engaging with the possibility of imminent AGI works at an AI company. In the absence of regulation, these companies are able to make unilateral decisions that will affect all of humanity. That is not acceptable.

Journalism must step up. Rather than treat AGI as a fringe concern, we must be proactive and ambitious: taking the possibility seriously, considering the implications, and starting a public, democratic conversation.

The window for journalism to rise to this challenge is still open, but it’s closing fast. In 2025, we’ll either see newsrooms step up to help society grapple with these questions, or we’ll watch as some of history’s most consequential decisions are made without adequate public scrutiny or debate. We can either repeat the mistakes of climate coverage, or make a concerted effort to do better.

The choice, and responsibility, is ours.

You can read the full piece here. Have a very happy new year, and see you next week.