Your bag is empty.
Welcome to Fair Play, a column exploring the shifting dynamics of sex, dating and culture by Playboy Senior Editor Magdalene Taylor.
This week, a number of current and former employees of AI company Anthropic said that there is a considerable chance that AI could straight up just kill everyone. As Anthropic’s alignment science lead Evan Hubinger wrote on X, “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
Well, alright. What the hell do we even say to that?
In the face of our potential demise, we have a few options. The first, of course, is to give up entirely and succumb to nihilism. The second would be to somehow fight, which sounds totally noble but improbable beyond deciding to disengage with AI on a personal level. The third option, however, is radically simple: we have got to start fucking more.
It might sound like I’m being glib or laughing in the face of potential mass death, but I am completely serious in my suggestion. If we are all going to die at the hands of a computer (not a very chic death, to be honest), we might as well embrace the things that make us fundamentally human. We should relish in the delights of the body: eating fruit and butter and bread, lingering long walks, late nights spent dancing with our friends, and yes, fun and pleasurable sex.
God, I wish I wasn’t even on my computer right now writing this. I should be at the damn club! Or an oyster bar! Or laying in a river bed of cool mountain water! But the odds are still slim enough that, for better or worse, we all have to keep working. It is nevertheless a reminder, though, that it’d do us all some good to do a little extra living in the meantime.
When I say we should be having a lot more sex, that is really what I’m referring to: living, in the real world, with real people in real time. And maybe there is even some possibility wrapped up in there that doing so could fix some things. Perhaps if we were focused a bit more on each other and the horizon beyond the screen, AI’s relevance in our worlds would diminish. I don’t need AI to look at the person in front of me.
Ultimately, I’m the opposite of a doomer. I reject the catastrophizing so commonly shared online. Despite all the potential future horrors that are thrown around—climate upheaval, famine, war—I tend to believe we’re going to keep on kicking. A few weeks back, for example, a woman on Threads posted that they cannot continue to be friends with someone who is having a baby. “You have to be so selfish and/or stupid to have a child right now,” she wrote. “Everyone currently living is going to die a premature death, caused by war, climate change, pollution, the monopolisation of our vital resources, lack of access to healthcare and education, and straight up fascism.”
Really, though? Everyone? I don’t wish to downplay the global plights of humanity—I’m certainly not a skeptic about the reality of the issues she’s listed above—but I don’t think it’s quite true that we’re all going to die from them. This grand narrative of apocalyptic decline does not quite mirror reality. The majority of us who die a premature death will probably succumb to heart disease exacerbated by metabolic dysfunction and behavioral factors, the most common cause of death worldwide. And 14 percent of people globally today die of infectious disease, less than half the number in 1980. According to the World Meteorological Association, weather and climate-related disasters have increased over the last 50 years, and associated economic losses have risen sevenfold. Deaths, meanwhile, have decreased threefold since 1970.
And, hey, maybe she and I are both wrong. Maybe AI will really be the one thing to kill us all. But in the meantime, I am going to continue to… live my life. In the wise words of the Bloodhound Gang, we ain’t nothin’ but mammals. So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel while there is still a human-made Discovery Channel to watch.
