Essay by **Asma Mhalla**, political scientist, published on **September 20, 2026** on her Substack newsletter *Dangerous Ideas* (~2,300 words, five parts titled in English), written on returning from a European tour — Madrid, Milan, Brussels — where within the same hour she was discussing AI, Meloni, the AfD, and sovereignty. She argues that September's AI sequence and the rise of nationalist parties are **two faces of the same anxiety**: the fear of becoming superfluous. **(A)** The cross-cutting observation: the viral resignation of **Jacob Coxon** (ex-OpenAI/Anthropic) on September 9, **Hinton** estimating that there is *"maybe a year"* left to put guardrails in place, divided executives (Amodei, Altman, Huang) — and, at the ballot box, **AfD at 43.8%** in Saxony-Anhalt, Vannacci's **Futuro Nazionale** around **7.5%**, Le Pen at **34-36%** in the first round. She withholds judgment on the probability of extinction and defers to the rapport international de sécurité de l'IA. **(B)** The mechanism: the word *replacement*, which first denotes a sensation — *"something could carry on without me"* —, and **retrofuturism**, read through **Jeffrey Herf**'s *Reactionary Modernism* (1984): the authoritarian right never fought technology, it detached it from the market and handed it to the nation. *"Technology is never the enemy. It is spoils."* When AI's producers say they no longer know how to govern it, they supply the vocabulary (control, frontier, sovereignty) to those who promise restoration. The thesis is not an electoral causality but a **narrative compatibility**. On the European side, extends [[wallace-wells-nyt-magazine-ai-populism-altman-backlash-no-one-ready-2026-05-08]].
#fear of becoming superfluous#replacement#narrative compatibility
Essay published on **Gates Notes** on **August 26, 2026** by **Bill Gates**, co-founder of **Microsoft** and chairman of the **Gates Foundation**, ~4,500 words, announced as the first in a series. The text poses an alternative — AI will be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice — and a finding: no plan exists for entering this period. **(A) Three risks**: the lasting disappearance of entry- and mid-career jobs, white-collar as much as blue-collar, within a decade rather than several generations, because this time the substitution targets **cognition**; the weaponization of malicious actors (cyberattacks, bioterrorism, fraud, deepfakes), coupled with a concentration of power among those who already hold it; the effect of compagnons IA on children's development and on critical thinking. **(B) The benefits**, located in five domains — research, health, agriculture in low-income countries (the impact the author calls the fastest), public services, education — with a reservation carried on the verb: *"the operative word is 'can'"*. **(C) Three proposals** open the series: building an unprecedented national and international institutional framework, borrowing from the nuclear inspection regime, aviation regulation, and ozone agreements; reserving certain occupations for humans, a domain named **Human Reserved**; **taxing AI tokens and robots** to rebalance the taxation of labor and capital. Gates discloses his financial ties to the industry and the transfer of his profits to the foundation. The text extends executive essays on the distribution of AI's value — [[nadella-frontier-ecosystem-human-token-capital-2026-06-12]], [[zuckerberg-meta-future-is-for-everyone-superintelligence-2026-08-10]] — by focusing on public power rather than the firm.
#AI and equity#transition to the AI era#cognition substitution
Bill Gates — cofondateur de Microsoft · président du conseil de la Gates Foundation. Blog personnel Gates Notes. Page non capturable par `curl | lynx` (403 Akamai) : extraction navigateur.