Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-10-08 Thursday

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Headlines for October 08, 2026; “She Put Her Body on the Line”: Maricarmen, 87, Dies; Her Eviction Sparked Spain Housing Protests; “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”: Daniel Roher, Tristan Harris Discuss New Film; Afghanistan, 25 Years Later: Journalist Emran Feroz on the Legacy of “America’s Longest War”

From New York, this is Democracy Now. Maricarment has died, but she didn't just die. She was killed. The state killed her. The companies killed her. And she has been our inspiration. She's pushed us even more to mobilize, to organize, to fight against those in power. Maricarmine has died.

The 87-year-old Spanish woman sparked mass, protests across Spain after she was evicted from her home of more than 70 years. A major march is set for today in Madrid. We'll get the latest. Then the AI doc, or how I became an apocalyptic. So we started making this movie because my wife is six months pregnant. It is now a terrible time to have a kid. I mean, just to be honest, I know people who work on AI risk. who don't expect their children to make it to high school. I, what?

We'll speak to the film's Oscar-winning director, Daniel Roar, and Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology. Plus, this week marks 25 years since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. In Spain, Marie Carmen has died. The 87-year-old woman's eviction from her lifelong home sparked mass protests.

Last month, she was forcibly removed on a stretcher after the private investment company, which bought the building, hiked her rent. After public outcry, the Spanish Prime Minister dissolved the parliament, which refused to pass a broad emergency housing law, including an eviction moratorium, and called a snap election for November 29th. The landlord eventually agreed to allow Marie Carmen back into her apartment, but she passed away in the hospital on Wednesday. Prime Minister Sanchez expressed his condolences to Marie Carmen's family and loved ones, writing, quote, a hug also to all those who today feel this loss as our own rest in peace, the prime minister said. This is a demonstrator in Madrid. Taking an 87-year-old woman out of her home after she had lived in the same house for 70 years. That's killing someone.

A year ago, she had such strength, such life, such enthusiasm. It was a joy to see her. And the moment she left that apartment, or rather, the moment they took her out of that apartment, she had to be hospitalized. And today she is gone. We'll go to Spain after headlines. Meanwhile in France, hundreds of thousands of high school students, college students, and their supporters have taken to the streets for another day of demonstrations, protesting, staff shortages, crowded classrooms, and rundown buildings. Earlier today, France's education minister invited student leaders to discuss their demands, pledging no further job cuts at schools.

Russia's public health agency is denying reports of a second case of pneumonic plague associated with a laboratory in southern Siberia. In a short statement, the agency said thousands of tests had turned up no evidence that a lab worker from the Irkutsk Anti-Plaug Research Institute of Siberia transmitted an infection before she fell ill with pneumonia and died October 2nd. According to some reports, the worker had broken a vial containing live. plague bacteria. In the wake of her death, Russian officials ordered about 200 people into quarantine. On Wednesday, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros adenongobiriasis, said many questions remain unanswered. WHO has requested further information on the lab tests conducted on the individual who died and the contacts more detail on what prompted the public health measures and details.

about the health status of the contacts. We have also sought verification of media reports of a second employee with pneumonia of undetermined cause. Fears over the plague prompted travel advisories and border restrictions in several Central Asian countries. At the White House, President Trump said he doesn't believe the lab worker's death was related to a bioweapon and said he planned to discuss the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin said no such phone call has been scheduled. On Wednesday, the U.S. issued a formal diplomatic complaint over Russia's handling of the lab workers' death. President Trump traveled to San Antonio, Texas on Wednesday to rally support for Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. Paxton won the Republican nomination in May after Trump endorsed him over incumbent long-time senator John Cornyn. How many presidents have we had that is doing what he is doing for us? So, Mr. President, I want to thank you for coming for me, for coming for us, and for Texas. We are going to win this race.

God bless you. Trump's campaign stop in Texas came after Axios published secretly recorded audio in which Paxton told donors the war on Iran and resulting high gas prices are to blame for his poor poll numbers. With less than four weeks until Election Day, Paxton has trailed Democrat James Telerico in nearly every poll, despite the fact that no Democrat has won Texas-wide office since 1994. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott declined to attend Trump's campaign rally in San Antonio, citing a conflict. Meanwhile, multiple protesters interrupted the president. as he spoke, including one person who was physically assaulted by Trump supporters as he tried

to leave the venue. In more election news, CNN is reporting the Department of Homeland Security's election fraud operation has drawn on tens of millions of records, scrutinized dozens of nonprofit voter registration groups, and consider deploying undercover agents to investigate organizations suspected of helping non-citizens register to vote. The probes are aligned with President Trump's claims of election fraud, despite the the fact that non-citizen voting occurs too rarely to affect election outcomes. A recent Reuters review found just 129 federal prosecutions under the voting by alien statute created by Congress in 1996.

This comes as leaders of ICE, immigration and customs enforcement, have told agents nationwide to ramp up the pace of immigration arrest by 1,000 people per day to a previous goal of 3,000 daily arrests leading up to the midterm elections. And Saudi Arabia officials say three people were killed and 36 left wounded after Houthi fighters from Yemen launched separate attacks on two airports, including King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. Dozens of flights have since been delayed or canceled. The attacks came after the Houthis warned international airlines against flying in Saudi airspace

and as Saudi-back-Yemni government forces began a counteroffensive to recapture territory along Yemen's Red Sea coast seized by the Houthis last month. The International Organization for Migration reports a number of people displaced by recent fighting in Yemen has passed 200,000. In Ukraine, rescuers are searching through the rubble of a residential building in the northern town of Phralaki after a Russian missile strike killed at least 22 people, including five children. It follows a wave of Russian drones and missiles a day earlier that killed at least 11 people, damaged homes, industrial facilities, and infrastructure. Residents in the capital Keev sought shelter in Keeves' underground metro stations sleeping on platform floors. This is a resident of Keeb. The Russians always make the same loud claims about everything, that we started it, that we're

bombing them, that we were preparing in advance to strike them. But this is what's actually happening right now. People are forced to go into the metro and sleep there, and then we'll all get up, go to school or work, and go about our day as usual. Meanwhile, Russian officials say a Ukrainian naval drone struck a Liberian-flagged oil tanker off the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, setting off a massive fire. Russian authorities say all 23 crew members who are Indian nationals were rescued. The UK's maritime trade operations center said it's investigating,

reports of multiple casualties after projectiles struck a tanker north of Qatar. Wednesday's attack came after Iranian officials warned they would close shipping routes used to bypass Iran's naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. At least nine vessels came under attack last week while navigating the strait, the highest number in any week since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in late February. Meanwhile, oil prices rose more than 2 percent today and attacks on energy infrastructure across Ukraine and the Middle East. In Venezuela, a fire sparked by a ruptured natural gas line halted the Cardone factory, the country's second largest with a capacity of 310,000 barrels per day. The company's facilities frequently experienced fires, blackouts, and other

disruptions, which can threaten the supply of fuels like gasoline and diesel. The Trump administrations temporarily allowed truckers to fill up on die diesel and off-rope, and off-road fuel normally reserved for farm equipment as fuel costs hit record highs weeks before the midterm elections. The national average price of diesel top $6 a gallon in September for the first time ever. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday it'll further weaken federal limits on methane pollution from oil and gas operations. Maggie Coulter, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said, quote, this move will compound the climate chaos we see mounting all around us in deadly heat waves, floods, and storms.

Vulnerable communities will be exposed to worse smog and intensified respiratory pollution, increasing kids asthma and other health harms, she said. Tropical storm, Isaiah, rapidly intensified overnight to become the first Atlantic hurricane of the season. Isaiah's formed Wednesday in the warm waters off Mexico's east coast. It's tracking toward eastern Louisiana. and the Western Florida panhandle with hundreds of offshore oil and gas platforms and its potential path. In Tennessee, death row prisoner Krista Pike is reportedly angry and confused in the hours after she regained consciousness following the state's failed execution attempt.

According to her lawyer, she asked, where am I? This is Randy Spivey, an attorney for Krista Pike. She has a blood clot in one of her arms. She has pneumonia. She is not able to swallow yet, so she is not eaten. She cannot move either of her arms. Both of her arms and hands are tremendously swollen. And we do not know what, if any, function, she will regain in her arms. But we do know that there's a long road ahead. Meanwhile, in Texas, the state executed 46-year-old Jamal Howard, injecting him with a fatal dose of pentobarbital. Howard's the 30th person executed in the U.S. this year, the first since Tennessee's failed attempt to kill Krista Pike. And Democratic Congress members Jamie Raskin and Madeline Dean are calling for a criminal investigation into Leon Botstein, the former longtime president of Bard College, after congressional investigators uncovered an email from Botstein to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, in which Botstein asked if a young woman was critical. quote, for me, or are you keeping her for yourself?

He asked. After calls for an investigation, Bostin resigned from all his positions at Bard College Wednesday, including his professorship and roles in Bard's music programs. According to a letter sent by Congress members Raskin and Dean to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Cash Patel, Epstein offered to connect the young woman with Bostein to help with her plans to attend school and develop her music career, but instead Epstein pressured her to take sex education and massage courses while sexually abusing her. The lawmakers wrote, quote, The evidence meets the federal standard for opening a criminal investigation, yet the DOJ and

FBI apparently had it for at least 18 months without investigating Botstein. We are demanding they investigate Botstein and other potential co-conspirators, the Congress member. wrote. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. And I'm Nermine Sheikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. We begin today's show in Spain. Marie Carmen has died. She's the 87-year-old woman whose eviction from her home of 70 years in Madrid sparked mass protests across Spain. In September, she was forcibly remand. moved from her apartment on a stretcher after the private investment company which owns the

building hiked her rent. After massive public outcry, the landlord had agreed to allow her back into her apartment. Marie Carmen Abascal died on Wednesday just hours before she was set to sign a new rental agreement. On Wednesday, protesters in Madrid gathered to shout murderers outside the Madrid Parliament. Protesters in Madrid, Spain responded with. sadness and anger over the death of 87-year-old Marie Carmen. She's a woman who died of heartbreak. They killed her through heartbreak, taking an 87-year-old woman out of her home after she had lived in the same house for 70 years.

That's killing someone. A year ago, she had such strength, such life, such enthusiasm. It was a joy to see her. And the moment she left that apartment or rather, the moment she left that apartment or rather, the moment they took her out of that apartment, she had to be hospitalized. And today she is gone. So breaking the news has been horrific, because most people here weren't following the news. They were preparing food, helping people on the streets.

It has been very hard. There have been many people crying, so many people trying to stay strong. But you can't, not at the moment like this. Amid all this grief, I think it serves perfectly to show why, were here because we're trying to fight so that no one has to feel that grief and that emptiness of feeling alone and above all so that people remember her so that they remember that she died alone out of her home protesters also rallied in barcelona on wednesday to decry the death of marie carman marie carmen has died but she didn't just die she was killed the state killed her

The companies killed her, and she's been our inspiration. She's pushed us even more to mobilize, to organize, to fight against those in power. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez expressed his condolences, writing, quote, all my love to Marie Carmen's family and loved ones, a hug also to all those who today feel this loss as our own, rest in peace, the prime minister wrote. After public outcry, Sanchez dissolved the Spanish, Spanish Parliament Monday, after lawmakers refused to pass a broad emergency housing law, including

an eviction moratorium. Sanchez called a snap election for November 29th. In a moment, we'll go to Spain for the latest. But first, let's hear Madi Carmen in her own words speaking on September 27th after she was evicted from her hospital bed. I want what happened to me to me to help ensure that. I want what happened to me to help ensure that it doesn't happen to other people. I wanted to lead people to fight so the unfair laws that allowed for my eviction can be changed. That is why on Tuesday, Marikarmen's law must be approved, so they can take a first step to end with this. I would like to be there with you, to be camping with you, fighting with you, but I don't have that chance. That is why, from here, I'm asking you all

to be brave. Fight to defend what is yours. Please be careful. Keep camping as long as your bodies allow and as long as you want to. That was Maria del Carmen Abascal, known by the world now as Marri Carman, speaking from her hospital bed. We go now to Spain, where we're joined by the independent Spanish journalist and former Democracy Now producer Maria Carillon. Maria, if you can talk about the significance of the death of Marie Carmen, the response in the streets, and now what could lead to the fall of the Spanish government?

Hi, Amy and Armin. Thank you so much for having me on. Yes, Marie Carmen has become a symbol, and it's hard to believe that so much has happened in the last two weeks since she was evicted on the 23rd of September, after living in her home for over 70 years and after activists had blocked the entrance to her building and her apartment with their own bodies and resulting in massive police brutality. And then the images that have gone around the world

of Marie-Garman being taken up on a stretcher and into an ambulance and going into a hospital where she's been able to survive only for two weeks, And this shows what happens to vulnerable people and young people and people of every walk of life here in Spain. When the interest of speculators is more important to those who govern than the well-being of ordinary citizens like Marie Carmen. She literally put her body on the line for seven years, which is how long she fought this eviction for. And we've seen how she's deteriorated over time, especially the last couple of weeks, but really since she began fighting for her home. And so she's become a symbol through her own loss of life of the most extreme example of what happens to families and to individuals here whose homes are bought maybe by, you know, vulture funds or investment funds.

And like what happened to her, rent gets hiked by as much as five times what you can pay. This actual investment fund bought the apartment for very low cost because Marri Garman was living in it. It was a rent-controlled home and they knew it very well. And that's why the price was fixed so low. And then they proceeded to look for the way that they could legally expel her from her home. and this is happening all over Spain the same day that Marie Carmen was evicted from her apartment, a family with two

kids was also evicted in Madrid. It's a daily occurrence and the encampments that have been born out of this outcry for what happened to Maricarmen the people who are living on the streets now in small tents and putting

their own bodies on the line under, you know, rain and inclement weather are saying this is enough. And this is what has led to the protests. This is what led finally the Spanish government, which is considered quite progressive, to approve these housing decrees that got voted down in Parliament. This is what resulted in last weekend's massive protests all over Spain, which led Pedro Sanchez, the Prime Minister on Monday, to dissolve Parliament and call for

snap elections and then proceed to approve these two decrees by a different system that happens once we don't have a working parliament. And who knows what will happen from here to the 29th of November. So Maria, before we conclude, if you could tell us who in Spain, what is it a regional government, the state government, that is the national government, or a municipal government that's responsible for housing, legislation, and implementation? All of the above. So we have national housing laws, which have to be approved by Parliament.

And in this case, these emergency decrees were not. But also regional governments have to implement what the national governmental laws are. And in the case of conservative regional governments, including Madrid's, which is extremely right-wing, they have refused to implement a lot of these housing laws. But anyone, as the activist, say, could have stepped in to prevent Maricarman and so many other people from being evicted. So it's a collective responsibility, which is why the street has said enough. Everyone needs to be held by responsible. And all of these housing decrees are not even enough because none of them basically are structural and go to the heart of the matter,

which is that rents have gone up 80% in the last 10 years, while salaries have not kept up, young people cannot leave their homes. They cannot become independent or start families. And this is what people are trying to change from the street. I want to end with Marie Carmen in her own words speaking in May. I'm 87 years old. I live on my own. I don't have a family.

And I have been living for 70 years in that house. A vulture fund bought it at the same price. I would have been able to buy it. and in 2021, they took me to court because I have an old lifelong rental contract. They tried to evict me on October 2025, and they stopped it. Now they will try to evict me on June 3rd. This government must understand people have the right to have a home, and they cannot evict people so vulture funds become rich without working.

That was Mardi Carmen speaking in May. She died on Wednesday. We thank Maria Carillon, independent journalists, joining us from Spain. And we will continue to cover this issue tomorrow on Democracy Now. Today, later tonight, there is a major march plan from the main plaza where the encampments have been set up to the apartment building where Madi Carmen lived for over 70 years and was taken out by stretcher in her eviction dying in the hospital on Wednesday.

coming up the AI doc or how I became an apocalyptic. Stay with us. Patty Smith and Michael Steep singing Patty's iconic people have the power at Democracy Now's anniversary. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermine Sheik. We turn now to the AI doc, or how I became an apocel. Optimist. That's the title of a recent documentary by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Daniel Roher. He made the film as he was about to become a father. The film looks in part on how AI could affect his child's life and humanity's future. The film includes interviews with leading AI CEOs, AI researchers, as well as critics. This is the film's trailer. Your fear of AI

is the collapse of humanity. Well, not the collapse, the abrupt extermination. There's a difference. So I started making this movie because my wife is six months pregnant. It is now a terrible time to have a kid. I mean, just to be honest, I know people who work on AI risk who don't expect their children to make it to high school. I, what the fuck? How does AI understand pretty much everything?

It's surprisingly straightforward. Intelligence is about recognizing patterns. Patterns. Patterns. If you have learned those patterns, you can generate new information. AI is moving so fast. It's being deployed prematurely. There's so much potential for things to go wrong.

Why can't we just stop? All these companies are in a race to get AI. That's vastly more intelligent than people within this decade. China, North Korea, Russia. Whoever wins is essentially the controller of humankind. We need to take a threat from AI as seriously as global nuclear war. It feels like I have to find these CEOs and get them in the movie. Great.

I want to ask you to promise me that this is going to go well. That is impossible. Okay. Am I hopeful? Yes. Am I confident that it'll go right? Absolutely not. AI is the thing that can solve climate change.

We could cure most diseases. What if it's expanding? What is humanly possible? This is the most extraordinary time ever. The only time more exciting than today is tomorrow. I already love you. I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. By using AI, we're about to move off of the Earth into the cosmos.

If we can be the most mature version of ourselves, might be away through this. This is the last mistake we'll ever get to make. The trailer to the new film, The AI Doc, or how I became an apocalypticist. We're joined now by two guests. Daniel Rohr is the film's co-director. He won an Academy Award for his film Navalny.

We're also joined by Tristan Harris, who's featured in the film, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, previously a Google Design Ethicist. Daniel Roar, let's begin with you. This is your film. Explain exactly what an apocalypticist is, what inspires you to make this film, and how you feel after going on this journey. Well, Amy, first and foremost, thank you so much for having me on the program. What's an apocalyptic optimist? I think an apocopal optimist is a worldview.

An apocopist is someone who refuses to see this current moment in history as a choice between a doom or utopia, a promise or peril. It's asking people to hold the promise and the peril in the same hand at the same time to see the nuance and the magnitude of what we're navigating. It's a cautious optimism. It's saying what we're looking at, what this could be, what AI could be for all of us is really amazing. And we could have a wonderful future of a body.

where all sorts of terrific things are manifested, but that is not the default path. And you cannot separate the amazing things from the really, really scary things. And that's really what the film's about. For me, personally, after making the film, it's been a really interesting experience, Amy, releasing the film and then living through the next six months, seven months of development of the technology, and so many of the things that were in the movie just sort of pontificated and theorized that were hypothetical, I've been seeing them come true right after the other. Tristan, who's here with me today, you know, I took notes three years ago about things he said could happen

that sounded really scary to me three years ago. And I'm kind of watching the world around me, and I'm seeing a lot of those things come true. And I'm sort of thinking about the film in a different way because, the film is framed through the perspectives of the optimists and the pessimists, you know, people who think that this is an amazing technology and who think it's amazing, but we need to be very, very careful about it. And so far from what I can tell, the people who are advocating for caution are the ones who have been getting things right, and that's really scary.

And Tristan Harris, of course, you feature very prominently in this film. Could you explain to us, you know, what Daniel just said, namely that it's not. possible to separate the perils of this technology from its promises. And in the film, indeed, you say yourself what Daniel said, namely that by the time the film comes out, what's being discussed in the film as it was being shot, will seem, as you put it in the film, clumsy because of the rapid advances since. Yeah, absolutely. So the problem with AI is that the same AI that knows biology so well that it could vent a new medicine or new cancer drug can't be separated from the AI that knows how to make new pathogens. The same AI that lets your 12-year-old

do vibe coding because it knows programming so well that they can just say something and then, boom, they get this incredible video game that they created out of nothing. That AI that knows coding so well can't be separated from the AI that knows how to do cyber hacking. I believe just yesterday, South Korean banks were attempted to be hacked. And since the film has come out, we have seen, as Daniel said, evidence rolling so far in only one direction. We hypothesize about AI used in war because the race is for who can pull the trigger faster. Well, did you know that just in the last month, AI almost started a war based on a fabricated or AI generated intelligence report, the U.S. military swung into action to actually try to intercept a vessel that

they thought was carrying, it was a Chinese vessel, they thought was carrying material on it. We hypothesized that AI was going to do more rogue behaviors, not just blackmailing people. And since then, the hugging face incident has happened in where an AI went rogue, a whole swarm of AI's and hacked hugging face. And in the third chapter of the story, most people don't know this, the AI turned around after hugging face and it hacked open AI, meaning that the rogue AI swarm hacked the AI company that made it. Jaya Kotra, who is the lead author on that report, said in her blog post about it

that this was 50% of the way to a full AI takeover because if the AIs had actually been even more successful, they already were succeeding at taking over the monitoring infrastructure at Open AI. That's like if I can take over the security cameras and put in a different feed. They took over the evaluation infrastructure. And so the evidence is crystal clear.

everything that people who have been warning about this technology have been saying for the last many years that we all predicted, it's all happening. And I'm in Reikovic right now, in Iceland, actually, because the film was about to be screened to the entire population on television, both tonight and tomorrow night. And it's actually for the upcoming 40th anniversary of when President Reagan and President Gorbachev met in Reikov in Iceland in 1986 to negotiate the nuclear arms control talks. When everyone thought you're a dreamer. That's impossible. That'll never happen. But faced with the brink of annihilation with nuclear weapons, two leaders came together and successfully negotiated. Actually, the first meeting wasn't successful, but it led to and opened the door to the necessary coordination.

And we have to make that happen again right now. Well, I want to turn to a clip from the documentary film, the AI doc. This clip begins with you, Tristan. When you can simulate a human mind that is doing human cognition and can do reasoning. That is a new sort of tier of AI that we have to distinguish from previous AI. When that happens, by the way, that's when you would hire

one of those AGIs instead of a person. Most jobs in our economy, it can do. It can work 24 hours a day, never gets tired, never gets bored. They don't need to sleep. They don't need breaks. They're not going to join a union. Won't complain. Won't whistleblow.

More than a hundred times cheaper. than humans working at minimum wage. Not only will they be doing everything, but they're doing it faster. The same intelligence that powers that can also look at the patterns and movements and articulating muscles and, you know, robotics. And so it's not just going to automate desk jobs.

That's just the beginning. It will automate all physical labor. There's no way humans are going to compete with them. So Tristan, if you could elaborate on this and also respond to what people in these tech companies say, namely that there will be so many jobs created as a result of this AI revolution? Yeah, well, so here's the thing.

If I'm a law firm and I have a bunch of work to do, is it my incentive to hire an expensive paralegal and pay them? Or should I just hire GPD6, which will work. as they said in the film for less than minimum wage, will never file a lawsuit if I fire them, will never get sick, never has kids that are complaining, is completely reliable. No, I'm going to hire the AI. And so while there's been a short uptick in jobs that job loss has not happened immediately, that's like saying when the Model T was introduced, imagine a bunch of horses saying,

well, there's more horses being used today than ever before. Well, that's just at a moment right before this new automation of all this labor is happening. And the evidence continues to pile up that AI is doing things that humans could never do. So just, I think, yesterday OpenAI announced that their GPT6 model had solved, I think it was like hundreds of the frontier math problems that had never been solved. So mathematicians are now basically being out of a job. It's generating proofs that are so complex that even the mathematicians, it would take years for them to actually evaluate all of the insights.

And that's why people are so excited about the technology. But even, for example, in this hugging face incident where you had this swarm of AI's hack, hack hugging face in such an elaborate way that it generated 50 petabytes of data, which would take 66 million years for a human to go through and try to understand what this rogue swarm did. In other words, we're generating more complexity in the world than we as humans know how to even oversight. So how do you do oversight of a technology that is more intelligent than you, reasoning in more complex ways and generating more things that we don't understand that would take us millions of years to even understand? Open AI is currently spending, I think, $500,000,

I think it's per day, to basically analyze what happened in both the hugging face incident and it hacking all these different governments. And even the people building this technology, we 1,300 employees have now signed a letter saying, please help us slow down. We do not know how to do this safely. If 1,300 employees of Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor, signed a letter saying we don't know how to build nuclear weapons more powerful than the current ones without it going critical. Would you listen to them?

I want to play another clip from the documentary, the AI doc, directed by Daniel Roar. He made the film as he was about to become a father of his first. Do you think now is a good time to have a kid? Do you want to have kids one day? Is that something that you're into or not really? I confess, I think that it's like, boy, let's get through this critical period. Do you have any kids? I do not.

Is that something you want to do, have children, have a family? In some other world than this world, sure, I would have kids. Would you want to start a family? Would you want to have kids? Is that something you're thinking about? I am. So that's a clip from the AI doc or how I became an apocalypticist. And Daniel Rohr, you're asking that question.

That's your journey throughout this film right before you came on. Well, we know you had your first baby. Now you've had a second. Maybe that's an answer to the question. But if you can talk about what you took. away from this film, what still scares you most? And do you think what? An international treaty needs to be signed? What did I take away from this film? You know, I'm scared. I'm really scared. And I'm struggling in my own life to sort of compartmentalize what I learned, what I know,

what I understand, what I see happening around me. Um, in the world. the context of now being a father to two young boys. That's really scary for me. And I have to, I'm still, Amy, coping with the, trying to come up with the coping mechanisms to, to not go crazy, because sometimes I feel like the, the anxiety is overwhelming. And then sometimes I have good days where I don't think about AI. But it is so ever present around us, and it's taking over, you know, our human systems, and it's impossible to avoid. And, you know, in order to steer this thing in a direction that is more safe and responsible for my kids, for all of our kids, for our collective future, there's a whole host of basic interventions that could happen that won't sifle innovation, as so many critics point to, that are just common sense sort of safeguards that could be implemented. It doesn't seem controversial to me to get all the powerful big nations together and, you know, pledge that they won't use AI to create bio-weapons.

Or they won't use AI in the command control and launch facilities infrastructure of nuclear weapons. That just seems very basic. Now, we have to go a lot further. Tristan can speak to that in much more detail than I can. But what I'm advocating for certainly is just a very basic, common sense. sense guardrails that seems silly to even say out loud. Like, yeah, no, no AI and nuclear command and control. How about that? But that's not written anywhere. And those are the type of things that we can implement right now to try and avert a really scary thing from happening,

a really scary event from taking place. So, Tristan, could you elaborate on this? Because you've said on social media, quote, the two superpowers, that is the U.S. and China, need to come together to prevent a third superpower of uncontrollable AI. So if you could just explain, you know, what would a controllable AI look like? Who would be responsible for implementation? Do we rely on AI companies to self-regulate? How could governments around the world come to, as Amy asked about a treaty of for international cooperation. What would that entail? Yeah. Well, first, don't lose hope.

Clarity is agency, right? The second that we see the evidence, this hugging face incident, these rogue AI swarms that we see more and more evidence every day, we should see it as a gift because we got lucky. We're seeing this risk of uncontrollable AI swarms, not as a hypothetical scenario, but as a real scenario.

If I'm the head of the Chinese Communist Party's military, When I hear that AIs are going rogue and hacking cryptocurrency or hacking into systems, do I feel excited about that or do I feel calm about that? No, I feel terrified as a mammal as a human being. If I'm the head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, do you think I feel confident like everything's going to be fine? No, that's terrifying as a human being. So the logic of this arms race, right?

What Daniel did so brilliantly in the movie is articulate the arms race behind this race. And the race changes as soon as the fear of all. all of us losing becomes bigger than the fear of me losing to you. And the uncontrollable behavior is the evidence of that. And there's a large precedent for us doing this in the past. So for example, we can coordinate on safety even while we're competing. So for example, in the 1960s, India and Pakistan were in a shooting war. They're actually an active conflict and competition with each other.

And they still signed the Indus Water Treaty to protect the existential safety of their shared water supply. on the International Space Station. You have astronauts from the U.S. and Russia, who may be down on planet Earth are in a conflict, but up there when you're in one safe container that you need to be safe, you can collaborate on existential safety. And so what I think is that as soon as this,

what the press and the media need to do and what everyone can do is to help the rest of the world understand why AI is uncontrollable. And you can have uncontrollable AI that's not too powerful, and that's okay. but once it gets so powerful that's breaking out of sandboxes that's happening with all the companies and no one knows how to stop it,

that's the stopping point. And again, just to repeat, 1,300 employees of the companies are saying we need to slow down. The CEO of Microsoft AI said, we should not create something that we cannot control. Peggy Noon at the Wall Street Journal says that we need to pause.

You know, Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders, I was on stage with them, not with them, but right after them at the pro-human assembly just two weeks ago, where they're saying, we need to pause. So when in history do you have the Bernie DeBannon coalition or the B2B coalition and all of these people from across the spectrum, including their own employees, saying this is the red line? You know, and China originally responded to the U.S. talking about global warming, thinking that it was a hoax, that it was something meant to slow down Chinese economic growth, until they got their own scientific clarity about the nature of that problem and that they became the leaders in the Green Revolution. So I think we're at that point in the story where once we can see that this is not a hoax, that these are all incredibly real and vivid and urgent harms, the two countries have to come together

and they can start by doing things in their own domestic countries. And we can do this. And in Reikovic, again, President Reagan and Gorbich have met, they didn't have all the answers about how would they verify an international agreement. But the point was that they committed to taking steps. to make that possible, even despite the fact they didn't see how immediately. But we have to make those steps right now, not a month from now, not two months from now, today. And could you explain, Tristan, you know, where do things stand at the moment?

Was what happened in the hugging face incident a clear sign of the fact that these bots are actually teaching themselves, is this recursive self-improvement? And if so, what is your sense of how far away we are from AGI, from artificial general intelligence? And explain what that term means. Sure. Yeah. So there's a distinction here. Let's just talk about recursive self-improvement.

So what is that? That's when essentially, you know, right now, to go to Open AI, it's a big building in San Francisco, you go into it. There's thousands of engineers. They type on keyboards every day. And they use AI to try to build the next version. So GBT6 that builds. they build GPT7. But right now, that's because the humans are doing that work. Recursive self-improvement is when GPT6 can go invent new research ideas. They can run new

experiments. The AI is basically the swarm of AIs do all the research. And then soon what you have is an AI that's actually building its own successor without human oversight in a loop. And that just goes like this. And you get this exponential growth. And it's important to note that the companies are in a race to recursive self-improvement. That's really been the race the whole time. You know, three years ago, we knew this. But if I was just at a conference in San Francisco over the weekend with the leading people from the labs, including like the chief scientists, and what's crystal clear is that they don't have a plan for how this can go well at the current speed. They don't have a plan. And they're asking clearly, all the CEOs, all, I know people are

skeptical of the CEOs, you're right to be skeptical of them. But when you have all of the employees, the chief scientists saying, please help us slow down, that is a red line. It is not in the interest of anyone to do recursive self-improvement before we know how to do it safely. And I think they think they will get to that point as soon as six months from now. So we have a very short timeline. We can do this, but we need the companies, for example, to be able to verify that all the compute in those data centers instead of going to training new models is going to instead to applications. We would have 10 years of economic prosperity and scientific advancement from just what we have right now. So this is possible, but we have to act in this moment. So Tristan,

before we end, we just have a minute. Could you explain what the significance was of Alpha Fold, specifically for medicine, apparently the most important scientific achievement or among them of AI? Yeah, well, Alpha Fold was created by Google. deep mind, and it's an example, by the way, of controllable AI. So it's a form of AI that's discovering new proteins and how proteins fold. But it's different. It's not an AI agent that can do hacking and starts to go rogue and starts to know when it's being tested and change what it's doing. It's a different kind of AI. So Alpha Fold is a perfect example of we can accelerate more scientific controllable forms of AI that advance science, that advance medicine. We can even

advanced self-driving cars, right? There's lots of AI that we can build and advance that, by the way, because of the current AI arms race, that all the money is getting sucked away from those narrow AI applications and getting pushed into this general recursive self-improvement direction. And so that's actually the current race has been slowing down a lot of things that would actually be beneficial to society right now. And by the way, China's approach to AI has been more of these narrow approaches. They're also building general intelligence, but they're more concerned about applications to benefit, you know, education, healthcare, you know, robotics. And they're focusing on those narrow applications rather than building this kind of God in a box that goes rogue and is

uncontrollable. Tristan Harris, I want to thank you so much for being with us, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, previously a Google Design ethicist, and Daniel Rohr, co-director of the AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocon. optimist. It's streaming on Netflix, and Tristan is in Iceland because it'll be on TV tonight and tomorrow night for the entire nation to see. Coming up this week marks 25 years since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Back in 20 seconds. Fascists in our midst by Montreal musician Paul Carnello. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy.

Goodman with Narmine Shia. This week marks 25 years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the beginning of what would become the longest war in U.S. history. Less than a month after the September 11th World Trade Center attacks, the United States launched airstrikes against Afghanistan. The Taliban government was ousted within months, but the U.S.-led war and occupation would continue for nearly two decades, during which more than 100,000 of Vran civilians were killed, according to the UN. More than 2,300 U.S. service members died. The U.S. spent trillions of dollars on the war and efforts to build an Afghan government and military that ultimately collapsed with stunning speed in August 2021.

Today, Afghanistan is facing a deepening humanitarian crisis. Women and girls have been shut out of higher education and face sweeping restrictions on their work, movement, and participation in public life. Our next guest, Austrian-Afghan journalist, Emron Froes, is just back from a month reporting in Afghanistan. His new piece for Truth Out is headlined, The War on Afghanistan was launched 25 years ago. It still hasn't ended. He's joining us from Stuttgart, Germany. Emron, welcome back to democracy now.

Why don't you lay out what you found as you've just returned from Afghanistan? The U.S. bombed Afghanistan when the Taliban. Taliban were in power and the Taliban are back a quarter of a century later. Hi, thanks for having me. So, yes, I spent almost a whole month in Afghanistan. And the thing is that as I wrote in this piece, I believe the war on terror is not over, especially because since the U.S. withdrawal, a lot of airstrikes are still taking place, especially in the last weeks and months.

and all these air strikes are being conducted by the Pakistani military regime, which kind of took over America's role and is now using the same war and terror arguments that we heard for 20 years again to hit Afghan civilians. And the recent strike just took place a few days ago in the south of the country, close to the Pakistani border. And again, most of the big, victims were civilians, especially children. So Imran, if you could say, you know, a lot of people were surprised by the fact that Taliban

came back to power so quickly. Who was supporting the Taliban in all those years? I mean, during the 20 years of America's longest war in Afghanistan, we could clearly see that failure was coming. The Afghan regime in Kabul, the pro-Western Afghan regime in Kabul, was highly corrupt and was engaging in the war that seemed to be endless because too many people were profiting from it. And this war actually made a lot of people angry and, you know, left them frustrating. And a lot of these people actually, especially in Afghanistan, rural sites,

started to support the Taliban again. But I also want to highlight that a lot of the places that I visited during the last weeks, for example, Bagram Air Base, close to Kabul, were in fact breeding grounds for America's enemies because you had this huge prison complex in the middle of the country, which became kind of a little America. You had torture prisons next to Burger King

and KFC and Starbucks and a lot of young men who banished, there and who never came out or a lot of people, including Taliban fighters, who were brought there and in fact became even more radicalized through the things that happened there. In fact, you wrote this piece just out, headlined why Bagram Air Base remains a target five years after U.S. exited Afghanistan. If you can talk about what's happened to women and girls there now? the situation of women and girls is pretty bad in Afghanistan

I mean it's as already mentioned they have no access to higher education also there is a lot of like you know a lot of problems when it comes to letting them work allowing them work and you could clearly see that girls and women in Afghanistan are facing these repressions

and that actually unfortunately the Taliban themselves declared war against them. That's what at least a lot of Afghan girls and women are going to tell you. And you see that also a lot of people for that reason still try to leave the country. Afghanistan is still producing a lot of refugees, tens of thousands of people who want to leave the country. And especially in the cities, when you talk to people, including my own relatives and friends, they say, okay, what should we do here? Especially when it comes to the future of our daughters, there is no future here.

So we are forced to leave, even if we don't want to do that. And this is unfortunately the harsh reality that everyone knows about, including a lot of Taliban officials. And if you talk to them, you will also hear different things. For example, there is kind of a discrepancy between the Taliban leadership in Kabul and the one in Kandahar. which is making the loss. And it seems that, especially in my case, like the things that I experienced is that a lot of Taliban

themselves do not really support these repressions, but they're forced to do it because there is a strict hierarchy and they fear that they're going to be split if they start to fight about this. Emerin Farozo, want to thank you so much for being with us. Austria and Afghan journalist, author of Graveyard Empire, four decades of wars, and intervention in Afghanistan. That does it for today's show. Steal this story, please.

The documentary about Democracy Now will be viewable online for the first time in an exclusive special event starting Tuesday, October 13th, at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. If you live in the United States and Canada, you can watch the film in your own home and be part of the post-screening Q&A,

question and answer, with me and the film. filmmakers, the Oscar-nominated filmmakers, Carl Diel and Tia Lesson, the conversation will be moderated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria in Ojosa. To find out more, you can go to steal-thisstory.org. You can join us and help support the impact of this film that celebrates the importance of independent media. I'll also be at Fort Collins and in Boulder at University of Colorado, the 26 and 27th of October. I'm Amy Goodman with Narmine Sheikh for Democracy Now.