bees?

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

The AIDS epidemic was monstrous. Not only for the lack of cure, but for the easy excuse it made for 'good people' to rid themselves of those disgusting gays.

The national willingness to discard an entire generation of (at first) gay men and then any queer persons has done immeasurable damage to every single one of us who survived it. The horror stories you might have seen in tabloids or online memorials only scratch the surface. We were unpersoned. We were named dangerous simply by our existence, and our presence was a herald for death and disease.

Our joy was not in spite of this. Our mad parties, the tendency to live in the moment, the stereotypical 'cattiness' and sex-crazed outlooks that media showers us with us even now, these were survival techniques. We dance because we lived another day. We craved physical contact from a world that feared us even in the same room, or touching the same door handle, or gods forbid us holding your hand.

And it's happening again.

If you notice your queer elders seem a little agitated beyond their usual baseline with what's happening with their trans peers this time around it's because we all recognize it from the 70s, 80s, 90s.

Name it a disease. Imply it's contagious, made-up for attention, or masking the 'real' problem (it's always pedophilia, always), often in the same breath. Consistency doesn't matter, only fear and hatred.

Say trans folks aren't worth the same considerations that good, upstanding people are. Deny them the medical care that, were they not trans, they would otherwise qualify for. Gender affirming care. Hormone treatments. Comprehensive therapy. Acceptance.

(Hell, even those lucky enough to escape obvious open discrimination find it on the back end, with medical care suddenly not being covered after being prescribed. Ask me how I know.)

And it's not just the right-wingers. Ask your Democratic or NP rep, if you have one, their thoughts on transgender rights. Listen close. See if they actually say anything of substance.

And then when trans people start dying off in droves, vanishing to forced detransitioning, assault, murder, or worse, well, that's just proof there's something wrong, isn't it? Not with the system. With us.

Recently, Sam Altman made comments comparing the energy required to power artificial intelligence systems with the energy required to raise human beings. Around the same time, another story emerged: in a wargame simulation, an AI system reportedly chose to deploy a tactical nuclear weapon 95% of the time.

At first glance, these two stories seem unrelated. One is about energy consumption. The other is about military simulations. But they share something deeply important.

They reveal the difference between intelligence and humanity.

The Nuclear Button in a Game

Ask any gamer. In a war simulation or strategy game, at some point, most players hit the nuclear option. In a game like Empire Earth — and yes, naming that shows my age — launching nukes often becomes the fastest way to win. It’s efficient. It’s decisive. It ends the match.

But here’s the key distinction: we know it’s a game.

If I lose all my money playing Monopoly, no big deal. If I wipe out virtual civilizations in a strategy game, no one actually dies. We understand the boundary between simulation and reality.

AI does not.

In a simulation, AI optimizes for victory. If deploying a tactical nuclear weapon produces the highest probability of success, it selects that option. It does not pause to consider civilian casualties. It does not imagine families at dinner tables. It does not perceive the moral gravity of the action.

It calculates.

We Were Warned in the 80s

The irony is that we’ve already explored this fear in popular culture.

In the 1983 film WarGames, a military supercomputer designed to simulate nuclear war scenarios nearly triggers World War III because it treats global thermonuclear conflict as a solvable game. The machine relentlessly runs simulations, escalating toward launch because that is what its programming tells it to do.

But what’s most telling about the film isn’t just the computer’s behavior.

It’s the humans’.

Throughout much of the movie, military officials dismiss mounting evidence that the computer is misinterpreting events. They trust the system’s calculations over contradictory human intuition. They assume the machine must be correct because it is precise. Efficient. Logical.

The real danger in the film was not a computer thinking like a computer.

It was humans thinking like one too.

The machine ultimately learns that nuclear war is a “strange game” — that the only winning move is not to play. But the humans take much longer to reach that realization, precisely because they surrender their judgment to technical output.

That lesson feels less fictional today than it did in 1983.

Human Intelligence Is More Than Calculation

We often hear that AI is “smarter” than humans. But what does that mean?

Human intelligence is flawed. We are unreliable eyewitnesses. We misremember events. We make emotional decisions. We are often wrong.

But we possess something machines do not: moral perception.

We integrate information that cannot be reduced to pure mathematics. We perceive consequences beyond immediate outcomes. We understand context beyond the parameters of a prompt. We know when something that is efficient is also catastrophic.

AI does not “know” anything in the human sense. It does not think. It does not reflect. It does not reconsider. It retrieves, processes, and predicts based on patterns.

That is not wisdom.

Artificially Intelligent Humans

There is an uncomfortable irony here.

Many of the leaders shaping AI — and many political and corporate leaders more broadly — are, in a sense, “artificially” intelligent. They are highly educated. Highly trained. Exceptionally skilled at navigating systems, institutions, and incentives. They can process vast amounts of information and make rapid, technically sound decisions.

But education and training are not the same as intrinsic human intelligence.

True human intelligence includes empathy. It includes moral restraint. It includes the ability to imagine consequences for people who will never appear on a balance sheet or in a strategic model. It includes compassion.

What we prize in machines — efficiency, speed, optimization, cold calculation — is precisely what becomes dangerous when it dominates human decision-making.

Progress has never come from optimization alone. It has come from moral evolution. From recognizing that just because something can be done efficiently does not mean it should be done at all.

When leaders lack that intrinsic layer of moral awareness, they begin to resemble the systems they are building: responsive, strategic, technically competent — but emotionally and ethically detached.

That is a far greater risk than any algorithm.

The Real Fear

The frightening thing is not that machines are coming for us.

The frightening thing is that many of the people running governments and corporations increasingly think like machines.

Efficiency over empathy. Speed over deliberation. Short-term gain over long-term consequence.

Machines answer the question asked of them at that moment. They do not say, “Let me take a day and think about this.” They do not wrestle with conscience. They do not feel the weight of irreversible decisions.

And yet many of our leaders appear to operate exactly that way — focused on optimization, quarterly results, political wins, or tactical advantage, with little evidence of deep reflection.

When human beings in power abandon introspection, they begin to resemble the very systems they are building.

That is what should worry us.

What Are We Replacing Ourselves With?

AI can be an extraordinary tool. Large language models can accelerate research, improve productivity, and expand access to information. None of that is inherently bad.

But we must ask a critical question:

Are we replacing human judgment with something wiser — or merely something faster?

AI is excellent at retrieving and synthesizing information. It is not excellent at moral reasoning, lived experience, or ethical restraint. It has no introspection. No conscience. No genuine reassessment.

If we hand over critical decision-making to systems optimized purely for efficiency, we should not be surprised when they choose the most efficient path — even when that path is destructive.

The Conversation We Actually Need

The debate about AI often centers on whether machines will become too powerful.

But perhaps the deeper issue is whether the humans building and deploying these systems are already thinking too mechanically.

We need leaders who resemble human beings more than algorithms.

Leaders who pause. Leaders who reflect. Leaders who understand that just because something works does not mean it should be done.

AI can be a powerful resource for humanity. It can assist us, inform us, and expand our capabilities.

But it should not be in charge.

And the people guiding its development must remember what makes human intelligence truly valuable: not just the ability to process information, but the capacity to understand what it means.

Aro and ace activism is healthcare reform, so that no one needs to rely on a spouse for health insurance, so that healthcare is available to everybody regardless of income, so that no one’s lived experiences or basic dignity are dismissed or overridden by doctors

Aro and ace activism is well-funded and expansive public transit, so that you don’t need to have someone on hand to drive you places if you are incapacitated, so that you don’t have to pay for an ambulance if you need to get to the hospital quickly

Aro and ace activism is disability and elder care services, so that no one needs a spouse to care for them, so that no one needs children to care for them, so that marriage is not a bind for disabled people, so that people on disability who want to and can live alone can

Aro and ace activism is community-building, it’s public events, it’s free social activities, it’s mutual aid, it’s activities that bring community members together without socializing relying on just a romantic partner

Aro and ace activism is developing a culture of believing when people tell you who they are and what they want rather than assuming you know them better than they know themselves