Almost Live From New York: The Robots Are Coming to Take Your Jobs Away!

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The perceptive among you have already recognized the subtle hints that I am no longer in Irvine. I’m in New York, and at the moment I feel like I’ve spent a day walking through soup. But I’m sure a quick shower will make me feel human again.

I’m here because I felt like taking one last photography trip this year, but I was given the excuse by Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, who needed a couple of people for a panel about the most important global trends of the next century. My answer, of course, is artificial intelligence. I may or may not be right about that, but I will say that at least it’s probably a more entertaining topic than the fall of the liberal order or the future of Marxism.

Anyway, here’s a livestream of the event if you have the patience to watch it. At one point, Gideon calls me one of our foremost expositors of enlightenment values, or something like that. Wasn’t that nice of him? Unfortunately, the world being what it is, I suspect this hints at a bit of naiveté too. Oh well. I’ll take the good with the bad.

And here we go:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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