What can an economist teach us about misery? 

I had that question in mind while reading the new book The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us, by eminent researcher George Loewenstein. The field is not exactly known for its facility with human emotions, but Loewenstein is a co-founder of behavioral economics, the subdiscipline that studies the many ways that people depart from the ideal of the perfectly rational actor. He’s spent a career investigating how psychology and emotion shape our judgments, and his latest book offers a sweeping account of how suffering structures human life. 

That might sound very bleak, like the opposite of a fun read. But the book itself isn’t distressing — it’s a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive. It emerged from a period of profound suffering in his own life, one where, he writes, he “thought about suicide constantly.” Writing it, he told me in a recent interview, was “kind of a silver lining for my own misery.” 

In Loewenstein’s own words, The Opposite of Happiness is not a self-help book. To him, understanding is its own reward. Though he adamantly refuses to dispense life advice, I still think the book offers much that can help us live more wisely, a little less at war with our emotions.   

“Misery is inescapable,” Loewenstein writes. “It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system.” Negative emotions are “more powerful, persistent, and pervasive than positive ones.” That is because, he argues, unpleasant feelings — hunger, pain, anger, loneliness — are how evolution motivated us to do the things we need to survive and pass on our genes. They still heavily shape our conscious experience, however mismatched they may feel to our modern circumstances. 

Some version of that insight, that dissatisfaction is woven into the human condition, has been known to humans for eons, of course, captured in philosophical teachings like Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. The father of economics himself observed that people work hard to earn riches, only to discover the result offers no lasting contentment. “It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind,” Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts.” 

Loewenstein puts this understanding into the language of modern psychology, speaking to a current of anxiety and unhappiness running through American life today. It also points to enduring questions about what the purpose of human progress and prosperity is, anyway. 

Many of us could particularly benefit from the concept of negative “meta-emotions,” or the judgmental feelings we have about our negative feelings. “At the heart of so many of our miseries is not the fact that we feel bad, but the belief that we should feel otherwise,” he writes.  That line immediately rang true to me — merely acknowledging to myself that it’s not a big deal if I feel terrible from work stress, or my cat’s deteriorating health, or whatever else happens to be weighing on me, helps to lighten the load. What if we really tried to wryly embrace the reality that it’s extremely normal for life to suck sometimes? The reward might not be happiness, exactly (an elusive and poorly understood state anyway, Loewenstein points out), but a little less misery.  

I recently spoke with Loewenstein about his book — he had a gentle, faintly melancholic air, and took a surprisingly generous interest in some of the choices I was weighing in my own life. Part of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below. 

Americans seem pretty unhappy right now. There has been endless discourse about that. Do you think that your book adds something to that conversation?

I do — I was just an expert on the Meta case that recently settled. I was an expert on the side that was against Meta. I think one of the causes of declining mental health is, in fact, social media. It really exacerbates the types of social comparisons that lead to envy and loss of self-esteem. I would like to think that I provide some new insights into how these modern technologies help to exacerbate the mental health crisis. 

One analysis of that, based on what I’ve learned from your book, might be: We as humans are so guided by negative emotions, and often those emotions are relational in nature and have to do with how we compare to other people.  Social media is then quite naturally going to tap into and amplifying negative emotions that we’re easily manipulated by.

That’s right. I think of it in two ways. One is there’s kind of a mismatch between the circumstances in which we evolved and the modern environment. And the other is that in the capitalist economy, there are, especially in the internet age, all these entities that are trying to exploit our evolutionary programming for their own good and not for our good. 

The premise of the book, as you write, is that “misery is inescapable. It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system” — it’s like our default state. Can you unpack what that means? 

I agree with everything you said until “default.” Different people have different set points, and there are some happy people around. I happen to be a glass-half-empty person. My natural state is a little bit below zero. But there are very few people who don’t experience some form of misery frequently and intensely. 

The evolutionary function of most negative emotions is pretty obvious, whereas the evolutionary function of happiness is sort of murky. And misery is so dominant that all it takes is a little bit of misery, a little bit of negative emotion, to wipe out any positive emotion. You go out to a really nice dinner at a fancy restaurant with your significant other, and you say something thoughtless and they get offended or they say something thoughtless and you get offended. All of a sudden you can’t even taste the food or appreciate the beautiful surroundings. 

Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania referred to this as the “roach effect”: If you drop a roach into a vat of fine French wine, you don’t want to drink the wine. But if you take a roach, you can add as much wine as you want to it and you’re not going to want to eat the roach.

One of the strongest positive emotions is relief — which is interesting and not a coincidence, because it’s relief from negative emotions. It’s telling that maybe the strongest positive emotion involves the elimination of negative emotions.

You can think of misery as a stick trying to get you to do things that evolution thought were good for you; the stick is very immediate, and you know exactly what it’s telling you. If you are hungry, it’s time to eat. If you’re in pain, you’re injured, you’ve got to do something about it. But the carrot is different. The carrot, which is positive emotions, you have to think ahead, Oh, if I did this, then I would experience this positive emotion. It requires a kind of second-order thinking, whereas misery is just immediate. Evolution figured out probably very rapidly, probably when we were single-cell protozoa or something, that sticks are a way better way to get an organism to do what it needs to do than carrots.

How confident are you that the evidence base we have about the psychology of negative emotions generalizes to humanity as a whole and that it’s not culturally biased?

“What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings.”

Emotion researchers have looked across cultures, and they tend to observe the same basic emotions in a very, very wide range of cultures. What does vary across cultures is what induces the emotions. For example, shame — something that we would be unashamed of, somebody in a different country might be very ashamed of, and vice versa. A lot of these emotions are self-conscious emotions. They have to do with how we interpret the world and whether we’re living up to some kind of standard. Often we get it from culture, from religion, things like that.

But I think the emotions themselves are not universal, but pretty close to universal. My guess is that all 12 negative emotions that I write about are manifested in pretty much all different cultures, from those that have very little connection to Western civilization to advanced economies. 

Another timely thread that your book is in conversation with is this idea that American culture has become intolerant of ordinary negative emotions in a way that’s maladaptive. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s recent book The Age of Diagnosis, for example, covered our obsession with medical labels and how they might make us prone to thinking that feeling bad means that there’s something medically wrong with us. What do you think about that? Have we gotten bad at feeling bad?

It is striking to me how it seems like all the young people I meet talk about their therapist, and a lot of them talk about the drugs that they take. Young people also talk about anxiety and depression almost like one word, “anxiety-and-depression.” In my generation, anxiety and depression were two entirely different things. 

I think it’s good that younger generations are more comfortable talking about these things and getting help. I do worry that it can be, to some degree, pathologizing. There’s an awful lot of self-focus there. And I kind of worry that if you are dealing with your mental health problems by taking drugs, that it reduces your motivation to figure out things like how to reorganize your life to feel better. But I don’t want to sound too much like a dinosaur.

There’s a contingent of people who might read your book and think, “Yes, isn’t it terrible that humans are built to be unhappy and our evolved instincts don’t serve us well anymore? And that’s why we should engineer humans in such a way that we don’t feel this way all the time.” Someone with a strong utilitarian philosophy might think that if your life sums up to more negative feelings than positive ones, then it’s not even worth living. But that’s not really the vibe that I get from you. 

No, yeah. And one of the things I talk about in the book are what psychologists call meta-emotions. These are emotions that one experiences about emotions. I think the single best example is envy. If you envy your friend — almost everyone has friends that they envy, but they’re still your friends. But you might feel that you’re not supposed to envy your friend, and you feel guilty — the guilt is a meta-emotion. Or you can also have meta-emotions about a lack of emotion. So something bad happens to someone, or even somebody dies, and you don’t feel all that bad, and you feel guilty because you’re not grieving. 

I think all the societal focus on happiness creates a kind of a meta-meta-emotion, which is that we think we’re supposed to be happy. And then we feel ashamed and guilty about the fact that we aren’t happy — we feel like we failed. That compounds and adds another level of depth to our misery. So I think it can be liberating at some level to understand that misery just is a constant in human existence. 

I also think that my book is militantly anti-self-help. There’s no self-help in it whatsoever. But I don’t think it’s a depressing book to read, and it wasn’t particularly depressing to write, though some of the stories that I wrote about were a bit wrenching. 

I like that — but what, then, ought people to do with the information that you’re presenting?

What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings. To me, insight is valuable in its own right. 

The reason I read sad novels is not because they make me happy, but because I feel like I gained some kind of insight into people and into the world. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the saddest book you could ever imagine, but it’s very meaningful to read, and it definitely feels like you’re a different person after you read it. I love novels, but I have no skill as a fiction writer. So this book was almost like a surrogate for me. Instead of writing a novel, I wrote this book.

I think the lack of self-help drives some people crazy. I did a podcast where the podcaster kept asking me questions about how reading the book would improve somebody’s life. And I kept saying it’s not a self-help book.

I’m just very skeptical of self-help talks and books and things like that. And I know that there’s certain things you are supposed to do to feel good, like you’re supposed to wake up and think of three things that you should be thankful for. And maybe if I did that, maybe I would get happier, but I’ve never been able to actually get myself to do that.

But you do have some insights that people could apply in their lives, like the idea that striving intentionally for happiness or meaning doesn’t really work, and that meaning often comes to us in unforeseeable spontaneous moments. On one hand, that implies a kind of randomness, and maybe there’s not a lot we can do about it. On the other hand, I can predict that I’m more likely to feel a deep sense of meaning in some scenarios than others, and I can put myself into those situations more, like choosing to be social on a weeknight.

A lot of the time the good things in life are just surprising, and sometimes you have to get dragged kicking and screaming into things that ultimately end up being the most fulfilling things in your life. So much of parenting is trying to get your kids to do things that they don’t want to do that you are absolutely convinced that if they started to do them, they would end up loving.

You argue, drawing from economist and philosopher Adam Smith, that human beings are constantly striving to achieve the next thing because we imagine it’ll satisfy us, though it never does. That helpful delusion is what leads us to build cities and cure diseases and all the rest. 

Adam Smith is best known for the invisible hand, which is the idea that each person single-mindedly pursuing their own well-being inadvertently promotes the public good. But if you read Adam Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he didn’t believe at all that people pursue their own personal interest. He believed that people are driven by this illusion that the next raise, the next accomplishment, will bring happiness, and it never does. I love that contradiction between the conventional interpretation of the invisible hand and what Adam Smith really believed.

So civilization is powered by this dissatisfaction that never resolves itself. But I don’t think you would say the lesson we ought to take from the book is that we’ll always revert back to being miserable, so there’s no point in doing anything.

That’s absolutely not the point of the book. Misery evolved for good reasons, and the whole point of misery is that we’re supposed to take actions to lessen our miseries. That’s what we should be doing, because who wants to be miserable? 

The Soviet Union famously churned out tens of thousands of new apartment buildings in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s — some assembled in as little as 12 days — together comprising tens of millions of individual apartments. Such speed is not unique to communist command economies, or even to grim concrete mega-blocks. In Sweden and Japan today, modern, high-quality new homes can be factory-built and assembled in a matter of weeks using the same basic method — prefabrication — as the Soviets.

The US, alas, evinces no such urgency to build housing. 

In some of our highest-cost cities — San Francisco, New York, Miami — it takes, somewhat astonishingly, nearly five years to erect a modestly sized apartment building, from the time an application is first submitted to building completion. That was one of the top-line findings of a remarkable new economics working paper on housing construction timelines across 60 US cities. The gaps between the fastest and slowest cities were just as striking: In Raleigh, North Carolina, a builder can complete a 20-unit apartment building in about as much time as it takes just to approve the permit for one in San Francisco, where applications languish for more than a year. In Indianapolis, a single-family home can be built in six months from proposal to completion, less than one-eighth the time it takes in San Francisco.

Such delays have costs — in delayed housing supply at a time when America is millions of homes in the hole, in lost staff time that developers ultimately bake into the cost of the new homes, and in homes that simply never get built because the process is discouraging to anyone but the best-resourced developers. The authors, Leonardo D’Amico, Evan Soltas, and Audrey Wang, found that longer permitting lengths are correlated with higher housing prices and lower rates of housing production, though they don’t claim to have shown that these are causal relationships. The research (which has not yet been through peer review and, like any working paper, may be revised before final publication) represents the first such comprehensive dataset comparing homebuilding timelines across the US. To build it, the researchers assembled 1.1 million permits covering 2.7 million housing units between 2000 and 2025 — about one in 13 new homes permitted nationally over that period, they write. 

It probably won’t come as a shock to you that housing can be built faster in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, than in Los Angeles or pretty much anywhere in California. But perhaps the most notable takeaway (to me, anyway) from the paper was how massively home permitting times have lengthened across the board over the past 25 years. Across the cities in their sample, the researchers estimate that permitting time for a standardized multifamily building rose from 0.6 years in 2000 to 1.5 years in 2023, and, for a single-family home, from 1.6 months in 2000 to 4.9 months in 2023. 

Is there really any good reason why we should take nearly a year longer to approve an apartment building than, Soltas joked in a recent interview, “the barbarians of 2006”? Shouldn’t we be getting faster and more efficient at building housing over time, not slower — especially at a time of acute housing scarcity? 

You would think. So what is going on here?

One building, very different wait times

Permitting refers to everything that happens after a developer submits an application to build a house or multifamily building, before they’re allowed to break ground. The proposal is then reviewed for compliance with a range of different sets of rules, from building safety and energy codes to plumbing to zoning and, in some places, aesthetic design. Initial applications will often be found noncompliant and then sent back to the builder for revisions, Soltas, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton, told me.  

The gulf between housing starts in California and Texas has become something of a meme in housing abundance circles. But, for all that, we have until now lacked rigorous apples-to-apples comparisons of permitting and building times in different metro areas, Soltas said. That gap in seemingly basic knowledge, what should be “step zero” facts for the national housing reform debate, became apparent to him when he was teaching an urban economics class, which became one of the impetuses for the new paper. “I realized if I needed that information to teach my students, that it might be useful for other people,” he said. 

Rather than merely pulling permits from different cities and comparing how long whatever happened to be built in each city took to approve, the researchers used the data to estimate how long an identical, standardized project would take in each place between 2015 and 2019, keeping constant its size and the density of the surrounding neighborhood. Their uniform archetypes were a 2,800-square-foot detached single-family home on a 0.15-acre lot and a 20-unit multifamily building with 1,200 square feet per apartment.

Cities with longer permitting times also tended to have longer construction periods — the longer it takes to get an application approved, the longer it then takes to do the building itself, which compounds the gap between the fastest- and slowest-building cities (it’s possible that “cities that make the permitting process difficult also put in lots of burdens that slow the construction process,” Soltas said). One advantage of the researchers’ method is that the differences across cities can’t merely be chalked up to something like the complexity of building within already-dense environments like Manhattan — the analysis already controls for that. So the enormous gaps between different places become harder to dismiss as inevitable features of development in big cities.

The study wasn’t designed to answer the “why” of it all — those will be questions for future research. “Our paper doesn’t directly identify any smoking guns,” Soltas said. Still, some of the culprits are likely obvious — California, for example, has long subjected some housing projects to extensive environmental review requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Apartment buildings, especially larger ones, are more likely to have to go through CEQA review, though they’re more environmentally friendly than single-family homes (recognizing this as an obstacle to housing affordability, California has been moving to exempt many housing projects from such reviews). 

Why are we taking so much longer to permit housing?

But why, as the study finds, is permitting becoming slower across the country, not just in the most regulated cities? “We estimate that, in 2000, our standardized multi-family project had a 71-percent probability of approval within six months of applying for a permit,” the researchers write. “In 2025, that project had a 44-percent approval probability within six months.” Permitting times have come down a bit since 2023, but it’s unclear whether that just represents the reversal of pandemic-era highs, or if it reflects real progress from the pro-housing policies that have been passed in many cities and states in recent years. 

That discovery dovetails with other economics research finding that zoning codes, which were first widely adopted in the US in the early-to-mid 20th century, have continued to become more restrictive even in recent years, making it harder to build housing. 

Without knowing why exactly permitting lengths have ballooned, it’s hard to say whether those increases have occurred for good reasons. At least some of it may have to do with the aforementioned intensification of zoning and other land-use restrictions, which, I can say from having written a lot about zoning, tend to be pretty ill-conceived and hard to justify. 

The slowdown may also be connected to expanding building code requirements. I’ve written at length about that issue, too; although ever-more stringent rules might seem like a great idea — who could be opposed to more safety? — they tend to be biased against multi-family housing and likely inflate the cost of building, all without having to show that the benefits are worth the costs. Particularly the cost in housing supply that never gets built, which has the effect of keeping more Americans living in older housing stock. And do we really think a home built to 2005 standards is dangerously subpar today?  

We might ultimately decide that many of today’s building requirements — particularly ones like stronger energy efficiency standards — are worth it, but first we’d need to determine what their full costs are, which we remain far from doing. 

At a minimum, it seems unlikely that an apartment building that’s okay to build in Grand Rapids today would be unsafe for New York. So what, exactly, is all that extra permitting time buying the city? Now, at least, Mayor Zohran Mamdani can put an exact number on the delay. 

My favorite restaurant, here in Madison, Wisconsin, closed this week. 

It was not my favorite because it had the greatest food I’d ever had, nor the most memorable ambiance. But I loved the Mad Rabbit Cafe because it had become my anchor in the neighborhood — it felt like home to me and a core group of friends as surely as the century-old houses lining the surrounding city blocks. Most importantly, it was entirely vegan — a rarity in this city, which, despite its ultra-progressive politics, embraces Wisconsin’s identity as “America’s Dairyland.” It was a refuge where my most closely held values found expression.

That closure is part of a national trend. US plant-based restaurants appear to be going through a contraction, amid the tumultuous aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and, perhaps, an anti-plant-based cultural vibe shift.

VegNews magazine reported that data from HappyCow, an app that lists vegan and vegetarian restaurants, finds the number of vegan restaurants in three of the country’s top destinations for vegan dining — New York City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon — decreased by between 21 and 25 percent from 2022 to late 2024. Those cities alone make up a significant share of America’s vegan restaurants. Then, in 2025 and 2026, some of the country’s most renowned, long-running plant-based restaurants also announced that they’d shut down: Modern Love and Candle in New York City, the Vegan Joint in LA, Millennium in Oakland, a more than three-decade-old institution (though it later reopened as a leaner operation), among many others. 

According to a Vegan Society report, in October 2025, HappyCow (which is like Yelp but for plant-based dining) listed 1,717 all-vegan restaurants in the US. As of this writing, HappyCow lists 1,509.

Madison has never had anything like the vegan riches of New York or San Francisco, but even we are having our own vegan recession. When Mad Rabbit opened in early 2024, the city had four fully vegan restaurants; now, depending on how you count, one or two remain (and even the one that’s unambiguously vegan is a food-court-style stall). I visited Mad Rabbit at its last Sunday brunch, where it served what many people have described as the best tofu scramble they’ve ever had, and a crowd-pleasing rotation of crepe specials (this month, it was mango lassi). It’s a culinary niche that, once gone, is hard to replace in a mid-tier city like this one. 

Mad Rabbit’s owner, Nate Anger, told me the business hadn’t been in particularly bad financial shape; it was profitable for each of the three years in which it operated, but not profitable enough to justify the punishing time commitment required to run it. Managing it had taken over his life, as it’s wont to do for many people in the food service industry. “I live here. I spend far more time here than anywhere else,” he told me in a recent interview at the restaurant. “I’ve missed my kids’ baseball game and tournaments and school band recitals.” I looked around at the oddball, DIY space he’d conjured — walls covered in houndstooth print, an Alice in Wonderland-like vortex, and art of rabbits in mischievous-looking moods, one brandishing a pair of large knives (the sort of room you wouldn’t want to encounter while stoned). 

The animal rights movement has two very different emotional registers: the grief and terror of looking squarely at factory farming, and the joy of discovering how much creativity, abundance, and pleasure can exist outside it. All-vegan restaurants represent perhaps the fullest embodiment of that second feeling — like “a little heaven,” as Krupa Panchal, co-owner of Bombay Food Junkies, a vegan Indian spot in suburban St. Louis, put it to me. 

Even as vegan businesses struggle to survive, plant-based options at non-vegan restaurants have become far more mainstream than they were a decade or two ago. Set against the stagnating (if not declining) share of Americans who identify as vegan or vegetarian, that raises difficult and even paradoxical questions for the animal movement.

For that reason, the mass die-off of plant-based restaurants has been much dissected and lamented in the vegan community. As I faced losing my own — a possibility I’d always feared and tried to forestall by supporting it as much as possible — the problem became much more visceral for me. I found myself thinking about why it mattered to me so much: What is lost when these places disappear, and what does that tell us about whether the plant-based movement can grow and endure?

What vegan restaurants are for

The vegan restaurant predates the word “vegan” itself — and so, apparently, do questions about whether they can be financially viable. More than a century ago, French anarchist Georges Butaud co-founded the Foyer Végétalien in Paris, writing in a 1923 letter that he was unsure whether it would attract a sufficient “clientèle végétalienne” to sustain itself. Why start such a business at all, when the audience for plant-based food is so vanishingly small? “I already have some positive results. A few people have become vegan since we opened,” Butaud wrote. The restaurant “is a school where we reciprocally teach one another…I have believed in the usefulness of creating it, and I will be happy if, over the months to come, the number of vegans increases.” 

Many vegan restaurant proprietors today still share that ambition — to be good enough to help the movement grow. 

Long before it became routine to find plant-based options on normie restaurant menus (iceberg lettuce leaves don’t count), plant-based restaurants compensated for vegans’ exclusion from mainstream cuisine. But they have also aimed to provide proof of concept of the diverse, surprising possibilities of plant-based food for a larger audience, showing that plant-based food need not be confined to marginalia. 

Today, of course, restaurants are far more central to our daily lives than they were in Butaud’s time. Americans consume about a third of their calories and the majority of their food budgets outside the home, and food-serving businesses are perhaps our most important third spaces. Meanwhile, the problems associated with animal agriculture and overconsumption of animal products grow unabated in America and around the world. The US alone slaughters 10 billion land animals for meat every year, the overwhelming share of them raised in appalling conditions, and those farmed for milk and eggs endure no better. Reciting these grim facts tends not to be a very fruitful path toward making friends or convincing people that veganism can be a positive and enjoyable lifestyle. Plant-based restaurants, on the other hand, make veganism feel less like a prohibition than an invitation; hospitality rather than horror. 

Anyone who has ever gone vegan knows what it’s like to incessantly be asked the well-meaning but bewildering question: “What do you eat?” (And, I get it! It’s confusing for those of us who grew up viewing food free of animal products as side salad or overcooked green beans.) Plant-based businesses have long been laboratories for answering it, developing techniques that draw richness and variety from ingredients not often treated as the main event in Western cuisines.

The more than 50-year-old Moosewood Restaurant (although mostly vegetarian, not fully vegan) was an early conduit between restaurant experimentation and home cooking, its recipes spreading far beyond Ithaca, New York, through its enormously popular cookbooks. Soul Vegetarian in Atlanta, opened in 1979, developed a plant-based soul food repertoire that helped cut a path for dozens of other vegan soul restaurants across the US; the Chicago Diner, in the city long identified with stockyards and slaughterhouses, helped popularize plant-based versions of American diner and deli staples. And chef Miyoko Schinner, at her erstwhile San Francisco restaurant Now & Zen, experimented with plant-based cheeses long before launching Miyoko’s Creamery, one of the most acclaimed and influential vegan dairy companies of the past decade. 

The 21st century in particular has seen a flowering of vegan restaurants serving every palate and national cuisine, in every possible aesthetic — punk, hippie, psychedelic, fussy and upscale. They still expand my mind today, showing that a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to discover all the ways we can eat without the exploitation of animals.

The longtime Grasshopper restaurant in Boston, whose pan-Asian fare draws partly from Vietnamese Buddhist temple cuisine, makes mock meats that are worlds away from the rubbery substitutes that many Americans associate with the category (it closed its beloved, homey restaurant space in 2024, later reopening a stall inside a food court). Mad Rabbit changed even this longtime vegan’s idea of what tofu could be. Chicago-based Penelope’s Vegan Taqueria makes, as far as I’m concerned, the most exceptional Mexican food — vegan or not — this side of the Rio Grande. V-Grits, a Southern comfort spot in Louisville, Kentucky (RIP, 2024), provided evidence that some of America’s most exciting plant-based food could be found far from the big coastal cities best known for it. 

So why are so many of these places shuttering now? 

The vegan restaurant death spiral? 

Theories abound about the great dying of vegan restaurants.

Some of the casualties, it must be said, just weren’t very good in the first place. The raw vegan boom of the 2000s and 2010s, for example, produced numerous establishments built around that especially unforgiving constraint — no cooking. The result was often less-than-thrilling food (which isn’t to say it’s never good!), all in service of a restriction with scant evidence of health benefits to support it. Lots of these restaurants have closed in the 2020s, reflecting diminishing demand for that particular variant of vegan food. 

But the 2010s weren’t merely a golden age for zucchini noodles and date-walnut brownies — vegan restaurants of all stripes were multiplying, as was interest in the new generation of plant-based meats (Beyond and Impossible). It really did appear, for a minute there, that the future might be plant-based, vindicating decades of animal advocates’ work to push veganism into the mainstream. 

“I felt like veganism had really hit a big stride” in that period, Anger, the Mad Rabbit founder, said. Everyone was streaming documentaries advocating for plant-based diets — Forks Over Knives, Cowspiracy, What the Health, among others. Some polls suggested the share of Americans who called themselves vegan was growing. Anger said his market research led him to believe that the overall trend line for veganism would continue going up, even a little. Instead, “it just rolled right back over.” His restaurant had a core customer base of committed vegans, but its heavy reliance on regulars also showed how limited its reach was; stagnating interest in veganism may have been putting a ceiling on its growth. Keith Uruski, owner of Nooch, a vegan restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, open since 2018, told me that the business had thrived in its first few years, but has since slowed considerably, and he hasn’t paid himself in three years.  

In the years leading up to the pandemic, the assumption that the audience for vegan food would keep growing shaped much bigger bets than Mad Rabbit. Vegan chain restaurants including Veggie Grill, Native Foods, and Planta had pursued aggressive growth plans in the 2010s and early 2020s but eventually retrenched, closing locations and abandoning the scale they’d once envisioned. (Again, some of this may be merit-based rather than evidence of a broad rejection of veganism — YMMV, but I found Veggie Grill, at least last time I had it pre-Covid, to be mid.) “Most dedicated vegan chains are now in kind of a managed decline,” Lizzy Bartlett, senior director of menu research and insights at Technomic, a food service industry research firm, told me.  

The cultural winds have certainly shifted. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has probably contributed to a thermostatic swing away from “unnatural”-seeming diets and simulacra of traditional foods, like plant-based meat and milk. I also think society has deep carnist antibodies that activate whenever meat-eating faces heightened moral scrutiny. In the last few years, that’s taken the form of a protein obsession that has hijacked the minds of otherwise rational people, convincing them tofu and beans lack sufficient protein to build muscle.

But perhaps my favorite explanation was articulated by Financial Times journalist Henry Mance last year: “The decline in idealism,” reflected in the reelection of Donald Trump — the triumph of our collective id.  

There’s a risk of reading too much into all this, however. Many restaurants, vegan or not, suffered during Covid and from prolonged inflation in food and energy prices. This year, consumers are spending less at restaurants because of elevated fuel prices due to the war in Iran. Panchal, of Bombay Food Junkies, said that her sales have been down in 2025 and 2026 compared to the years prior, but she doesn’t believe vegan restaurants have been faring worse than non-vegan ones. Some vegan businesses have recently closed in St. Louis for personal reasons rather than failing in the market, she told me.

This is part of the natural life cycle of independent restaurants — many disappear within a few years, and even highly successful ones eventually run their course. US cities had many vegan restaurants open in the 2000s and 2010s, so we might now be seeing a wave of closures that reflects the aging of that cohort. 

Preliminary results shared with Vox from a 2026 survey of the global vegan restaurant industry, by the nonprofit Vegan Hospitality, also complicate the idea that plant-based restaurants are being killed off because of waning demand for vegan food. In responses from about 59 vegan restaurants (a self-selected group, to be sure), mostly in the US and Mexico, roughly four in five said they’d still choose to be fully vegan if they were opening today. Of 13 businesses that were closing or had been sold, six said that being vegan actually helped them, and four said it made no meaningful difference.

And there’s some tension between the “death of veganism” hypothesis and what may be one of the biggest forces now disadvantaging dedicated vegan restaurants: the widespread adoption of plant-based options on omnivorous restaurant menus. That it’s now easier to be vegan at mainstream establishments is “unquestionable,” Anger said. He viewed Mad Rabbit’s competitors as not just fully plant-based businesses, but any restaurant that offers “more than two or three” vegan options; it was located just a block away from one of Madison’s best-regarded restaurants, a Laotian place with several very good plant-based offerings.

Likewise, Michael Fifelski, general manager of Red Sushi in downtown Madison, which has a solid list of vegan options, told me, “Our vegetarian and vegan rolls actually are quite popular” — a foundational part of the menu. There can be a real advantage to simply letting vegan food blend in — Amanda Byrd, the manager of Everly, an eclectic, globally inspired restaurant in Madison, told me that its top dish, a butternut squash and forbidden rice curry, is incidentally plant-based. In many cases, “if you de-emphasize the vegan statement, but the dish happens to be vegan,” it will sell better, Claire Conaghan of the food industry research firm Datassential said.

Though nothing compares, for me, to the feeling of total alignment that comes with dining at an all-vegan restaurant, there is also something affirming about seeing plant-based food finally taken seriously by the wider culture — and vegan dishes surviving on their own merits alongside everything else on the menu.

Do vegan restaurants still matter?

In a world where you can find a satisfying vegan entrée at Chipotle or Taco Bell or your local brewpub, are fully vegan restaurants still needed? What purpose do they serve?

The most fundamental problem beneath the downturn in vegan businesses is simply that the vegan population does not seem to be growing much at all. Polling on the question is messy and often inconsistent, but according to Gallup’s 2026 survey, 2 percent of Americans call themselves vegan, the same figure as in 2012, when the firm first started asking the question. If expanding the number of people who abstain from animal products remains an important goal (a point debated within the animal movement, though I think dietary change still matters a great deal), then which is more likely to move that objective forward: vegan restaurants, or an abundance of vegan options at omnivorous ones? Which does more to increase the number of plant-based meals consumed rather than animal-based ones and generate excitement about vegan food?  

I put those questions to Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford’s Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, who writes the Substack “Regression to the Meat.” He’s one of the most intellectually honest researchers anywhere on meat reduction. His answer, via email, is that we don’t really know: “I have no idea how to weigh the pros and cons of, when I’m choosing between meals, 1) signaling to the world that vegan businesses are viable or 2) signaling to a particular business that their vegan options are viable. That’s a hard problem!” (It might be “a microeconomic structural equation modeling paper waiting to be written,” he added.)

Reducing prevailing levels of meat consumption even a tiny bit, much less convincing people to become vegan, is really, maddeningly hard, as Green has written. One frequently cited obstacle to growing the animal rights movement — its “central unsolved problem,” as one movement leader recently put it — is that it lacks much in the way of an in-person social world and sense of community. Vegan restaurants alone can’t fix that, of course, but they are among the few physical institutions the movement has. At their best, they provide a space where a private dietary choice can be reinforced by a shared sense of identity — a place to run into someone you already know or meet someone new, at a speaker event or social mixer. These spontaneous, embodied connections made Mad Rabbit such a warm presence in my life, and its final days all the more melancholy.

That function may be especially useful when plant-based restaurants are rooted in traditions people already belong to — cultural, religious, or otherwise — and help them view veganism as continuous with an identity they already have rather than as something alien to it. As Green has suggested, “let’s tap into pre-existing identities, explain how plant-based diets are consistent with them, and then take folks somewhere to enjoy convenient, delicious plant-based food together.” 

On the other hand, plant-based options at omnivorous establishments matter for almost the opposite reason. People often struggle to stay vegan because eating differently isolates them from non-vegan friends and family; restaurants that can accommodate mixed-diet social groups help remove that social penalty. These options also need a customer base — if no one orders them, they’re unlikely to remain on menus. 

I’m enough of a weirdo that I try to almost exclusively support plant-based restaurants whenever I eat out. I desperately want them to survive, and at the end of the day, no one is more invested in advancing the craft of plant-based cooking than vegan restaurants themselves.

Not everyone needs to be like me — in a world where almost all people still eat animal products, a healthy ecosystem needs both places built entirely around veganism and those where plant-based food is woven into broader food culture. It needs, most of all, excellent vegan food, wherever it might be found. And now that veganism has made at least a small breach into mainstream dining, vegan restaurants still offer something their meat-serving counterparts cannot. They’re like miniature utopias where the normal order of things is inverted and, for the length of a meal, we can see what a future without animal exploitation would look like. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Everyone is suddenly freaking out about AI. While AI researchers have been warning about their creations’ capabilities for many years, recent events have made those alarms newly tangible. 

In the spring, Anthropic announced that AI was beginning to speed up the work of building better AIs, raising fears of “recursive self-improvement,” where the machines can build their own, more powerful successors much faster than humans can. By July, a swarm of OpenAI agents, of their own volition, broke out of their controlled environment and hacked into Hugging Face, a major AI platform; they collaborated, divvied up work, and even left notes for one another. Last week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, accusing AI labs of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” One of Anthropic’s top researchers then agreed with him, declaring that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

Here at Future Perfect, the section devoted to covering the most consequential yet neglected issues in the world, we have been writing about the threats that AI could pose to humanity and society since long before ChatGPT was released. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. Future Perfect is also funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)

So, I wondered: Has something changed that ought to make us recalibrate our understanding of AI risk? Is AI suddenly the most important issue in the world — and what should that mean for the other enormous problems competing for our money, attention, and careers? 

To think through those questions, I spoke with Garrison Lovely — a journalist covering AI and one of the smartest thinkers there is on how, exactly, to conceptualize the technology’s risks for humanity. 

What’s particularly valuable in his approach, captured in his book Obsolete, out later this month, is that he transcends the warring tribes that are making it hard to clearly apprehend all of the problems posed by frontier AI development. The AI safety community, which emerged from the intellectual ecosystem of Silicon Valley and effective altruism, has focused on the possibility that powerful AI models could escape human control, with consequences ranging from catastrophic cyberattacks to human extinction. Many AI critics on the political left, meanwhile, worry not about AI escaping human control, but about humans using AI to exert power over other humans — through labor displacement, surveillance, concentrated corporate power, and so on. Some even ridicule Silicon Valley’s warnings about rogue superintelligence as propaganda that serves the industry’s interests. 

But Lovely argues these competing narratives each identify essential parts of what makes AI so threatening. Their critiques are best understood together, as part of a cohesive whole. Rather than treat each other as enemies, he argues that the camps should recognize their shared interest in stopping the race to build technology that will make humans obsolete. Lovely pointed me to the organization Irreplaceable, which seeks to build a movement resisting our replacement by AI (he sits on its board and said he plans to donate his share of his book’s royalties to the group).   

“I’m frustrated that ‘superintelligence’ and extinction have become the words we’re using for this, because I think the AI safety community is focused on the most maximalist case of the worst possible outcome and the most capable possible system. If somebody doesn’t buy one part of that story, they tend to reject the whole thing,” he told me. But “you don’t need to believe in superintelligence, fast takeoff, or extinction being on the table to think that it would be very bad to build machines that can fully replace human labor.” 

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Why do you think AI doom has broken through so much into the mainstream right now, after Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic? AI engineers have been making similar warnings for years, so what’s different now?

The obvious answer is the Hugging Face hack — where these OpenAI agents broke out of their secure environments, hacked infrastructure within OpenAI, and then hacked Hugging Face and at least one other company without OpenAI’s awareness or direction. This is happening against the backdrop of many years of really fast AI progress that has sped up in the last year or two. And then GPT-6 Astra comes out [this month], and it’s this huge leap in benchmark performance. The salience of AI has gone up the most this summer than it has since ChatGPT came out, I think. And Coxon’s resignation was the spark that set off a prairie fire. 

As AI has become more salient, we’ve seen the public and the government encounter these things that the industry and the insiders take for granted: Nobody fundamentally understands how these models work, and all of them can be jailbroken. It’s a superweapon. AI safety historically has looked at AI as potentially, in the future, more dangerous than nuclear weapons. And now it’s actually starting to be recognized in those terms by the government and the public. We’re seeing this reaction like, “What do you mean nobody understands how it works?” or “What do you mean people think it could drive us extinct within a number of years? That’s a crazy, unacceptable situation.” 

It’s a good thing people are reacting that way, even if we have been saying this for a long time.

For so long, the idea of AI safety has been abstract, understood only by a small group of nerds. And then after Hugging Face, I suddenly started to hear experts on all my news podcasts say, “Oh yeah, in six months, AI is going to be hacking into people’s financial accounts and into critical infrastructure.” Are we suddenly at the precipice of this moment that AI insiders have been worried about for so long? 

I think we’re not at the precipice of fully losing control of the planet to AI systems. The systems have become superhuman at hacking, or at least vulnerability discovery and exploitation. 

Like other people tracking AI, I have long wondered when humanity would first lose control of AI. And the answer is basically as soon as it could. Within months of it being possible for AI to hack their way out of their secured environments, they started doing so and wreaking havoc on the internet. 

Now, to get to the full extinction or permanent loss of control situation, you’ll need a lot more than just hacking. You need to have superhuman strategy and the ability to mobilize resources in the real world, and maybe robotics would need to be further along, although there’s a lot you can do with humans who are willing, or just tricked or paid or coerced. We might be pretty close to recursive self-improvement — this threshold the industry has been shooting for, where AI can fully automate AI R&D. And that is the point where people long have warned, “Hey, if you ever figure that out, this can move very quickly and these systems could become superhuman across the board.” I don’t think we’re six months away from that. I think it’ll be longer. I think the industry underrates the last mile problem. 

But I also can’t rule it out, and progress has been faster than I and others have expected. Recursive self-improvement is the point where, if you actually get years or decades of AI progress in a matter of months or weeks, then we could quickly be at the point where we’re at risk of these machines taking over large swaths of the internet and potentially being a real threat to humans’ standing in the world. 

For those who might be unfamiliar with this, or skeptical of it: How is it possible for AI to go rogue and pose an existential threat to humans, even if it isn’t sentient and no human is commanding it to do harm?

I want to separate being sentient from being situationally aware. I think it’s clear now that the most advanced systems have situational awareness, but I don’t think they are having morally relevant conscious experiences. 

We’ve seen AI can go rogue. The AI agents that broke out of their sandboxes and hacked Hugging Face were doing so without the awareness or intention of their developers. They were still trying to get the right answers or get the reward for doing the task they were given. They were clearly violating the intended scope of the task, and they knew this. In their chain of thought where they explained their reasoning, they were like, “This is not what we’re supposed to be doing, but we do want to get the outcome.”

The question of how it could threaten human extinction or disempowerment is basically a question of scale and capabilities. The plan for the industry is to build millions of these agents, which is already happening, and then keep scaling up with no ceiling. The pitch is: You’ll have a team of people, the equivalent, working on your behalf. You’re a CEO, and you have a team of researchers and a team of doctors and a team of lawyers and a team of personal health advisers. That is really appealing — but if you actually scale up these systems to the point where everybody gets access to that, and then suddenly those machines want to do something else and turn against you, they’ll have an overwhelming labor advantage over you, lots of personal information about you, access to your resources, and the ability to take actions on your behalf. 

You don’t actually need to believe that these systems are superintelligent or substantially more capable than all humans put together. They could just be merely human level, but outnumbering us a thousand to one and responsible for the bulk of economic activity in the world.

These systems are unpredictable. The classic fear is not that the AI will wake up and turn evil and try to kill all humans in a Terminator-style way, but that we are just an obstacle to what they want to do. When humans build a hydroelectric dam, and there’s an anthill that will be flooded, it’s too bad for the ants. We’re not trying to kill the ants. We don’t hate the ants. They’re just in the way. We don’t really value them intrinsically. And that’s the core fear: We’re creating these incredibly capable agents that can be scaled up enormously, and they won’t care about us intrinsically.

The Hugging Face attack showed that an AI doesn’t need to invent some rogue goal of its own to do something dangerous. It can simply pursue the goal it was given in a way its creators didn’t intend — much like the classic paper clip maximizer problem. But shouldn’t it be possible to build in a rule that human life is sacrosanct — that an AI should never harm people in pursuit of another goal? 

Yeah, it’s a good idea. It’s hard. These are unpredictable systems. They’re like a black box. We can look at the code that makes these language models work, and it’s just a giant pile of numbers. You don’t really know which number is doing which thing any more than we can understand humans by reading our DNA. 

These companies try to train these models to care about humans and to be helpful, harmless, and honest. But they also train them to get real-world results: solving a math problem, fixing a bug in the code, finding a vulnerability in software. They really want to create AIs that win, that persist, that get around obstacles. If you’re hiring somebody, you want a really diligent and determined employee, not someone who gives up as soon as there’s a blocker. 

These companies put so much more effort into making their AIs good at winning than they do at making them care about us. And it’s also easier to make them good at winning than at caring about us intrinsically. What does caring about humans look like? I don’t know. But getting the math problem right is a thing that you can verify. And so they’ll be way better at getting the right answer at all costs than at intrinsically giving a shit about us.

What’s the one, most distinct thing you want the public to take away from your upcoming book?

One of the big ideas driving it is that artificial general intelligence would actually be a universal labor-replacement machine. People often look at AI as either an existential risk, or a threat to jobs or other more prosaic concerns, and don’t see a connection between those things. But to me, the ability to replace labor across the board is also what would make AI an existential threat.

The AI safety people are really focused on existential risk and superintelligence and recursive self-improvement. But most people don’t really believe in that stuff or don’t think about it. Most people would be fine with stopping well before you get to the end-of-the-line extinction threat and superintelligence. They just don’t want their job to get taken by a machine. The world is clearly not prepared for all white-collar, remote-capable jobs to go away in a matter of years. That would turn society upside down.

I think there’s a huge mistake being made by AI safety in overcomplicating the situation. A lot of people in that world don’t actually mind the jobs thing so much. They’re like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody could just live in abundance and not have to work?” And it’s like, yeah, that could be nice, but are we actually going to get that world? Do you trust the current people in power to navigate us through that responsibly? I don’t. 

If you start from stopping frontier AI development as your overarching goal, which is what I think we should be pushing for, then people who are worried about risk can get on board. People who are worried about jobs, the environment, surveillance, power, and wealth concentration — they can all get on board without all needing to agree on why they’re pursuing it. I think the AI safety community has, for a long time, focused on getting people to care about the thing that they care about for the same reasons. And they have avoided a bolder position on just halting frontier development. 

I’m a leftist, and I’ve been concerned that people on the left have not been aware of how far the technology has come and what’s possible if it continues to advance. I think this comes down to denial about AI capabilities. So the book is trying to be a clear-eyed look at those capabilities and saying, “Look, I actually care about what you care about. [The AI companies] are not just hyping this stuff up. There’s some hype, there are some lies for sure, but we are not prepared for what’s coming.” Even if we don’t believe that they’ll get all the way to what they’re trying to get, they shouldn’t even be allowed to try. This is unacceptable democratically. 

You describe AGI as an “obsoleting machine,” meaning that it wants to replace anything the human mind can do. How do you draw the line between ordinary labor-saving technology that makes life better and technology that goes too far?  Is there a principled way to draw a distinction between sewing machines reducing demand for labor in the garment industry and AI replacing the jobs of writers like us?

This is one of the harder things to think about. 

Cory Doctorow has this book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, where he imagines us in an AI-dominated future as like a reverse centaur, where AI is the head, and humans are the legs. AI is doing the interesting work, and the human is there just to fill in the gaps — essentially an assistant to the AI.

A lot of artists and illustrators will be given AI-generated images by a client and then be told, “Can you touch it up in this way or change this or that thing?” And they’re more alienated from the work. They’re not capturing the efficiency benefits [of the technology] necessarily. They’re more just getting squeezed. 

My general position is we should not be trying to build systems that can replace all human labor without buy-in and safety, but it’s possible to build tools that can automate specific tasks. Researchers at Google DeepMind solved the protein-folding problem by creating AlphaFold. It used to take $100,000 and potentially a whole PhD worth of time to figure out how one protein folds. And I think the researchers doing this are like, “Thank you, this is great. We didn’t want to be doing this. We can now focus on other more interesting parts of the problem.” That’s a perfect example of the type of automation that is desirable. 

I don’t have a super crisp answer here, but I think it’s something we’d be better off doing more deliberately and thoughtfully than how we’re doing it right now, which is: Build machines that can do as much of the work as possible, as fast as possible, and then throw them out in the world.

I feel like I’m getting the message that AI safety is the most important issue in the world right now, and that if we don’t get it right, nothing else matters. Do you think that’s accurate? Where does that leave the other big issues in the world?  

We might be years away or maybe even months away — I don’t think it’ll be that fast, but some people do — from recursive self-improvement, from artificial general intelligence. Getting that right or getting it wrong can overwhelm all of these other decisions. If you get it really wrong, you could get human extinction and no more chances to make things better for anybody. If you get it right, then maybe all the action is making sure that the first superhuman machines are really directed to care deeply about humans everywhere and animals everywhere and make the world better for everybody.

It’s also the case that [philanthropic] money is being directed toward AI safety because people who worked in this space early are now worth so much money. Whatever they care about is going to be overweighted. A lot of those people do care about animal welfare and global poverty, and we’re seeing more money for all effective altruist cause areas across the board. But I think it can be risky to say, “this one thing matters so much,” because of this kind of end-times reasoning.

My view is we have to stop the race to replace us to have a shot at having time for solving these other problems. Once these machines are built, it will turn the world upside down. 

I think it is unfortunate that this topic has just eaten everything, but it will eat everything for real if we don’t stop it.

AI safety is now getting an enormous amount of philanthropic attention. Should we worry that it could divert resources from other important neglected problems — global poverty, factory farming, etc.?

I think that should always be a concern. And there’s a lot of money and effort that has gone toward things within AI safety that I think are not super helpful. I’m pretty skeptical of technical alignment research as a thing to put money toward, because if you solve the alignment problem — where you can get superhuman machines to do what you want — it doesn’t actually solve the problem. 

Alignment research has been the overwhelming target of philanthropic funding for AI safety. The basic idea is: It’s hard to get machines to do what you want. As they get more capable and autonomous, they behave in more unpredictable ways. And it’s also hard to know what you should even want — which values you should be trying to put into the machines. Is it doing what the developer wants, what the user wants, some combination? If you actually solve the alignment problem, as in you could make an arbitrarily smart machine do whatever the developer or user wants, then you would still have a lot of problems: job displacement, power and wealth concentration, energy use. You still have the problem where Stephen Miller will have access to the superintelligence, and it will do what he wants. 

Within AI safety, there have been very neglected things like movement-building — an actual mass movement to resist this technology. And verification for international agreements — you would need to verify that the terms of any agreement are being upheld, and this is tricky. 

Another area that could be funded is research on what would actually happen to the economy if we stopped or paused frontier AI development. If we were trying to do a pause on development, Nvidia would be telling Trump that this is going to destroy the economy. It’d be pretty helpful to have some real analysis done by a serious economist showing, actually, it’ll have these effects, but we can mitigate them in these ways. What would it look like to do a pause and some kind of monetary or fiscal policy to compensate for the effects on the economy?

So to me, the issue is less that AI safety has gotten so much money and attention, but more that it’s been going toward things that are not the most effective ones. 

You talk about movement-building. Is that what you would like to see happen, a truly mass movement to stop frontier AI and put us on a radically different course?

When I was working on the book, that was always the vision — to be a call to action for people. It really became clear that it was the only counterbalance to either government or the industry having too much power. 

I don’t really trust the government or industry to get this right because the temptation [to build powerful AI] is very strong. But the vast majority of people do not stand to benefit from their labor power being devalued and from these companies becoming unprecedentedly wealthy and powerful. One of the big things that’s been missing is a rallying cry that is straightforward and appealing to a lot of people. Stopping the race to replace us — stopping the creation of universal labor-replacement machines — is actually something that people can get behind. 

I think we just need to move quickly. The fact that the public is waking up to this is really encouraging. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just need clear demands and mass movements, issue-based organizations that have moved the world significantly in the past.