AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome - by Jim Prosser
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AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome<br>A communications intervention
Jim Prosser<br>Feb 24, 2026
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“If I’m to have a symbol, it shall be one I respect.”<br>Back in January, it came to light via FEC reporting that OpenAI’s president and co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife had made a monumental $25 million donation to MAGA Inc. last September—one of the largest individual political donations of 2025.<br>When interviewed by WIRED about his newfound political largesse, Brockman explained the check in rather grand terms. “This mission, in my mind, is bigger than companies, bigger than corporate structures,” he said. “We are embarking on a journey to develop this technology that’s going to be the most impactful thing humanity has ever created.”<br>The word that sticks out to me here is “humanity”. He writes a $25 million check with his wife to a partisan political operation, one with very specific policy positions affecting very specific people, and explains it in the language of humanity. The kind that lives in essays and mission statements, not the kind that has healthcare anxieties or gets deported or loses jobs or disagrees with you about politics. Capital-H, abstract, floating-above-the-fray Humanity.<br>Brockman is not an outlier. If you’ve worked in or around big tech for any length of time, you’ve met the type, probably several dozen of them. They’re everywhere in AI. They care enormously about Humanity. They’d do anything for Humanity. They just can’t be bothered with actual people.<br>And if these executives and companies don’t see and address the disconnect in their public messaging, they’re doomed to keep losing the battle for hearts and minds the industry desperately needs them to win.<br>The View From Orbit
When I contemplate a mascot for this type of executive, the image that comes to mind is blue, nude, and levitating: Dr. Manhattan.<br>For those who haven’t read writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons’ “Watchmen”, here’s the quick version: Jon Osterman is a nuclear physicist who gets disintegrated in a lab accident and reconstitutes himself as a being of godlike power. He can see across time. He can manipulate matter at the atomic level. He is, for all practical purposes, omniscient and omnipotent. And over the arc of the story, he gradually loses the ability to give a shit about people.<br>This isn’t a flaw in his character. Moore wrote it as the inevitable consequence of operating at that altitude. Manhattan can perceive the entire arc of human civilization. He understands the quantum mechanics underlying all of existence. He genuinely does care about humanity’s survival in some detached cosmic sense. But he can’t maintain a relationship with the woman he loves or comfort someone who’s grieving. Individual suffering becomes statistically insignificant when you’re tracking the movements of atoms and the trajectory of species.<br>The crucial part—the part that makes “Watchmen” more than a comic book—is that Manhattan doesn’t experience this as a loss, but as clarity. He thinks he’s seeing more clearly than everyone else. The people around him can tell that something essential has been lost, but he can’t see it himself because the view from orbit is so intoxicating.<br>Replace “nuclear physicist” with “AI executive,” and you have a disturbingly accurate portrait of a particular mode of tech leadership that has exploded across the industry over the past few years. (Minus the nudity, thankfully.)<br>Why the Abstraction is Irresistible
I don’t think these guys are truly indifferent. I’ve met and worked with many Dr. Manhattan types over two decades in this industry—an industry I'm personally and professionally invested in, as someone who builds with these tools daily and whose consulting business is substantially tied to AI. They are, in the majority of cases, formidably intelligent, voraciously curious, and capable of accomplishing amazing feats. The problem doesn’t lie in any of these things, but in the comfort the worldview they inhabit provides.<br>Humanity, the concept, is an extraordinarily comfortable thing to care about. It’s theoretical. It’s malleable. You can model it and optimize for it. You can write essays about it on a blank white page at the top of your company’s domain hierarchy, and nobody can pin you down on specifics.<br>People, on the other hand, are a nightmare. They’re real and present, messy, inconsistent, and contradictory. They get angry at you, sue you, organize against you, show up outside your office with signs. They have the temerity to worry about their job rather than the species-level trajectory of labor markets. They want to know why their kid is using your chatbot to cheat on homework instead of appreciating that you’re building the most important technology in human history.<br>Humanity holds still for your grand plans. People do not.<br>There’s a second force at work beyond comfort, one...