Article by Moshe Y. Vardi: “Peggy Noonan is a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal. I often disagree with her opinions, but I find her to be one of the most astute observers of the American social-economical-political zeitgeist. When she described in 2018 Silicon Valley executives as “moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength,” I realized that the popular view of Silicon Valley as a fountain of technical innovation and cool gadgets had changed. Indeed, in my January 2019 column, I also quoted Niall Ferguson, a Hoover Institution historian, who described cyberspace as “cyberia, a dark and lawless realm where malevolent actors range.” The Economist magazine coined the term Techlash to describe what was then a new phenomenon of growing hostility toward the tech giants. The COVID pandemic distracted us from the techlash of the late 2010s. In fact, technology was our salvation during those dark days of social distancing. But now, the techlash is back!
In her Sept. 10, 2026 column “Pause AI for Humanity’s Sake,” Noonan argued, “When something speeds up and gets out of control, it isn’t alarmist to demand prudence and deliberation.” This is not the first call to slow down AI development. “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” was a letter published by the Future of Life Institute in March 2023. But The Wall Street Journal is, in essence, the flagship publication of the U.S. business community; the publication objects practically always to government regulation. A day earlier, Paul Tudor Jones, another columnist at The Wall Street Journal, warned that “AI May Become the Third Superpower”, and called for U.S. president Donald Trump and China president Xi Jingping to “develop a shared strategy to confront it.” As reported in the 2026 AI Index, U.S. sentiment has turned negative on AI, with the majority concerned rather than optimistic about AI’s societal impact…(More)”.
