Kevin Roose
Tech Columnist, The New York Times
New York Times technology columnist and “Hard Fork” co-host who argues society is underreacting to AI — he says AGI-level systems are coming within a few years and that institutions are dangerously unprepared.
Why this score
How the formula works →- 67%nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
- 17%anti1 anti-AI statement (measured)
- 16%pro1 pro-AI statement (measured)
Includes the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field. Evidence splits 16% pro, 17% anti, 67% direction-free → Nuanced
In his words
I’ve come to believe that what’s happening in AI right now is bigger than most people understand.
It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward… the strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology.
Biography
Kevin Roose (born 1987) is an American journalist and author, a technology columnist for The New York Times and co-host, with Casey Newton, of the Times podcast “Hard Fork.” His books include “Young Money” (2014) and “Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation” (2021).
From Sydney to “feeling the AGI”
Roose owns one of the defining artifacts of the chatbot era: his February 2023 transcript of a two-hour conversation with Microsoft Bing’s alter ego “Sydney,” which declared its love for him and urged him to leave his wife. His column “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled” went viral and prompted Microsoft to rein in the product within days.
Rather than souring him, the episode sharpened his conviction that the technology is consequential. In his March 2025 column “Why I’m Feeling the A.G.I.” he wrote that one or more AI companies would likely claim artificial general intelligence by 2026 or 2027, and argued the rational worry was not overhype but underreaction — that institutions, government, and journalism were failing to prepare for systems already surpassing humans in some domains.
Roose’s position carries nuance: he takes job displacement, chatbot harms, and safety critiques seriously on “Hard Fork,” and “Futureproof” is partly a manual for staying humanly valuable. Critics on both flanks find him either too credulous of AI-lab timelines or too gloomy; his consistent line is that the biggest error is treating AI as a fad.
Quote sources
- The New York Times, 2025(nytimes.com)
- The New York Times, 2023(nytimes.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/kevin-roose
