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On August 28th, I went to a Q&A in SF by Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic and Ezra Klein of the NYT. The Q&A was on Lowrey's new book about the impact of government bureaucratic paperwork on poor people, but what struck me was that they both made several rapid non-sequitur jokes about AI killing everyone, in the middle of talking about policy, political polarization, and 20th century history. Paraphrased very roughly from memory (don't remember who said which):
It's important to think about the cruelty in TANF’s forced work requirements in the very short period of time before humanity permanently loses control of its own destiny.
San Francisco is a place that has made certain things— such as building superintelligence that will destroy the world— completely frictionless.
I think the audience reacted much less to the strange throwaway AI jokes than they did to more mundane jokes about Trump or political parties. This was surreal, especially because the jokes read to me more as gallows humor than as mocking the SF discourse.