The Daily Show Warned of AI's Threat. Brent Taylor's Excuse Drew Nearly 7 Times the Views

If you want to know how a civilization ends, don't ask a historian. Look at the YouTube page of The Daily Show this week. As of Friday, the upload in which Jon Stewart and the news team take up artificial intelligence's looming threat had 298,500 views. The upload with "D**k Pics" in the title had 2,009,226. That's nearly seven to one, and the machines haven't even needed to do anything yet. They can just wait.

In fairness to the machines, the upload dates are close but not identical, and YouTube doesn't come with a stopwatch. But the runner-up was the show's midterm fearmongering piece, at 1,570,136, so the public isn't against all forms of dread. It simply wants the dread to be about somebody else.

The winner earned it. Jordan Klepper took on Brent Taylor, a Tennessee state senator and the Republican nominee in the 9th Congressional District, after the Nashville Scene reported he'd sent unsolicited nude photos. Taylor confirmed sending them to a woman, said the report has inaccuracies and called it a politically motivated distraction. He also described the business as "youthful indiscretions." Local reporting puts him at 53 at the time. I knew a fellow who described his third bankruptcy as a learning experience, but he at least had the decency to be 40. Klepper's rejoinder, per the Daily Beast, was that a youthful indiscretion doesn't involve a pill. Asked whether there had been more than one recipient, Taylor offered, "one was too many," which is the most careful sentence ever spoken by a man in this line of work.

The same upload found room for Alaska, where a sitting senator named Dan Sullivan is running on a ballot that also contains a retired teacher from Petersburg named Dan Sullivan. The state's Supreme Court has ruled both can stay, and Trump went to Wasilla and urged people to vote for the real one. All this for a man who has spent his whole career hoping voters couldn't tell one politician from another, and has now met the downside.

Further down the page, Michael Kosta's visit with an activist fighting for America's persecuted billionaires had 526,081 views, and I'd guess a good share of those were the billionaires, checking on the cause. Thank goodness someone is. It's lonely work, being worth that much, and all your friends are dead or suing.

None of this means the AI segment wasn't good. It means a country will always sit up for a scandal it can picture and sleep through one it can't, and it's generally the second kind that comes for the house.