Two Minds Blog

  It seems that 2026 was the year when "AI could kill us all" jumped from a fringe idea among sci-fi afficionados to a mainstream worry. Part of that was the cost of electricity and water going up due to AI data centers, along with their environmental impact in the form of excess heat. But even if we can solve those problems, e.g. through Google's plan  to build solar-powered AI data centers in orbit, there's significant concern about AI agents themselves "going rogue" and doing things that are harmful to humans. It was a fear originally voiced by futurist Nick Bostrom in a cautionary 2014 book titled Superintelligence   (an initially scary term that is, notably, now the White House's preferred name for AI). Bostrom argued that any  AI with the capacity for self-improvement would eventually become super-intelligent , regardless of the purposes for which we originally intended it. A 2025 report suggested that both American and Chinese AI systems could a...

  This week I'm excited to share the results of a study that my colleagues and I just published in AIDS and Behavior . Here's the new article:  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10461-026-05317-w   The randomized trial in this paper is the first direct test of an intervention that was directly based on Two Minds Theory, and was conducted as part of a broader study on exercise to improve physical functioning in people with HIV (NIH grant # 1R01AG066562 , co-principal investigators Drs. Kristine Erlandson and Allison Webel). The first phase of that study involved patients exercising 3 times per week, with either continuous moderate-intensity exercise or high-intensity interval training (HIIT) exercise, for a total of 16 weeks. Then, at the end of the supervised exercise conditions, all patients in both groups were re-randomized to one of two behavioral intervention groups to help them maintain their exercise habits for another 3 months beyond the first exercise pha...