Well, Kevin, did you see this? Elon Musk told employees at XAI that the company needs a factory on the moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space.

Yes, this is his new pivot from Mars. He's no longer interested in Mars as he was all those years. Now he's going to the moon.

This Looney Tunes ass company, I swear to God. Elon Musk, I have a message for you. If Bugs Bunny ever shows up and tells you to climb into that catapult, do not trust him. Okay? That is a rascally rabbit. And you might find yourself in space, my friend. He's going to launch you from the moon catapult.

You know what?

That might be the way I want to go out, honestly.

It's just have a nice long career in journalism and then put me in the moon catapult.

I'm ready.

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork.

This week, Labor Pains, why AI is causing freakouts from the markets to the workforce.

Then, the Times-Alexandra Alter on how the romance novel industry is being overtaken by AI

authors.

And finally, it's time for our new

segment, One Good Thing. It replaces our previous segment, a lot of terrible things.

Well, Kevin, welcome back from our nation's capital.

Yes, I was in D.C. very briefly this week there for some book meetings, and it was very cold.

But the bigger observation is that Washington, D.C. is like freaking out about AI.

Is that right? Yes. So everywhere I went,

every meeting I had, people were sort of asking me, is this stuff real? Is it happening?

Are we in the takeoff? Is the singularity approaching? And it does feel like the sort of political

salience of AI has gotten much, much higher just in the past couple of weeks.

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