Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"
#784: The absurdity of the apocalypse
Plus: repayment avoidance, the death of “hello,” and a Cinderella story for the algorithmic era
Where will AI be at the end of 2027? A bet
We, Gary Marcus, author, scientist, and noted skeptic of generative AI, and Miles Brundage, an independent AI policy researcher who recently left OpenAI and is bullish on AI progress, have agreed to the following bet, at 10:1 odds, with criteria drawn from two earlier Substack essays by Gary that proposed criteria for
233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper
This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.
The AI future where humans get paid to be creative
Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro!
You’ll have noticed how previously normal people start acting like addicts to their favourite generative AI and shout at you like you’re trying to take their cocaine away. Matthias Döpm…
Is there something it is like to be an AI?
Posted on Wednesday 2 Jul 2025. 1,593 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.
Import AI 472: DeepMind's cheating math agents; populist AI policies; and Forethought theorizes a nightwatchman
Plus, a machine hermeneutics story
An AI Upheaval Is Coming for Media. This Journalist Is Already All In.
AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune’s web traffic in the second half of 2025. Most are written by Nick Lichtenberg.
Automate the C-Suite - The Ideas Letter
Weatherby argues that Benanav’s and Morozov’s essays on AI and the left miss a deeper reality: Today’s AI is not a neutral tool operating within capitalism but the materialization of…
The AI safety vibe shift
Once a fringe obsession of Bay Area rationalists, existential risk is suddenly all anyone is talking about
March 2026 Global Dialogues Survey | Windfall Trust
Here’s what the world had to say about the AI economy
AI #176 Part 2: Plan B
This is part 2 of the weekly, broadly covering speculation, rhetoric and policy, along with alignment research.
AI FOR EPISTEMICS & COORDINATION
Civilization and technology have radically improved the human condition. Nonetheless, the world sometimes goes in directions which essentially nobody would prefer — e.g., nuclear arms races, unexpected financial crashes, predatory marketing, or ubiquitous political misinformation.
Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares — Common Notions Press
Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fear
