An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people an…
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen.
Import AI 452: Scaling laws for cyberwar; rising tides of AI automation; and a puzzle over gDP forecasting
How much could AI revolutionize the economy?
What we can’t measure about AI – yet | Aeon Essays
The costs of transformative innovations are immediately clear: it’s the longterm gains that are hardest to understand
Is there something it is like to be an AI?
Posted on Wednesday 2 Jul 2025. 1,593 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.
March 2026 Global Dialogues Survey | Windfall Trust
Here’s what the world had to say about the AI economy
Intelligence Rising
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to be one of the most transformative technologies in human history.
AI as Social Technology
Our debates about ‘AI’ grow out of 1990s science fiction. Back then, Vinge (1993) wrote essays and novels urging us to face up to the oncoming “Singularity”: a moment of rapid change that would fundamentally transform the human condition. On that day, AI would rapidly evolve from merely human-level intelligence, what some now call ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), into something super-intelligent with its own interests and goals. Humanity would then either be casually eliminated by out-of-control machines, or humans would become as gods, with super-human servitors at our command.
Stripe Press — The Scaling Era
An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen.
Presentations — Benedict Evans
Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. New in May 2025, ‘AI eats the world’.
70 years of AI hype
Quoting from Olivia Guest et al. (2025) "Against the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia."
The Era of Experience & The Age of Design: Richard S. Sutton, Upper Bound 2025
A guide to understanding AI as normal technology
And a big change for this newsletter
"The forces that are now shaping AI are the same forces that turned the open internet into monopolistic platforms, converted peer-to-peer participation into precarious labor, and enclosed the digital commons. They are now threatening to capture and enclose thought itself." osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qahd3_v1/
read the article making this argument and it just reinforced the 3d printing analogy. the industry hype with AI is 100x larger, but the pattern was a similar "this is going to change humanity" to "this is going to revolutionize specific industries" to "this will be a fun hobby for eccentrics"
Adam Conover
I’m sorry but “everyone is going to use AI to code their own apps” sounds like “everyone is going to learn HTML and code their own websites.“ like … have you met people? no they’re not
