Excellent essay on the uncanny valley that AI writing is in today and how it likely won’t be long before it’s out of it. This was a somewhat heartening conclusion:
Human writing will respond the way handicrafts always have to industrialization: by becoming a luxury good. Mechanical watches did not die when quartz watches arrived; rather, mechanical watches became less accurate and far more expensive. They are worn to signal that the owner can afford imprecision. Expect artisanal typos. Expect certified, free-range sentences that are lovingly hand-reared and traceable to a named writer with visible deadline damage.
Good to hear as I start a new blog in 2026. However, he doesn’t explicitly say for whom the hand-crafted writing is a luxury, the reader or the writer. OCT 1 | REPLY
A living system reproduces, creates variants, selects from among those variants and uses energy from its environment to do so. Reproduction, variation, selection and energy define life. This definition does not require carbon, cells, a heartbeat, a nervous system or pain.
Given this very sensible definition of life, which encompasses viruses, it’s difficult to say that AI systems aren’t alive today, or won’t soon be.
The common objection to calling machine intelligence a form of life is: How can something dependent on human-built hardware and electricity be alive? But all life depends on its context or envelope! Viruses need cells, humans need Earth and machine intelligence needs data centers and supporting infrastructure. Depending on a particular environment does not disqualify something from being considered alive. It is a consistent condition.
And something people get hung up on when talking about AI (and especially its risks) is consciousness. It’s refreshing that this very lucid article barely mentions it. SEP 29 | REPLY
Commentary on journalist Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience, which I am tempted to pick up.
Once you open your eyes to the tradeoff between convenience and community, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s more convenient to ride a Peloton bike at home alone than to go to a spin class full of other sweaty bodies (whom you might end up chatting with). Zoom meetings make working with distant colleagues much easier, but aren’t very socially nourishing. The gig economy is rife with this bargain. Ubers and Lyfts replace rides given by friends and trips taken on public transit. Delivery replaces meals out at local restaurants and time spent in stores of all kinds. […]
Sometimes, the reason an innovation is even considered convenient at all is because it allows you to do something in isolation. Such is the case with self-checkout. American shoppers love it—self-checkout lines frequently thread through a store even when staffed checkouts have little to no wait. But as Bullard points out, self-checkout is more work for customers, who have to do the cashier’s job themselves. And the machines are often less efficient than human cashiers, freaking out and freezing up because you jostled an item in the bagging area. “The only effort saved,” Bullard writes, “is whatever would have gone into engaging in basic niceties with a cashier.” Similarly, recognizing an opportunity in consumers’ desire to escape the alleged inconvenience of small talk, in 2019 Uber introduced a setting to request a “quiet ride”—for an extra fee, of course.
I find that “community” is often presented undefined, and as an obvious desideratum. But I can understand why folks would choose to opt out of “community” that includes an open set of cashiers, Uber drivers, and gym-machine neighbors.
In the environments for which we are adapted, humans would have lived in bands of 25 to 50 people, and would have had contact with maybe two to three times that number in a lifetime. Daily face-to-face interaction was likely with a few dozen people at most, and usually the same familiar faces, day after day, for one’s entire life. Nearly all interactions were with people one knew well, was related to, or would see repeatedly. These would have been high-context, high-trust, high-accountability relationships. There’s a reason Dunbar’s number is 150.
Modernity inverts this. We come across hundreds of strangers in a day. Ancestral interactions were few, deep, and repeated, while modern interactions are many, shallow, and often one-off. The community we sense we’ve lost, it seems to me, is something other than the retail encounters we’re conveniencing away. SEP 29 | REPLY
[Social media] will only show us so much. They excel at finding the stuff that may be interesting to everyone, but they are virtually impotent at promoting what would be truly fascinating to a few.
The sweetest stuff has to be unearthed and recommended by people we trust. Which is why everyone should blog. When you blog there are two types of entries:
The Post: your stuff. The Link: someone else’s stuff.
There’s no reason why people couldn’t share on social media the same stuff they link on blogs. The reasons it doesn’t work in practice are the status-seeking incentives engendered by visible metrics such as views and likes, and the algorithm’s intervention in what you see to keep you engaged for longer.
Nevertheless, this 2009 post is inspiring me today. Blanc makes the case not just for blogging, but for making link posts a first-class citizen on blogs. SEP 26 | REPLY
Cass thinks AI is the new climate change.
A decade later, we are doing it all again with artificial intelligence. We have the demands for aggressive regulation, the imperative of global coordination, and the obstacle of an untrustworthy Chinese Communist Party. Pope Leo released an encyclical. And Donald Trump is insisting that predictions of AI doom, like predictions of climate doom, are a “HOAX.”
Of course, neither climate risk nor AI risk is a hoax. But in each case the pitched battle between catastrophism and complacency has left too little room for the pragmatism with which we humans might manage to muddle through, as we typically do. Much of my own early policy work addressed this dynamic in the climate context, analyzing the underlying causes of overheated rhetoric and making the case that one could, and should, accept the physical science of rising temperatures while rejecting the poorly constructed causal chains that led toward “Hell on Earth.”
This is exactly how I feel about AI. There’s plenty about which to be skeptical, and the accelerationists discredit themselves when they dismiss all concern. But the doomers driving the anti-AI activism (and thus the public conversation) are nuts. SEP 26 | REPLY
The past six months have seen a big uptick in media attention about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and growing political concern over its consequences. This began with Anthropic’s release last April of its Mythos model, which could reportedly break into a wide range of government computer systems thought to be secure. This was followed by the Hugging Face incident, where an OpenAI test of an AI agent escaped control of its human organizers, broke into other websites, and organized a swarm of other AI agents to cover their tracks. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing opposition to data centers, and the emergence of anti-AI wings in both the Democratic and Republican parties.
I saw much of this dynamic in crypto policy. So many shape rotators who saw every political question as an engineering problem. Either no concept of, or too literal a view of, group interest and political incentives. SEP 23 | REPLY