A country of geniuses ⊗ Collapse: A framework

Once in a while I think I should do a Nate Hagens special, so many of his interviews are worth spreading far and wide. This is not such a special, but, it does first feature an essay by Hagens; one of the better analyses of that Dario Amodei essay that made a splash not long ago, The Adolescence of Technology. Don’t be taken by the title, Nate summarises the essay but largely focuses in filling the missing pieces with a series of “wide boundary” arguments. The second featured article is by someone I didn’t know about, Adrian Lambert, who presents his framework for collapse, which feels very Hagensian. Maybe make your coffee a bit stronger this morning.

A country of geniuses

Nate Hagens’ meta-commentary about Dario Amodei’s essay on AI risk begins with a useful declaration of intent: this is not AI doomerism or AI cheerleading, but an attempt to look at the world this technology is actually entering—with all its incentives, constraints, and fragilities. He borrows a useful metaphor from Amodei, that of a “country of geniuses”—the idea that sufficiently advanced AI would function like 50 million highly capable minds operating in coordination, able to copy themselves, work without pause, and act across every interface of modern life, from scientific research to markets to media. That framing sets up the question Hagens finds most absent from Amodei’s analysis: what is all this actually for? He draws on Dennis Meadows’ observation that tools don’t change goals, they amplify the priorities of whoever holds them. If those priorities remain growth, power, and competitive throughput, a more capable optimisation engine won’t redirect civilisation toward different ends—it will pursue the same ones faster.

The deeper challenge Hagens poses to Amodei’s framework is that it assumes surviving technological adolescence leads somewhere worth arriving. Amodei imagines a managed abundance on the other side: AI-accelerated scientific progress, sustained GDP growth, a kind of settled stability. Hagens questions whether that destination is physically possible. A “country of geniuses” doesn’t float above the biosphere, it plugs directly into it, competing for energy, water, and materials that are already strained. The “goal function” question, then, isn’t just philosophical. As Hagens puts it, a system that optimises the wrong objective can perform brilliantly while destroying the things you actually value, ”Think King Midas meets the Terminator.” The real issue isn’t whether AI can make us richer, but what kind of richness we’re aiming for in the first place.

Further reading → He writes that “people focus on the alignment of models as if that’s all that matters. It does matter quite a bit, but the larger alignment problem, in my opinion, is societal alignment.” The piece I shared last week, The Next Great Transformation (which quite a few readers seem to have appreciated) connects directly with that.

This is not a smart research assistant or a brilliant colleague, rather it’s something closer to a vast workforce of highly capable minds that can operate quickly, copy themselves, and act through all the interfaces of the modern world like emails, code, design tools, scientific papers, research labs, bureaucracies, markets, and media. If and when this workforce arrives, it will be a civilizational event. For better or worse it will change everything. […]

A datacenter is also basically a physical machine plugged into the Earth. It’s made of silicon chips, copper, and cooling systems, and uses water, concrete, and transmission lines. Most of these things rely on geopolitically-tenuous supply chains and the reality that those source materials are not infinite or frictionless to access. […]

Most of the real world harm in modern life doesn’t come from any lack of intelligence, it comes from incentive structures, institutional capture, and organizations that can externalize costs while still declaring success and cultural status. […]

All definitions of wisdom (from every language and knowledge system) have an element of restraint. Restraint in ourselves, our species, our tech, and our institutions.

Collapse: A framework for understanding and navigating the decline of industrial civilisation

Adrian Lambert’s starting point is pretty bleak: industrial civilisation is collapsing, and prevention is no longer the relevant question. He lays out a framework along six domains—thermodynamics, ecological overshoot, the myth of decoupling, capitalism’s growth imperative, an epistemic crisis, and renewal within limits—to argue that collapse is not a future risk but an active process already underway. The core mechanism is thermodynamic: civilisation is a system that survives by consuming concentrated energy and releasing it in degraded form, and fossil fuels have allowed it to grow far beyond what the planet can sustain. As Joseph Tainter’s work on historical civilisations shows, complexity yields diminishing returns, and when the energy surplus required to maintain it falls below a threshold, rapid simplification follows.

Lambert is equally sceptical of the cultural narratives that obscure this trajectory. He sees the promise of “decoupling” (growing GDP while shrinking environmental impact) as an accounting trick, with high-income countries offshoring resource-intensive production rather than reducing it. The epistemic crisis runs deeper still: modernity’s reductionist frame, fixated on quantifiable metrics and human exceptionalism, leaves societies poorly equipped to reckon with relational and ecological realities. He prescribes a shift in orientation: towards ways of living that work within biophysical limits, regeneration of the commons, and acceptance that the work of renewal matters even if human survival is not guaranteed.

Further reading → Also on collapse, this episode of the Farsight podcast a few months ago is a very good interview with Luke Kemp about his book Goliath’s Curse, a historical study of the collapse of human societies.

The Great Turning that Macy describes will not arrive as a single, coordinated revolution. It will be local, fragmented, and adaptive, small communities woven into the fabric of the ecosystems they depend on. In the absence of central planning, these efforts will be messy and incomplete. But they will also be experiments in survival. […]

Overshoot is therefore both an ecological and political reality: it is as much about the unequal distribution of consumption as the aggregate scale of it. As a result, collapse will not arrive everywhere at the same time, but will unfold along different timescales across the world. […]

The political economy of industrial civilisation has locked itself into a high-cost complexity trap: maintaining and expanding complexity requires ever-greater inputs, but the returns on that complexity are shrinking, pushing the system toward instability. […]

How we think shapes how we act. Without epistemic renewal, technical and political interventions will remain trapped in the logic of overshoot. […]

This demands a shift from the industrial growth economy to what Joanna Macy calls a “life-sustaining society.” It is a cultural, political, and ecological pivot: from growth to sufficiency, from extraction to kinship, from centralised control to distributed resilience.

§ We can move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate—here are the first three steps. By Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis, who’s capitalism diagnosis and description fits right along the collapse piece above. “By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets.”

§ Our emerging planetary nervous system. There’s something in the language of this essay that I find too … spacey? But there’s something to it. “We’ve been separating signal from judgment, letting speed outrun significance, and ignoring our bodies until alarms blare. We, as a species, are grimly out of tune. Reimagining civilization’s cognition is no longer optional — it is the design imperative for a world that must learn to steer, not spin.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Thinking About Tomorrow: A handbook for strategic foresight. “There is no single right way to do foresight. Throughout, we invite you to treat what you read as a starting point. Whether you are new to foresight or have practised it for a long time, we hope this handbook will be a useful and enjoyable companion on your journey into the future we are all heading into.”
• Refracting the Futures: Megatrends PRISM. “Foresight is not about accumulating information but about developing the capacity to make sense of change in ways that inform action. Similarly, the field of anticipatory governance highlights the need for mechanisms that link long-term analysis to present-day institutional choices. The PRISM was designed as such a mechanism. It offers a disciplined yet flexible process for refracting megatrends into implications that are strategic, ethical, and actionable.”
• Foresight Africa 2026. “This year’s Foresight Africa report brings together leading scholars and practitioners to illuminate how Africa can navigate the challenges of 2026 and chart a path toward inclusive, resilient, and self-determined growth.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• A Cookie for Dario? Anthropic and selling death. “To be clear: I am glad that Dario, and presumably the entire Anthropic board of directors, have made this choice. However, I don’t think we need to be overly effusive in our praise. The bar cannot be set so impossibly low that we celebrate merely refusing to directly, intentionally enable war crimes like the repeated bombing of unknown targets in international waters, in direct violation of both U.S. and international law. This is, in fact, basic common sense, and it’s shocking and inexcusable that any other technology platform would enable a sitting official of any government to knowingly commit such crimes.”
• AI taxonomy. An operational framework for precision in AI discourse. “‘AI’ has become semantically meaningless. The term now encompasses everything from a regression model to an autonomous robot, creating confusion in strategic discussions, partner conversations, and product positioning. This taxonomy provides a functional framework based on what the AI actually does, not what technique it uses.”
• Pope Leo tells priests not to use AI to write homilies or seek likes on TikTok. Not a group of people I would have thought needed to hear this. “‘Like all the muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die. The brain needs to be used, so our intelligence must also be exercised a little so as not to lose this capacity,’ Leo said in the closed door meeting, according to a report by Vatican News on Feb. 20.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• This city turned its rooftops into a climate shield. Niiiice!! Beautiful work, have a look at those pictures for your next solarpunk deck/mood board ;-) “As cities struggle with heat, Zürich offers a masterclass in using vegetation to cool streets, manage stormwater and restore biodiversity.”
• Amazon deforestation on pace to be the lowest on record, says Brazil. “Near-real-time satellite alerts show Amazon deforestation in Brazil continuing to decline into early 2026, with clearing from August through January falling to its lowest level for that period since 2014. Over the previous 12 months, detected forest loss also dropped to a 2014 low, reinforcing a broader downward trend that is corroborated by official annual data and independent monitoring. Clearing in the neighboring Cerrado savanna has also fallen.”
• Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn. “‘Unsustainable economic activity and a focus on growth as measured by the gross domestic product, has been a driver of the decline of biodiversity ... and stands in the way of transformative change,’ warns a report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) published Monday.”

Asides

• Paediatricians’ blood used to make new treatments for RSV and colds. “Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments.” Now do preschool educators.
• “Viking” was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows. “Viking-style graves excavated on the United Kingdom's Orkney islands contained individuals with no Scandinavian DNA, whereas some people buried in Scandinavia had Irish and Scottish parents. And several individuals in Norway were buried as Vikings, but their genes identified them as Saami, an Indigenous group genetically closer to East Asians and Siberians than to Europeans. ‘These identities aren't genetic or ethnic, they're social," Jarman says. "To have backup for that from DNA is powerful.’”
• Star Wars: Andor’s Tony Gilroy gives interview he couldn’t before. “Yeah, it’s the same shit all the time. Get rid of truth, get rid of a free press, destroy communities, nationalize the businesses, find an arbitrary enemy that you can elevate and false flag them through propaganda. Flood the zone with as much gak and atrocity as you can so that nobody can pay attention to what just happened, and pray that you have an overwhelming majority of sheep that will follow you. It’s just tragically and sadly familiar.”