Latent space as a new medium ⊗ The technology killing oil demand

Latent space as a new medium

Fascinating piece by Kevin Kelly—although you might feel an eye-roll coming a couple of times and there’s definitely too much anthropomorphising—where he gives a very useful and clear explanation of latent space in LLMs, followed by a number of intriguing ways in which we might use it. Kelly’s central image is a model as compression: billions of pages of text collapse into a map with billions of dimensions—latent in the original sense of hidden, present but not visible on the surface—and every concept becomes a direction rather than a location†. Push something along the “cat” direction and it grows more feline; push along “red” and it reddens. Related things sit near each other because they share directions—dogs and cats both intersect fur, ears, tails—a calculation like (king - man) + woman = queen is simply arithmetic performed on these vectors. A book is thus both a single point and a path: the plot moves through latent space sentence by sentence, and the LLM writes its answer the same way, discovering the response as it travels rather than composing it beforehand and translating it into words.

From there Kelly moves into speculation, listing thirteen ways artists and scientists might treat latent space as a medium in its own right, separate from its use as a tool for answering questions. Some ideas stay close to prototyping: push a concept along a chosen direction—more African, more watercolour, more gunpowder—and see what emerges. Others aim at discovery. The map is full of gaps between known things, and Kelly frames exploring them as prospecting rather than inventing, and proposes using structural similarities between distant fields, geology and immunology among them, to transfer solutions across disciplines no single expert could span. A few ideas push even further, among them training a private, personally curated model as an artistic medium, or treating obsolete models the way collectors now treat vinyl or old video game graphics. What I like about this angle to consider LLMs is that it looks at this space as a new way of exploring knowledge, a map where one can find new connections and territories, not as the embryo of a super intelligence.

† Ted Chiang used the same kind of language in The New Yorker with ChatGPT is a blurry jpeg of the Web in early 2023.

This mapping works for not just nouns, but any idea, any sound, any image. The whoosh of a splash of water is a direction in latent space. The aha moment in invention. The fright seeing a snake on a path. The notion of a prime number. All these are contained within a single map. This is one of the most astounding, yet underappreciated aspects of an LLM latent space: Everything — everything! — appears on just one map. […]

The simulations will converge on being realistic in millions of dimensions. It then becomes possible to create simulations of various propositions by moving through the latent space, just shifting the variable you desire. These simulations can quickly substitute for initial experiments, accelerating science. […]

At some point there will be enough compute to simulate all possible latent spaces and computationally sweep through the space of all possible latent spaces, in a sense mapping the nature of latent space itself. A similar sweep through other combinatorial spaces, such as examining all possible proteins, or all possible ceramics, has yielded great insights. The space of all possible latent spaces might also launch a new field of study. […]

I believe latent space, this continuous, multidimensional map of both the real and the possible, one that transcends domains, will usher in whole new goods and services we have never imagined before. And most likely the greatest of them will be ones I have not thought of here.

This single technology is killing oil demand

Susan Su argues that the electric vehicle story everyone tells is the wrong one. Coverage of the energy transition often fixates on passenger cars, yet electric two and three wheelers make up the largest segment of road transport worldwide. Bloomberg NEF recently downgraded its EV outlook after a slowdown in China and the US, but the report only looks at cars—even though the firm’s own figures show scooters and mopeds doing most of the work. Yadea alone outsold Tesla and BYD combined last year. Su traces this blind spot to geography: cars read as status symbols in North America, while across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, two wheelers function as income-generating tools for gig workers and small operators.

Her most intriguing and less covered perspective is what she calls return on invested battery. The materials in one electric truck’s battery could build well over a hundred electric two wheelers, and SUVs spend most of their lives parked. The comparison goes beyond batteries: rare earth elements in the motor, steel and aluminum in the frame, and the plastics and rubber that make up tires and interior parts all scale with a vehicle’s size and weight, and heavier EVs wear down their tires faster, which is now a major source of microplastics entering waterways. A midsized EV also carries a carbon debt from manufacturing that takes roughly two years of driving to repay, while a two wheeler’s manufacturing footprint is a fraction of that. Su extends the comparison to money and space too: a fleet of small electric vehicles in constant commercial use avoids the waste of an expensive car sitting idle, and needs a fraction of the parking real estate. She closes with ebikes making the same case in wealthier markets—most ebike trips replace car trips rather than walking or transit—and frames this as the shape climate technology should take: unglamorous, cheap, and already profitable, rather than reliant on subsidy or a future breakthrough.

Electric two and three wheelers are the largest segment of road transport globally, with over 80 million units sold annually. But Western energy transition narrative spends 99% of its word count on cars. […]

Having $49,855 locked into a rapidly depreciating, underutilized asset is a financial dumpster fire for the median consumer. By contrast, a $3,000 ebike sitting idle is a much more palatable capital allocation, especially when it costs just $0.05 to $0.25 to charge and requires near zero maintenance or insurance. I won’t even mention electric scooters and motorcycles here because their utilization as fleet assets is so high. […]

In East Africa, where two wheelers as a category are growing at 25% annually (wowza), Zeno says that it’s able to deliver a 50% raise to its drivers, who buy Zeno’s motorcycles but rent its battery via a swapping system that brings ‘refuel’ time down to 90 seconds. […]

Companies like Gogoro in Taiwan, Battery Smart (and many others) in India, and Spiro and Zeno (and others) in East Africa all offer batteries as a subscription service, offsetting a large portion of the upfront capex of purchasing an electric two or three wheeler, reducing financing pressure, and eliminating battery degradation risk for an underwriter.

More → On the Futur-ish podcast, Tobias Revell and Radha Mistry make the case that the bicycle, not the EV or the autonomous car, is the real future of transport—citing its energy efficiency, its safety record, and how little space and material it demands compared with any four-wheeled alternative. Revell reminds us that Amsterdam’s cycling culture goes back to a 1970s policy shift, rather than anything inherent to the Dutch, arguing that the barrier everywhere else is politics, not technology.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Permacrisis readiness: What 80+ scenario interventions reveal. “Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly challenged by “permacrisis” – a prolonged period of overlapping disruptions that drain resources and erode strategic advantages. Scenario planning has been recommended to aid firms in navigating such turbulence, yet SMEs rarely know what to expect when adopting these methods. This article draws on a national Danish initiative that supported more than 80 SMEs in using scenario planning to strengthen organizational readiness.”
• Resources by ETCHwork. “To fully deliver on the promise of technology now and into the future, we require careful attention to the implementation processes of new technologies, the cascades of impacts on healthcare work, and the ethical implications of these new frontiers. The following resources have been created by members of the ETCHwork community and are free to download.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• China’s AI Boom creates new marketplace to rent human faces. “Over 95% of the microdramas released in China in the first three months of 2026 used AI in their production. The city-level Guangzhou Internet Court has heard approximately 700 AI-related face-theft cases over the past three years. Proponents say the platforms give people more control over their likeness, but experts warn they cannot eliminate the long-term risks of AI misuse and biometric data exploitation.”
• What if municipal governments built their own AI models?. “What if, rather than relying on services from the private sector, municipal governments built their own AI models, or collectively stewarded open source alternatives? This could help ensure language access for constituents who are not represented or who are undersupported in commercially available LLMs and related offerings. And cities may be in a position to develop uniquely valuable AI-powered language services because of who they are and where they are located. ”
• With Moonshot’s free Kimi K3, China changes the sovereign AI playbook. “Governments can now deploy top-tier AI locally, bypassing costly U.S. cloud rentals.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Londoners find “horrendous” cracks in homes after heat waves. “Londoners are facing historic levels of subsidence risk after five successive heat waves dried out the clay soil on which much of the city is built. Insurance claims tied to subsidence hit a record last quarter, with households claiming £20,000 on average, a 15% jump from the same period in 2025.”
• Scientists found the sweet spot for dumping iron into the ocean. “A new model shows fertilizing the Southern Ocean instead of the equator could pull carbon from the air without wrecking the food chain.”
• Extreme heat threatens Italy’s Parmesan heartland. “The region’s climate-controlled warehouses have become institutions, collectively known as the Bank of Parmigiano. Behind their walls, technology and tradition go hand in hand.”

Asides

• It’s so hot that Japan needs a new word for it. “Earlier this year, the Japan Meteorological Agency held a public poll to select a name for a day of temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher, to signal that precautions were needed. The winner, with more than 40 percent of the vote, was kokushobi, meaning ‘cruel heat day.’”
• The naturalist’s library (1833-43). “Nicholas Rougeux has published a complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume book series on natural history published in the early-to-mid 19th-century. As part of the project, Rougeux restored each of the more than 1300 illustrations in the library, and the results are fantastic.”
• The book prize index. “A free resource for browsing major nonfiction prizes and the books they recognize.”