Newsletter 8 min read

Now is the time of monsters ⊗ Trouble transitioning ⊗ Living alongside computer people

No.340 — Artists challenge us to imagine a more optimistic world ⊗ How AI uncovers new ways to tackle difficult diseases ⊗ Libraries positively impact community health and well-being

Now is the time of monsters ⊗ Trouble transitioning ⊗ Living alongside computer people
David Spriggs, Vision II, 2017. (Merci Joëlle!)

Now is the time of monsters

Ezra Klein reflects on a rapidly changing world marked by the return of the convicted former President, the rise of artificial intelligence, the climate crisis, and declining global fertility rates. He expresses concern that as AI advances, we may not be adequately prepared for the implications, especially in the context of energy demands and climate change.

His basic argument, without using the term, is that we are faced with a number of hyperobjects (“objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity“), each of which humans are ill-equipped to grasp and deal with, much less with all of them intertwined as they are and arriving at roughly the same time.

Although he does briefly attach everything together, he spends a lot more time on AI and brings me, once again, to wondering who is right about LLMs. Even dismissing leaders who have a vested interest and are constantly angling for investment rounds and political weight, there are smart people convinced AI is only beginning and other equally smart people convinced it’s a bubble ready to burst. On the parrot to god axis, I tend to be at “it’s going to be huge but not AGI or superintelligence huge, for a while yet (or ever), and yes, some valuation and expectations corrections are in store.” But who really knows? As I’ve stated before, I think people at both ends are disregarding truths in the others’ thinking and there’s no solid place to point the arrow between them.

I consider the range of outcomes for Trump’s second term to be stupefyingly vast, stretching from self-destructive incompetence to muddling incoherence to authoritarian consolidation. But the levees that narrowed the possibilities of his first term have been breached. […]

The United States and China have drifted from uneasy cooperation to grim competition, and both intend to be prepared for war. Attaining A.I. superiority has emerged as central to both sides of the conflict. […]

The first wave of A.I., Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic and a former policy director at OpenAI, writes, was about algorithmic dominance: “Did you have the ability to have enough smart people to help you train neural nets in clever ways?” Then came the need for computing dominance: “Did you have enough computers to do large-scale projects?” But the future, he says, will turn on power dominance: “Do you have access to enough electricity to power the data centers?” […]

I find myself returning to a famous translation of a line from Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

More → Speaking of possibilities, The General Intelligence tsunami is quite a good overview of where we might be in understanding “the scaling hypothesis.” But it’s clearly written by someone roughly in the libertarian / accelerationist camp (gleaned from his writing, and the fact he works for a “libertarian, free-market-oriented non-profit think tank”). I wasn’t going to include it, but it’s a good read for some technical bits and useful in exploring the axis I mention above.

Trouble transitioning

“Transition” like “sustainable,” “green,” or any number of terms, is defined differently by various people. The energy transition means transferring all our energy output to renewables. But, as Adam Tooze explains here while reviewing Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’ More and More and More, “the green energy transition is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions that have shaped modern history.” In that view, we went from organic (people and animals), to coal, to hydrocarbons, and now to renewables. That’s not the case, all of those previous “ages” of energy are still there, they have been agglomerated one on top of the other. Switching everything to renewables is a gigantic and unprecedented task.

The book also stops in the 1990s, missing the huge jump in solar and wind energy that has happened since then. So although it provides a useful historical perspective of transition v transition, Tooze also highlights the very significant role that economic and technological changes in Asia, particularly China, will have in shaping the future of energy and climate stabilisation. In other words, “Fressoz has given us a properly materialist history of the 20th century. A 21st-century sequel must carry that logic to its global conclusion.”

That wouldn’t mean that the transition to green energy is impossible, just that it is unsupported by historical experience. Indeed, it runs counter to it. When we look more closely at the historical record, it shows not a neat sequence of energy transitions, but the accumulation of ever more and different types of energy. Economic growth has been based not on progressive shifts from one source of energy to the next, but on their interdependent agglomeration. […]

I am put in mind of Bruno Latour’s thesis in We Have Never Been Modern (1991), where he argues that there has been a systematic blindness to the giant entangling of natural resources and technologies that has enabled the expansion and acceleration of modernity. […]

In the production of steel and cement China recapitulated the entire industrial history of humanity in the space of two decades. As a result, Europe and the US are today responsible for less than a quarter of global emissions.

Living alongside computer people

I’ve been reading tech-centered takes on AI agents and looking a bit into the stack to run your own, ideally locally. In this post, Jay Springett comes at it instead from a more-than-human angle. He argues that AI agents are already a part of our online experience, and that the challenge now lies in how we coexist with them. He emphasises that our online social interactions have been flattened by social media, which has conditioned us to behave like caricatures, making AI profiles a natural extension of this evolution. He believes that rather than trying to exclude these AI beings, we need to rethink our ethical frameworks to share our digital spaces responsibly and with care.

First read the above to reframe how you see AI agents. Then, to explode your brain a bit, have a look at the related post he links to, The New Economic Entertainment. Here’s a quote that might get you clicking: “But out of the corner of my eye, I see it all converging. Autonomous AI agents inside of VTubers as real time characters, inside of virtual worlds, fully monetised with a token which powers the interactive in-show entertainment options.”

In 2025 AI-powered profiles on Twitter are already indistinguishable from real people. (And to be fair to the bots, they have better reading comprehension than most Twitter users.) […]

These same agents doing things out in the world for us will manifest as a kind of charismatic virtual fauna. Populating (critics might say polluting) shared spaces and shaping our experiences within them. […]

If we’re going to engage with non-human agents and entities in meaningful ways—whether animals, ecosystems, or AI—it requires us to rethink our ethical frameworks. It’s not about denying their existence and expulsion, but figuring out how to share our world responsibly and with care.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

  • At ACMI’s The Future & Other Fictions, artists challenge us to imagine a more optimistic world. “The future, according to [featured artist and futurist Liam] Young, ‘rushes over us like water’. It doesn’t ‘just happen to us’ – ‘we can all be active participants in shaping and defining it’. At the opening he described the exhibition as a ‘call to arms,’ challenging visitors to imagine or be empowered to shape a more optimistic world.”
  • Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest: The 2025 collection. “These stories have never pretended the path will be easy — some of the most compelling Imagine stories showcase the struggle as well as the successes — but they all offer the promise that through the transformative power of radical imagining, we can envision a better world and work toward making it our reality.”
  • 25 things we think will happen in 2025. “It’s fun to make predictions about the future, which is part of the reason why we do it so often. But this isn’t just blind guessing. Each prediction comes with a probability attached to it. That gives you a sense of our confidence.” (In foresight we specifically don’t make predictions but I’m throwing in here anyway.)

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

  • How AI uncovers new ways to tackle difficult diseases. “Welcome to the great AI drug race, where a host of companies are employing the power of AI to do what has traditionally been the job of medicinal chemists. That includes both smaller, specialist AI-driven biotech companies, which have sprung up over the past decade, and larger pharmaceutical firms who are either doing the research themselves, or in partnership with smaller firms.”
  • Biden Administration ignites firestorm with rules governing AI’s global spread. “The rules are largely about national security: Given the way that A.I. might transform military conflict, the regulations are designed to keep the most powerful technology in the hands of allies and prevent China from getting access to A.I. chips through international data centers.”
  • OpenAI’s AI reasoning model ‘thinks’ in Chinese sometimes and no one really knows why. Fascinating (and kind of funny). “By embracing every linguistic nuance, we expand the model’s worldview and allow it to learn from the full spectrum of human knowledge. For example, I prefer doing math in Chinese because each digit is just one syllable, which makes calculations crisp and efficient. But when it comes to topics like unconscious bias, I automatically switch to English, mainly because that’s where I first learned and absorbed those ideas.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

  • This ancient building material is making a comeback. “Used since the 19th century—typically as a rural, rustic building material—straw has been a DIY solution for affordable, earth-friendly construction. But a new wave of contemporary straw designs, as well as more industrial-scale efforts to expand the availability of straw as a building material, have modernized this traditional method of making a home.”
  • Entirely new class of life has been found in the human digestive system. “Stanford University biologist Ivan Zheludev and colleagues argue their strange discovery may not be viruses at all, but instead an entirely new group of entities that may help bridge the ancient gap between the simplest genetic molecules and more complex viruses. ‘Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes.’”
  • Gigantic SUVs are a public health threat. Why don’t we treat them like one? “Much like secondhand smoke, driving a gigantic vehicle endangers those who never consented to the danger they face walking, biking, or sitting inside smaller cars. Although not widely known, car bloat’s harms are well-documented. Heavier vehicles can pulverize modest-sized ones, and tall front ends obscure a driver’s vision, putting pedestrians and cyclists at particular risk.”

Asides

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