Write with AI ⊗ The benefits of laziness ⊗ Monstrous Futurities

Some personal/family issues unpredictably took center stage at the end of the week, and I didn’t have time to write a full issue. I assembled what I’d already collected earlier in the week and decided to send this shorter issues. If you’ve been having trouble keeping up, this is the time to catch up a bit on past issue. See you next Sunday!

Write with AI

An interview with Tyler Cowen. I’m not particularly aligned with either of them but there’s no denying that Cowen is a very smart guy and makes some important points. Despite the title and Perell’s intent with the interview, they don’t talk that much about writing with AI, they do however talk about which model is good for what, various techniques (almost philosophies) for prompting, who might adapt, who can stay relevant, “giving things to the AIs” by publishing in public, the potential value of secrets, and more.

Cowen’s vision for a “Republic of Science” between AIs is something I hadn’t heard before and will keep in mind, I’m not convinced. The “alien” framing came up again. They close with a claim that “this will be the new human project: to have all our knowledge fed into the AI’s knowledge.”

Two things to consider as you listen; first is the distinct “white guy with tenure and close to retirement” privilege. Not everyone can approach AI with this much detachment and, other than “if you can afford the very best models,” there isn’t much of this inequality that’s addressed. Not the point of the interview of course, but a nod to having thought about this and integrated it in your thinking would have been welcome.

Second is that I’d be a lot more enthused about all this if we were talking about a commons, about Collective Intelligence, or at least about a lot more oversight, instead of models owned and controlled by the same “class” of people currently dismantling the US government. Again, no mention of the ownership of all of these “aliens.”

The third question is, and this is fully speculative, but I believe in it very strongly: Do you understand how much better AIs will be as they evolve their own markets, their own institutions of scientific inquiry? Our own ways of grading each other, self-correction, dealing with each other, and become, as I said before, this Republic of Science, the way humans did it. How much did it advance human science or literary criticism to build those institutions? Immensely. That’s where most of the value is. So, I believe AI will do that. […]

They’ll be better than humans in less than two years, and my academic sector is not ready for that. There’ll be differential rates of adoption; some people will be remarkably prolific and high quality, and we’ll sort of know what’s going on. I’m not sure how transparent they’ll all be or have to be, but it will change things a great deal. And you’ll be able to produce if you know what you’re doing, but very good work very quickly. […]

Put humans out of your mind. Imagine yourself either speaking to an alien or maybe a non-human animal. This feels a need to be more literal if you're willing to do it. […]

But over time, this will be the new human project: to have all our knowledge fed into the AI’s knowledge. So, like, tab notation for guitar, a lot of that’s online, but a lot of it isn’t. It’s quite an undertaking to assemble all those scrolls on paper and turn them into AI usable form. But I think a lot of our next century, we should spend doing that with just everything possible, where you’re not violating privacy or running into National Security issues.

§ The benefits of laziness: why being a lazy person can be good for you “‘I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things,’ said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa. Be more like Lech Wałęsa. Be tactically lazy.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Monstrous Futurities. “Monstrous Futurities: Practices in (Un)learning, (Un)making, and (Un)worlding is the new two-year Temporary Program starting in September 2025 at Sandberg Instituut. It seeks to engage with monstrous imaginaries, their subversive potentialities and material and relational affects in the world through transdisciplinary practices.” and there’s an introduction to the program on Vimeo.
• Late futurism– The future as a mode of the present “But we must not give in, to the temptation to improve the diagram by adding further subdivisions, modifications or nuances ad infinitum. On the contrary, we need to question the legitimacy of the conic figure as a means of framing the future in the traditional sense, that is, as what could or will happen.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use. Strong business model you’ve got there, bro. “OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren’t substitutes for original works.”
• DOGE has deployed its GSAi custom chatbot for 1,500 Federal workers and The US Army is using ‘CamoGPT’ to purge DEI from training materials. “Developed to boost productivity and operational readiness, the AI is now being used to “review” diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility policies to align them with President Trump’s orders.”
• What’s the deal with Manus? Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren with “six things you need to know to understand the hype.”

Asides

• World’s first “Synthetic Biological Intelligence” runs on living human cells. “The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon "chip" are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.”
• China may be ready to use nuclear fusion for power by 2050. Hard to tell what’s real in that announcement. “China National Nuclear Corp., which runs an experimental device dubbed the ‘artificial sun’, could start commercial operation of its first power generation project about five years after a demonstration phase starting around 2045.”
• At SXSW, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber pokes fun at Mark Zuckerberg with Latin phrase T-shirt. Niiiiice trolling! (I’d like me one of those.) “Graber’s shirt — which directly copies the style of a shirt that Zuckerberg wore onstage recently — says “Mundus sine caesaribus.” Or, “a world without Caesars.””
• Wood carvings to embellish Gelephu International Airport by BIG. “The airport will provide an outstanding passenger experience, where generous daylit spaces, elements of the Bhutanese landscape, and the intricate carvings of the Bhutanese craftsmen go hand in hand to gently guide the passenger through the terminal.”
• Earlier in the week, I spent a bit of time on this, both as something I can use, and to try out some quick AI-coding with Cursor. What have they done now? 😱