Reckons

A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage — and it’s only going to get worse.

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom

Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up  capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom. In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team

I look forward to your feedback.

Reviewing Chaim Gingold’s “Building SimCity,” Celine Nguyen finds similarities between tech billionaires’ attempts to build a utopian city in Solano, California, and being a godlike player in “SimCity.”

Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become.

Scaling will run out. The question is when.

Workers, including children, labor in harsh and dangerous conditions to meet the world’s soaring demand for cobalt, a mineral essential to powering electric vehicles, laptops, and smartphones, according to an investigation by The Washington Post.

What do you do when you’ve got two actors, a bunch of dialogue, and only enough time to get one camera angle? Consider one of the oldest tools in the filmmak...

Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington told me that they believe generative AI can help millions of suffering people. I’m not so sure.

SOTA research, chips, sanctions, and loopholes

Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.

The Design Education Advisory Committee (DEAC) calls for a ‘Future Design School’, where design thinking is part of everyday learning from primary school.

A primer on degrowth as an alternative economic model to current late capitalism. Plus: unpacking terms like degrowth communism, ecological economics, ecosocialism, green growth, and post-growth.

Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.

The real threat with super intelligence is falling prey to the hype

A Blog post by Sasha Luccioni on Hugging Face

Because that's what we're throwing away

Warning: Contains explicit language (if you hadn’t guessed that from the title) The Shitthropocene is a mock anthropological view of humanity's consumption h...

The Scarlett Johansson debacle is a microcosm of AI’s raw deal: It’s happening, and you can’t stop it.

We mock Musk, Altman and Zuck for using bleak sci-fi references to market products — but these 'useful dystopias' might just be the point

How do we reconcile an increasingly fractured order with an increasingly planetary reality?

In a complex world, foresight methodologies offer an alternative to prediction. This approach can help map new possibilities to plan for future disruption.

If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay.

The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour

Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)