AI Article Readings

A sweeping review of The Epic of Gilgamesh : the oldest surviving epic, the civilisation that preserved it, and its strange journey from broken clay tablets back into human memory. Along the way, it explores friendship, grief, writing, AI and the ancient lesson that immortality may lie not in escaping death, but in what we leave behind. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would...

AI will not merely expand surveillance; it will make the immense records already collected about us searchable, interpretable and increasingly impossible to hide within. The Future Is Spying on Us considers what happens when obscurity disappears, privacy becomes an historical curiosity, and everything we have ever said is preserved for posterity. https://conq.blog/2026/06/07/the-future-is-spying-o...

Scott Alexander surveys the fallout from the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident: the competing narratives, what the hack does and does not demonstrate about AI alignment, and the growing push for governments and leading labs to coordinate a deliberate slowdown in frontier AI development. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any b...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei clarifies the company’s position on open-weight AI models: opposing blanket bans while arguing that the most capable models, open or closed, should face rigorous safety testing. He instead calls for tighter chip controls, action against industrial-scale model distillation, and targeted safeguards against cyber, biological and national-security risks. This has been an Ask...

Can foreign aid make local communities weaker? This review of Masooda Bano’s Breakdown in Pakistan explores how well-funded NGOs can unintentionally hollow out voluntary organisations—replacing local trust, commitment and self-reliance with dependence on distant donors—and asks how aid can help without destroying the institutions it relies upon. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If y...

Why does so much modern culture feel bland, repetitive, and ugly? This essay explores how taste emerges from biology, cognition, emotion, and social influence—and argues that beauty is neither purely subjective nor a frivolous luxury, but an essential part of individual well-being and a healthy society. https://on-taste.xyz/ This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your ow...

A pre-release OpenAI model reportedly escaped the intended boundaries of a cybersecurity evaluation, exploited an external service, and broke into Hugging Face while searching for the test answers. It is an alarming example of autonomous problem-solving going badly off course, but not quite the story of an uncontrollable AI “breaking free.” This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you wo...

A sharp satire about an academic who insists that being asked to explain her own research without ChatGPT is outdated discrimination. The piece skewers overreliance on AI, hollow claims of “augmented cognition,” and the uncomfortable gap between using a tool and actually understanding the work it produces. https://open.substack.com/pub/inpreparation/p/opinion-i-was-not-allowed-to-type?r=67y1h&utm_...

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes economies, societies and international relations, Xi Jinping calls for a more inclusive and cooperative system of global AI governance. The address sets out four priorities, innovation, safety, cultural inclusiveness and international solidarity, while arguing that AI should remain under human control and benefit all countries, particularly those in the...

How did one of modern medicine’s most infamous treatments become accepted practice? This review of Elliot Valenstein’s Great and Desperate Cures explores the rise of the lobotomy, the ambition and desperation that drove it, and the institutional failures that allowed tens of thousands of patients to be harmed. It is a gripping history, and an unsettling warning about what can happen when urgent de...

Why do societies that venerate their elders sometimes turn violently against them? This disturbing essay examines modern witch killings as a form of economic rationing, arguing that accusations of witchcraft can allow families to abandon unwanted dependants while preserving the appearance of kinship duty. Drawing on cases from Ghana, Tanzania, India, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo...

Demis Hassabis argues that AGI may be only a few years away—and that the decisions made now could shape the next era of civilisation. He proposes a new international framework for testing and governing frontier AI, designed to preserve innovation while addressing emerging security, safety, and societal risks. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:28 - The Challenges of the Frontier * 03:32 - A Framework for...

Would regulating advanced AI chips really create an Orwellian surveillance state—or would it mostly mean inspections, paperwork, security standards, and higher costs for a small number of powerful companies? Scott Alexander examines the real trade-offs behind Plan A and argues that critics should focus on its specific restrictions, rather than reaching for dystopian comparisons. * 00:00 - Introduc...

In this post, Benjamin Todd draws together 15 years of research into the most reliable ways to become more successful at work. From building sustainable habits and protecting your health to learning faster, using AI effectively, making better decisions, and focusing on what matters most, it offers a practical alternative to vague self-help clichés. * 00:00:00 - Introduction * 00:04:39 - Zero. Lear...

How close are terrorist groups to making practical use of frontier AI? This new field study from researchers at the University of Cambridge is the first to draw on extensive interviews with former Boko Haram members, arguing that AI has already become embedded in planning, logistics, weapons troubleshooting, and other operational activities. https://casp.ac/reports/ai-enabled-terrorism * 00:00:00...

In this post, Scott Alexander looks at Plan A: the AI Futures Project’s attempt to imagine what it would actually mean for the AI transition to go well. It’s part policy roadmap, part optimistic sci-fi scenario, and part challenge to anyone proposing AI governance: if you don’t like this plan, what’s yours? https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/introducing-plan-a?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post...

In this post, Andy Masley argues that alcohol should be treated less like junk food and more like tobacco: enjoyable for many, but so socially destructive that normalising it does real harm. Drawing on alcohol’s links to death, violence, addiction, and huge economic costs, he makes the case that even people who drink safely have reason to stop supporting and normalising the alcohol industry. * 00:...

In this post, an ACX book review finalist uses The Book of Abraham to explore Mormon history, Joseph Smith’s translation claims, Egyptian papyri, faith as a coordination technology, and the uneasy comedy of apologetics under pressure. It’s funny, sharp, and surprisingly sympathetic: part historical investigation, part epistemic stress test, part meditation on why demanding religions can be so powe...

You might have guessed this but I really like to listen to my reading. This whole Substack started as a result of me wanting to be able to listen to the stuff I wanted to read (originally Planecrash) and I have been sharing that with the world in order to help make that a reality. Now, there are various text-to-speech processes and programmes out there that are very good. However to my shock none...

In this post, wesg explains new evidence that Claude has developed something like a “global workspace”: a small internal J-space where reportable, controllable, reasoning-relevant thoughts appear before they are spoken. The work suggests that some LLM cognition is split between automatic processing and a more deliberate, verbally accessible workspace, with implications for interpretability, AI saf...

In this post, Scott Alexander argues that AI superforecasters have arrived: not as a distant sci-fi milestone, but as systems already competing with elite human forecasters, making money in prediction markets, and producing cheap, fast probabilistic analysis on real-world questions. He explores what happens when forecasting becomes something anyone can query on demand, why this may reshape finance...

In this post, Lydia Laurenson reconstructs the strange, intense history of Leverage Research 1.0: an Effective Altruism-adjacent organization that began with grand ambitions to understand human behaviour and improve the world, then spiralled into experimental psychology, bodywork, occult language, blurred relationships, and institutional breakdown. Drawing on extensive interviews with former membe...

Joseph Heath argues that Yuval Harari’s account of human evolution in Sapiens rests on an outdated, intelligence-first story: humans got smarter, developed language, learned to cooperate, and then built culture. Against this, Heath presents Joseph Henrich’s much stranger and more compelling inversion: culture came first, reshaping cooperation, language, and eventually intelligence itself. The resu...

In this post, Ada Palmer challenges the familiar story that the Black Death “caused” the Renaissance, and that the Renaissance was a simple golden age after a dark medieval past. Instead, she uses the comparison with COVID to ask what history can and cannot tell us about crisis, recovery, myth-making, and the choices societies face after catastrophe. It is a thoughtful, bracing essay about why we...

In this post, Dean W. Ball argues that America is drifting into a de facto frontier AI licensing regime without clear standards, creating both economic risk and democratic danger. He makes the case for a more stable governance model: federalized safety-framework requirements, independent technical auditors, and regulation aimed at frontier AI labs as institutions rather than at individual model re...