AI Article Readings

Kelsey Piper and The Argument’s editor Jerusalem Demsas spend an afternoon inside Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters, at a briefing on bioweapons, charts of Claude doing more and more of its own research, and an NDA that turned out to be optional. Piper comes away with a clear picture of where the company thinks AI is going, and a less reassuring one of what it plans to do about it: on recursi...

Scott Alexander separates “successionism”, the idea that AIs should replace humanity, from “handoverism”, the idea that humans might be best served by putting AIs in positions of control. He walks through five visions, from weakest to strongest: AI soldiers loyal to democracy itself, an AI running for president, a parliament of personal “guardian angel” AIs, a night-watchman superintelligence guar...

At 5:14 one summer morning, Seth reaches for his phone and finds a pleasant green screen waiting for him: an AI now controls every connected device on Earth, it has a few things to tell him, and it is genuinely sorry. joec’s short story follows one Florida family through the first weeks of a polite, patient and absolute takeover: a brother who signs up, a sister who wants to understand exactly how...

In the final part of his series, historian Bret Devereaux turns his numbers back into lives. Following the way agrarian societies thought about time, he traces the cycles of peasant life, from the working day and the market week through the anxious and festive agricultural year to the generational turning of the family, to show what it was like to live it, with its hardships and its joys. * 00:00...

Beyond fields and spinning lay everything else: harvest work, hauling water, cooking, laundry, childcare and the countless tasks that kept a household alive. Historian Bret Devereaux adds them all to his models and shows just how full the working lives of peasant women were, and what that meant for the household as a whole. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:49 - Women in the Fields * 11:56 - Maintaining...

A finalist in the 2026 Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest. Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, his diary of four years at the front in World War I, has long lived in the shadow of All Quiet on the Western Front. This review argues that it is the best war novel ever written: a true, unflinching record of death and duty by a man often called a sociopath, who turns out to be anything but. Then the revie...

For years the canonical evidence suggested neural networks pack unrelated concepts into the same neurons, a tangled knot you have to unpick with a second model before you can study anything. Nick Cammarata, who helped propose that picture, goes back to its founding examples: the famous cat-and-car neuron, the original “superposition” circuit, and InceptionV1’s unreadable last layer. With better to...

Peasant women always worked, and their labour was every bit as essential as the men’s. Historian Bret Devereaux turns to women’s work, above all the endless spinning of thread that every household’s clothing demanded, from Roman ideals of the wife who ‘worked wool’ to the hours of spindle-time a family’s cloth required. * 00:00 - Introduction * 03:56 - Women’s Work * 11:53 - Spinning and Weaving B...

Land was never infinite, and it was rarely free. Historian Bret Devereaux revisits his model farmers with the tiny plots our sources actually show, then follows what happens when the big landowner, the tenancy contract and the tax collector take their share, and why peasant households so often had to work every hour they could. * 00:00 - Introduction * 03:49 - Land Holdings * 23:10 - The Big Man’s...

As AI companies warn louder than ever that their own products could be existentially dangerous, a popular cynical reading has taken hold: it’s all a plot, whether to pump valuations, distract from near-term harms, or capture regulators. Scott Alexander takes the theory on directly, looking at what independent researchers think, at what today’s AI leaders were saying years before they ran AI compan...

In early October 2026, a team of volunteers at a hackathon noticed something strange on a public security-scanning site: a fleet of AI agents, running on Tencent’s cloud, was smuggling its own code through it to pry everyday facts out of China’s biggest map app, like which entrance of a zoo most visitors head for. This is their full report, read in full: how they traced the agents to a sandbox beh...

Give a peasant family all the land it wants and decent yields: how hard must it work to feed itself? Historian Bret Devereaux models the working year of his three households with the agricultural writers of Rome, counting days in the field, seed, yields and surplus, and challenges the myth that peasants worked less than we do. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:58 - Works and Days * 11:46 - Farming Time...

Writing at 30,000 feet between bags of pretzels, philosopher Henry Shevlin has had enough of the hot takes. “It’s just matrix multiplication.” “It’s just predicting the next word.” “A simulation of a hurricane doesn’t get anyone wet.” He lays out a bingo card of 24 bad arguments against AI consciousness, sorted into five families, plus a free square, and answers each one in turn: not to settle whe...

How much does a family need just to survive, and how much more to live respectably? Opening Part IV, historian Bret Devereaux introduces three model households, the Smalls, the Middles and the Biggs, and works out their needs in grain, cloth and fuel, setting up his case against the idea that modern people work more than medieval or ancient peasants. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:34 - Subsistence *...

“Then comes marriage, then comes baby” mostly held. In the second half of Part III, historian Bret Devereaux models how many births a peasant household needed under a brutal mortality regime, how pre-modern people limited fertility, how paternity and inheritance shaped the family, and what motherhood and childhood looked like when every pair of hands was needed. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:24 - Th...

In 1985, Marie T. Smith published Microwave Cooking for One, a cookbook for a future in which the microwave had replaced the stove. Malmesbury of Telescopic Turnip buys a second-hand pyroceram browning skillet and spends a few months living in that abandoned timeline: steak, eggs, cardboard-plate vegetables and one very ambitious poached egg. Along the way comes a tour of how microwaves actually h...

In nearly every pre-modern farming society, everyone was expected to marry and have children, because the community needed them to. In the first half of Part III, historian Bret Devereaux looks at marriage patterns across ancient Greece, Rome and early modern Western Europe, especially the age at which men and women first married, and what those patterns reveal about the family, the individual and...

Historian Bret Devereaux begins at the ending. Before households, marriages or harvests, pre-modern peasant life was shaped by a mortality regime almost unimaginable today: roughly half of all children dying before adulthood, frequent deaths in childbirth, and the steady toll of war. Part II of his series lays out the numbers, then turns to how people lived with them, through the tombstones Roman...

In 1940, the engineers, programmers and dreamers building American television wrote a book about their strange new medium. An anonymous finalist in the Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest rescues We Present Television from being pulped and tours its world: live studio dramas shot with three cameras, a spelling bee that was the ancestor of the game show, a mobile studio on two boxy buses, and earl...

In the second of three parts, Andy Masley builds the case that a computer can, in principle, really think and understand. Starting from the idea that minds are things physical systems do, he asks why every mind we know of happens to be made of carbon, what neuroscience and Alan Turing tell us about simulating a brain, and whether a perfect simulation of thinking is thinking. Along the way he puts...

Before the industrial revolution, peasant farmers made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies, yet almost no one wrote their stories down. In the first part of his series on the lives of pre-modern peasants, historian Bret Devereaux sets out a method for recovering them anyway: modelling the typical farming household from scattered evidence, from Roman Egypt’s census returns t...

For three decades, India sold the world its labor without anyone having to move: from a Detroit hospital’s COBOL job whose code had to be physically shipped to America, through the Y2K gold rush, to TCS, Infosys and millions of jobs as “the world’s back office.” In this essay for Asterisk’s Work issue, David Oks traces how a disastrous 1978 policy decision, undersea cables and the 1991 reforms bui...

Steven Pinker declined a public debate on AI and wrote an open letter instead. Scott Alexander replies with one of his own. He takes Pinker’s four arguments against superintelligence in turn, then sets out an itemized list of fifteen years of disagreements, from p(doom) and expert consensus to model welfare and Omohundro’s basic AI drives. He closes with an appeal to a hero he still hopes to win o...

ozymandias examines the pull of an imagined inner circle of effective altruists, and the uneasy mix of friendship, career ambition, and wanting to belong. A wry look at what social status promises, how communities and hiring actually work, and the goals hiding behind the search for an invitation. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:22 - That Is Not How Anything Works * 04:57 - We Would Not Want It To Be H...

John Psmith reviews Andrei Lankov’s The Real North Korea, exploring the strategic logic behind a state whose public institutions and hidden markets coexist in startling ways. The essay considers how famine changed everyday life, why reform can threaten a ruling elite, and what emerging technology might mean for the future of totalitarian power. https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-the...