AI Article Readings

In this post, Ajeya Cotra expands on her claim that near-term AI timelines could make modern marriage “shorter” than we usually imagine, arguing that the Singularity could either cut lives off through catastrophic risk or transform them so radically that ordinary lifelong vows may no longer fit the world people find themselves in. The essay is less a rejection of marriage than a reframing of commi...

In this post, Ajeya Cotra offers a clear, unsentimental framework for deciding whether to marry a long-term partner, treating marriage as a commitment device that enables deeper investment, trust, and shared life-building while also forcing a real tradeoff against possible alternatives. The piece walks through when “waiting for more information” stops being useful, how to evaluate a partner as cof...

In this post, Scott Alexander reviews The Dialectical Imagination as a way into the strange, slippery world of the Frankfurt School: its origins, its relationship to Marxism, its suspicion of capitalism and mass culture, and its insistence that criticism itself can be a kind of philosophical work. The piece is a witty, sceptical, and surprisingly sympathetic attempt to understand a school of thoug...

In this article, johnswentworth reviews Uri Alon’s An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits , using it to argue against the idea that biology is an incomprehensible tangle of evolutionary spaghetti. By exploring recurring network motifs, feedback loops, robustness mechanisms, and biological control systems, the article shows how evolution repeatedly converges on...

In this post, Max Harms reflects on using AI to produce full-cast audiobooks, weighing the creative empowerment it gives him against the fear that he is helping accelerate the replacement of human artists. Through his own experience with rapidly improving text-to-speech tools, he explores broader worries about AI’s growing ability to capture attention, reshape culture, and blur the line between us...

In this post Marcus Olang pushes back against the lazy idea that formal, polished prose is automatically a sign of AI, arguing that many so-called ChatGPT “tells” are also the marks of a very human education shaped by exams, colonial history, and the pressure to master English as a language of opportunity. It’s a sharp, personal defence of writers whose humanity is too easily misread by algorithmi...

In this post Scott Alexander uses AI fiction, school-essay “wow words,” children’s songs, poetry, architecture, and orange juice to build a theory of taste: bad taste as the overuse of cheap tricks that reliably delight unsophisticated audiences, and good taste as the difficult art of making space for subtler pleasures. It’s funny, wide-ranging, and unusually generous about why “lowbrow” joys can...

In this post Scott Alexander uses flags, movie plot holes, and tech-company names as “model organisms” for thinking about taste: small, familiar examples where broader arguments about rules, context, elegance, novelty, and cliché become easier to see. It’s a sharp, funny exploration of why some aesthetic rules feel obvious, when they may just be inherited habits, and why “easy wins” can sometimes...

In this post John Psmith reviews Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games , using the history of interactive fiction to explore why games made of words once felt magical, why they faded, and why AI might make them newly strange, powerful, and relevant. https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-50-years-of-text-games-by?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to A...

In this post Scott Alexander returns to the topic of artistic taste, responding to thoughtful replies from Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition on a piece he wrote last year. He opens by unpacking eight distinct things people tend to bundle together under the heading of "good art" — from raw sensory delight to historical novelty to political point-making — and then sets out to argue, contr...

In this essay, Lee Sandlin reflects on how war is remembered, misunderstood, mythologised, and slowly lost to those who never experienced it directly, moving from private family mementos to the vast cultural memory of World War Two with a bleak, humane eye for the gap between history as story and history as lived catastrophe. https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm Get full access to...

This is beautiful. https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliercargill/p/it-is-the-end-of-the-world-and-i?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A short story by Max Harms. https://open.substack.com/pub/raelifin/p/the-fulcrum?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Kelsey Piper argues that one of AI’s most prominent critics is making a weaker case than he used to: as AI tools have improved, adoption has grown, and costs have fallen, the serious skeptical argument has shifted from “AI has no value” to harder questions about profitability, capital expenditure, and whether current revenue can justify the build-out. It’s a sharp but spoiler-free cr...

In this post, Jane Psmith reviews Thomas Asbridge’s The Greatest Knight , a biography of William Marshal, using it as a springboard into the violent, strange, and often surprisingly funny world of twelfth-century knighthood. She highlights how Asbridge turns one extraordinary career into a broader portrait of civil war, tournament culture, patronage, loyalty, and the making of chivalric ideals. ht...

In this post Scott Alexander offers fifteen (and a half) short pieces of writing advice, framed as compensation for missing the first half of Lighthaven's second Inkhaven — a month-long bootcamp where aspiring bloggers must publish a post a day or get kicked out. Dispensed in his characteristic voice, with the usual asides, jokes, and passing metaphors, the collection ranges across questions of cr...

In this post Andy Masley takes a close, critical look at popular claims that data centers produce harmful “infrasound,” using the viral videos of Benn Jordan as a case study in how persuasive, high-production misinformation can spread. He unpacks the underlying science, contrasts it with how it’s presented online, and argues that while noise pollution is real, the more extreme infrasound claims do...

In this post Eliezer Yudkowsky writes a satirical news article in which physicists "disprove" pregnancy by showing that women's weight gain during gestation is fully explained by increased eating and drinking, a mass-in-mass-out (MIMO) balance, and therefore no underlying biological phenomenon need exist. The piece is a sustained analogy to the Calories In, Calories Out (CICO) framing of obesity:...

In this post Alex Imas asks what becomes scarce when AI can automate most production. Drawing on the economics of structural change, mimetic desire theory from René Girard, and consumer expenditure data, he argues that cheap commodity production won't eliminate jobs, it will redirect spending and employment toward a "relational sector" where the human element is itself part of the value. The post...

In this post Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that the existential risk posed by artificial superintelligence cannot be mitigated by individual action, corporate self-regulation, or localised prohibitions, but only by coordinated international law — specifically, a global treaty restricting the specialised hardware used to train and run frontier AI systems — and he systematically dismantles the notion tha...

In this article Max explores the craft of writing through the lens of tension, arguing that the ability to create, sustain, and release anticipation is one of the most powerful tools a writer has for keeping readers engaged, while also emphasizing that tension alone is not enough without underlying quality. Using a mix of examples from film, television, nonfiction, and classic literature, he exami...

The Scary Bridge - by Moridinamael In this post Moridinamael uses a short allegorical scene, a town hall debate about a dangerous bridge, to illustrate how technical arguments about real, mechanistic risks get flattened into emotional narratives by both allies and opponents, and how onlookers end up judging the validity of claims based on the perceived confidence and composure of the speakers rath...

Consider chilling out in 2028 - by Valentine. In this post Valentine argues that if the AI risk landscape in early 2028 looks functionally the same as it does today, perpetually escalating alarm without correspondingly escalating real-world evidence of doom, the rationalist community should treat that as a serious signal to pause, reconsider its decades-long strategy of frightening people into act...

Against the Luddites - By SE Gyges In this post, SE Gyges argues that the contemporary rehabilitation of the Luddites as thoughtful technology critics is historically dishonest. Drawing on labor history, Marx and Engels, and modern post-capitalist thinkers, the piece makes the case that Luddism was a reactionary defense of guild privilege and male craft monopoly, not a progressive workers' movemen...

dark ilan - By Ozy Brennan https://open.substack.com/pub/ozybrennan/p/dark-ilan?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe