Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

For decades, Big Oil has treated the atmosphere as an open sewer and cashed in on the consequences.

— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations / “Final Address to the United Nations, September 22, 2026”

Summer is never
Fall is again
Winter is forever
Spring is when

— Katie Peterson / “Elegy as the Four Seasons”

The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived.

— Phillips Payson O’Brien / “The American Age Is Over: A period of global dominance has ended in plain sight.” / The Atlantic

Make a list of words that sound like shots being fired on a residential
street or that sound like children being herded into cages. Create a
poem around these words. It should not rhyme.

— Susan Briante / “Further Exercises”

By creating something smarter than us, we could put ourselves in the position of our primate cousins. With a long-term view in mind, those focusing on AGI scenarios are right to be concerned. Indeed, there is a strong case that by definition a superintelligence would be fully impossible to control or contain. An “intelligence explosion” is the point at which an Al can improve itself again and again, recursively making itself better in ever faster and more effective ways. Here is the definitive uncontained and uncontainable technology. The blunt truth is that nobody knows when, if, or exactly how Als might slip beyond us and what happens next; nobody knows when or if they will become fully autonomous or how to make them behave with awareness of and alignment with our values, assuming we can settle on those values in the first place.

Nobody really knows how we can contain the very features being researched so intently in the coming wave. There comes a point where technology can fully direct its own evolution; where it is subject to recursive processes of improvement; where it passes beyond explanation; where it is consequently impossible to predict how it will behave in the wild; where, in short, we reach the limits of human agency and control.

— Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskan / The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

The war is over. But the bombs are still falling inside my head.

If we lived in a virtual world
I would have cleaned the window overlooking your house with an electronic newspaper
And the plastic rose that I put on my brother’s grave would have blossomed.

— Ghayath Almadhoun / “If We Lived in a Virtual World”

Trust has frayed. And the climate crisis went from distant warning to daily reality, and artificial intelligence moved at a speed that has blindsided even those who created it. These are not separate crises. They are chapters of the same story, the story of power. Who has it? 

— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations / “Final Address to the United Nations, September 22, 2026”

What I’m Listening To:

You ought to take away from me things that are mine
And it’s not your right, I thought that you wouldn’t expect to find out
Can it be that I don’t want what you want?
And the only thing I could care for is a place
Of my own that is safe and warm, safe and warm, safe and warm
Safe and warm

— The White Stripes / “As Ugly As I Seem”