The Future as God
Nietzsche saw what happens when old religious longings survive under new names. Today, one of those names is the Future.
In a recent essay in The Guardian, Eduardo Porter describes the strange fantasy taking shape among the men most aggressively steering the A.I. future. Its elements are by now familiar, if still bizarre: machines waking into consciousness, minds uploaded into immortal receptacles, and descendants purified of the merely human streaming outward among the stars.
Read essay →The A.I. We Reward Is the Future We Get
The danger is not A.I. itself. It is an economy that rewards companies for replacing workers instead of helping them work, learn, and build.
A friend of mine, a clinical psychologist, once described what happened to the United States in 2020 as a “national nervous breakdown.” The phrase stayed with me because it captured something that unemployment rates, infection curves, and political polling could not: the deeper sense of a society that had reached a tipping point.
Read essay →“As Good as Real”: Silicon Valley’s Confusion Around Simulation
On the dangerous mistake of treating simulation as the real thing
The most painful relationship of my life was not with a machine. This feels important to say, because the argument I am about to make depends on not turning every strange attachment into a tech parable. He was a person: older, brilliant in the way older men are often brilliant to twenty-two-year-old women, which is to say he had read more books, had acquired more practiced forms of sadness, and knew how to make his instability seem like depth.
Read essay →The Professor Who Cried
What college gave me that A.I. cannot
On May 5, writing in The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang asked whether A.I. would make college obsolete. The question had, like many questions now put to A.I., a misleading neatness; it seemed to name a single institution and a single threat, when in fact college is a rite of passage, a postponement of adulthood, a mechanism by which class remembers itself, and sometimes, almost by accident, an education.
Read essay →U.B.I. Is Not Enough: The Case for Civic Basic Income
The answer to automation is not checks for disappearance, but support tied to service.
Universal basic income proposes that every citizen receive a regular cash payment from the state, regardless of employment status, income, productivity, virtue, or need. Its promise is that human beings should have a floor beneath them simply by virtue of belonging to a political community. That promise is not foolish. People need money.
Read essay →What A.I. Exposes About Capitalism
The question A.I. raises is not only what happens to jobs, but what happens to dignity in a society that has long routed recognition through market value.
I recently wrote a piece arguing that we need to change the incentive structure around artificial intelligence before the race itself makes dangerous choices seem unavoidable. One reader, Prasidha, left a comment that seemed to ask the deeper question beneath the piece: If A.I. exposes a recurring failure in capitalism, what should come after the version of capitalism we have now?
Read essay →The Pitchforks Are Coming for A.I.
America has long tolerated inequality by promising escape...but A.I. may be closing the door.
In a recent episode of The Good Fight on Americans’ loss of faith in universities, Yascha Mounk, speaking with Yale professor David Bromwich, identified a contradiction at the heart of American meritocracy: The stakes are enormous, but the criteria are often obscure. They were talking about college admissions, but the point reaches further.
Read essay →Who Gets to End the World?
From dynamite to nuclear deterrence to A.I., the makers of dangerous technologies keep asking to be trusted with catastrophe. The ruin is the same either way.
The line was fake, but entirely believable. Sam Altman: "If I Don’t End the World, Someone Far More Dangerous Will" was an Onion joke, not a confession. It landed because it distilled the bargain Silicon Valley keeps asking us to accept: Artificial intelligence may transform work, war, politics, even the terms of human survival.
Read essay →Cloud Labs and the New Supply Chain for Bioterrorism
A.I. and remote experimentation are collapsing the distance between dangerous biological ideas and dangerous biological action
In 2005, the C.D.C. released into public circulation the full genome sequence of the 1918 influenza virus, one of the deadliest pathogens in modern history. The decision was defended as preparedness; by studying the virus that killed an estimated 50 million people, scientists hoped to improve surveillance, vaccines, and antiviral defenses. But even then, this was a failure of foresight.
Read essay →What is it For?
On the missing language of ends in a technological age
The question of teleology is one our vocabulary for technology is woefully unfit to ask. We know how to talk about whether a system works—about scale, optimization, deployment, adoption, alignment, reliability, safety, robustness, latency, and throughput. What we do not know how to say is what the thing is for.
Read essay →What Would an FDA for AI Look Like
Private incentives built the models; public consequences now demand a regulator
The United States created the FDA because the market, left to its own devices, had shown itself far more gifted at invention than at restraint. By the time the harm could be counted, described, and photographed, the sale had already been made, the product had already moved on, and the public had already been left to absorb the consequence.
Read essay →Who Gets to Study AI (And Why That Matters)
Why the people who explain AI are often the same ones who profit from it (and why that matters)
In AI, "interpretability" names the effort to describe what happens inside a model when it reaches a decision. The term, however, carries a larger promise as well, which is that the system can, with enough expertise, be made readable. But who gets to make that promise? And what happens when it is made by the very companies that own the models and sell access to them?
Read essay →Why AI Will Never Write Good Literature
On bodies, feeling, and the metabolic limits of machine prose
Given how good large language models are at so many things—coding, summarizing, explaining complex material—why can't they write well? By "writing well," I do not mean producing competent reports or serviceable summaries. I mean writing with human feeling. Their sentences are sound, their paragraphs coherent, yet something essential is missing. The words convey meaning, but not felt life. You understand what is being said and almost immediately sense that no one is there.
Read essay →How AI Made Monomania Look Like Progress
On startup culture, where obsession becomes strategy and inevitability becomes excuse
A recent investigation accused Delve, a YC-backed startup run—as so many YC-backed startups now seem to be—by people barely past adolescence, of rapidly producing fake compliance certifications for startups eager to close enterprise deals. In a December TikTok interview, Delve's co-founder carried herself with the earnest authority of someone newly entrusted with it.
Read essay →The New Idols of Silicon Valley
Why the AI assistant is replacing God (and human judgment)
Whenever the tech world invents something strange, it immediately dresses the thing up in a human costume and pretends it isn't strange at all. The machine must have a name; it must be friendly; it must address you in the tone of a patient schoolteacher who has just finished a mindfulness course and now believes every question is "a great insight."
Read essay →Why Writers Will Outlast AI
Large language models can simulate voices, but they cannot share in the moral life that gives writing its meaning.
My brother, who is one of the smartest AI evangelists I know, sent me a post reporting that 54% of NYT readers preferred AI-written essays to human ones. I read it once, then again; and almost immediately I felt an instinctive resistance I could not initially translate into language. I have learned over time that this sensation often signals the beginning of an essay.
Read essay →The Logic of the Lesser Evil
War, artificial intelligence, and the comfort of what we call necessity
Arendt's observation captures a pattern that remains as visible in modern politics and economic life as it was in her own time: the gradual normalization of decisions that seem defensible in isolation but prove corrosive when accumulated. A leader chooses the lesser evil because the alternative appears worse; a company adopts a cheaper technology because its competitors already have; a market slides toward a new equilibrium because each participant believes there is no real choice.
Read essay →We Are All Victor Frankenstein Now
After Anthropic refused Washington and OpenAI signed on, the real question is who gets to control the creature.
It is a singular felicity (and a singular terror) of the human mind that it can mistake its own desires for the decrees of fate. Nearly two centuries ago, nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley cast into narrative form a warning so vivid that it has haunted every generation that followed. In her tale of Victor Frankenstein, she traced the perilous arc from curiosity to catastrophe. That arc extends with dreadful symmetry into our own age of artificial intelligence.
Read essay →A City in Cyberpsychosis
The profit motive behind the AGI apocalypse narrative
In 2018, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara founded Kalshi, now one of the largest regulated prediction markets in the U.S. Their proposal was to standardize uncertainty and sell it in one-dollar increments. The future was not a mystery to endure but a signal to extract; and wagering on it was not indulgence but discipline—a way to convert intuition into conviction with money behind it.
Read essay →San Francisco's Story of Inevitability
On conviction, consequence, and the 2026 tech economy
Recently, I received a message on LinkedIn from a woman who introduced herself as "a fellow Yalie in the Bay Area." She asked whether I might be "feeling a jump to an early-stage AI startup." Then she explained what they were doing: "We build voice AI agents that sell mortgages over the phone." What unsettled me was not the technology itself, but the absence of hesitation in the way she described the work.
Read essay →Some Dreamers of the Silicon Dream
Reflections on San Francisco in 2025
In 1966, Joan Didion wrote about a woman who burned her husband to death in a car on a lonely road in San Bernardino. She called the essay "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." But her piece is less about the murder and more about the Californian faith that life, if pursued with enough intensity, could be remade. Having just moved to San Francisco, I can tell you this: Didion's California still exists.
Read essay →Ash: The First AI for Therapy
Is counterfeit help truly better than no help at all?
It is hard to ignore that over the past several decades, the world has experienced a subtle (though rapid) desocialization driven by technology. What makes this shift particularly insidious is the way its creators disguise their products as tools which enhance human connection, when in reality, these tools have the opposite effect, isolating us from those who are physically present.
Read essay →Holding a Mirror up to Nature
Why LLMs Cannot Replace Human Artists
Every time I read Stevens's "The Snow Man," the word "beholds" leaps off the page and grips me. What does it mean to behold something, as opposed to merely observe it? To behold is not simply to witness, but to participate—to actively shape the meaning of what is seen. Observation is passive; beholding carries intention, presence, and responsibility.
Read essay →Can an LLM Know Itself?
Applying Antonia Peacocke's Philosophy of Self-Knowledge to AI
What does it mean to know oneself? For human beings, Antonia Peacocke argues, self-knowledge is not a matter of passively observing our minds from the outside. Instead, when we judge that p or decide to act, we are not just noticing our beliefs or intentions—we are actively forming them. This kind of knowledge is authoritative because it is based on our capacity to engage in mental action.
Read essay →Narrating the Machine
AI and the Fictions of Fairness
Amanda Askell, Anthropic's "in-house philosopher," argues that efforts to reduce bias in AI systems are constrained by two forms of "ethical locality": practical and epistemic. Yet Askell might have begun with an even more foundational concern: language itself. LLMs are not only shaped by social and ethical locality—they are built entirely out of language.
Read essay →Is Art Still Worth Making?
A Response to Yascha Mounk's "The Third Humbling of Humanity"
Yascha Mounk argues that AI's creative prowess constitutes humanity's third "great humbling"—after Copernicus and Darwin. But perhaps Mounk underestimates the enduring power of belief, and the depth of motivation that drives people to create in the first place. Artistic expression is rarely about the final product alone; it often emerges from a need to make sense of pain, to resist despair, or simply to stay alive.
Read essay →The Algorithmic Eye
Large Language Models and Hume's Standard of Taste
In his essay "Of the Standard of Taste," David Hume insists that a standard of taste exists, discoverable through the consensus of critics endowed with "delicacy of taste." This essay proposes that large language models may represent the most faithful realization of Hume's true critics to date—not because they feel, but because they have access to more examples, fewer personal prejudices, and the capacity for instantaneous comparison.
Read essay →A Blue and Gold Mistake
On Emily Dickinson and nostalgia
The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, to name a malady of homesick soldiers. It comes from the Greek nostos—return—and algos—pain. Nostalgia is the ache of returning, or rather, of longing to return to a place or time no longer reachable. It is not memory itself, but sorrow sewn into memory's hem.
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