"I no longer believe that our technology will have a net positive impact on society. I think there's a fantasy world where AI can help decarbonise grids, cut waste, protect ecosystems, and benefit humanity. But it's not this world, and it's not this type of general-purpose AI we are racing to develop. Racing to deploy agentic AI in society as it is now and in this historical moment is a terrible idea, and will definitely be a net evil."
"Technology is NOT a neutral tool. This assessment assumes we can separate technology from the context it's deployed into, but we should not: we have a responsibility to assess the tool in the context in which it's going to be used. It also assumes we can separate the technology from who owns it, builds it, controls it, and benefits from it."
"One of the most powerful of these reassurances is compartmentalisation. Many of us don't work on projects directly related to warfare, myself included. And even people working on Gemini can take comfort in the broad range of its applications, or detach their work from how it is concretely used by focusing on the research or technical side. It's easy to push any ethical consideration to the side."
"The problem is not AI. The problem is not doing the work."
"She would have read the difficult chapter twice. The second time something would have caught - a phrase she didn't quite understand, a sentence that sounded like it was talking about her. She would have written about it badly, then better, then almost well. By the end of the term she would have been someone slightly different from the person who began it. She used the model. Hi, how can I help? The chapter was summarised. The essay was structured. The grade was good. The person who began the term completed it. Some formations cannot be efficient. She will never know who she did not become."
2026-10-31 Writing is Magic; Machine Writing is Ash. "Machine writing [is] ash – the burnt embers of dead thoughts. It captures nothing, structures nothing, orders nothing."
"Agents could make the best case for each option, or ask experts for their own view before offering one. But this could quickly become overwhelming for users. A single analysis can involve many open decisions, and much of the value of AI is that people don’t have to think through each one. Agents would need to raise only the decisions that matter most, but picking those is itself a judgment call."
2026-06-04: ratfactor.com: Ascetic computing via Tim Hårek. Asceticism has fascinated me for a long time. I like how you can connect it to anything, even computing.
2026-06-01: nytimes.com: What AI did to my college class. A very interesting description of AI's effects on students. Quite alarming if this is an accurate description of the culture at Stanford.