<![CDATA[Curious futures (KGhosh)]]>https://substack.kghosh.mehttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!77au!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2b10bed-2c2a-4db9-808e-7fd84e255a97_1024x1024.pngCurious futures (KGhosh)https://substack.kghosh.meSubstackThu, 23 Jul 2026 20:12:39 GMT<![CDATA[20260719]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260719https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260719Sun, 19 Jul 2026 03:47:20 GMT

“When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.”
— Bob Dylan, via workfutures.io

“Technology is legislation. Introducing a new technology is equivalent to imposing new global economic, legal, or societal policies with major consequences — and we don’t know in advance what that policy is going to be.”
— Karl Schroeder, Unapocalyptic

Timecapsules, really?

The Translation Layer

Marcus had been told the restructuring was good news for people like him, by which his manager Elaine meant people who were good at the “why.”

What Marcus was actually good at was explaining things to other people who were also good at explaining things. This was, he now understood, translation. He had spent eleven years being the person in the meeting who connected what the strategy people said to what the engineering people built, and he had been very good at it, and it had not occurred to him until last Tuesday that this was the job AI had been eating first.

The new org chart was two layers. There was the “what” and there was the “how.” The “what” had grown. The “how” had gotten faster. The middle — the thing Marcus had been — was described as gone in the memo from HR, which Elaine had forwarded without comment at 6:43 PM on a Thursday.

He had a three-year-old now. Leo. The brain research said that fathers’ brains changed in the caregiving areas — the same parental networks that lit up in mothers, just from a different starting point and peaking later. Marcus had noticed this without being able to name it: a new kind of attention, a vigilance that was not anxiety but something adjacent to it, the way you become aware of every open socket and unlocked gate. He had rewired for a small specific person. He had become, without knowing it, a different system.1

“What are you going to do?” his wife Petra asked.

He had been on a call that morning about a pilot program requiring employees to verify their identity before accessing certain systems. Facial recognition. His face, scanned and stored. “You can change a password,” the pamphlet said. “But this is more secure.” The pamphlet did not mention what a future he could not currently imagine might want to do with a database of his face at thirty-eight.2

He thought about the memo. He thought about Leo. He thought about the fact that you could not change your face, and that you could, presumably, change what you were, though the org chart suggested the window was closing.

Leo had learned that week to climb out of his crib. He had done it once, at 2 AM, and presented himself at the bedroom door with the expression of a person who has just demonstrated a proof. He had not yet learned that getting out was the easy part.

Marcus went to bed. He lay in the dark and thought about translation. About the layer of work that had been the middle. About what it meant that the biology of caring for something small could restructure a person’s brain while the org chart was restructuring everything else.

He would need, he thought, a new theory of what he was for.

Leo did not climb out of his crib that night. He had not yet worked out that he could do it twice.

1 The threat detection activation in new fathers’ brains makes a specific kind of sense: you have introduced a variable into your life that is entirely dependent on your continued competence, and you are aware, at some level, that you have never been tested for this. The brain adjusts accordingly.

2 The pamphlet is a real genre. Every major biometric rollout comes with one. They explain why this is better for you. They always omit the sentence: “We will have this forever, regardless of what we tell you now.”

]]><![CDATA[20260712]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260712https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260712Sun, 12 Jul 2026 02:03:12 GMT

”The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run.” — Richard Sutton

”It’s incredibly hard, and maybe impossible, to escape the distorted perspective that’s been labelled ‘temporal chauvinism’: the feeling that the time we’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever, simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.” — Oliver Burkeman

Scan of a human body
Midjourney full body scanners.

The Planning Meeting

Declan had explained the data center to his mother three times, and each time she had asked him if it was like a cloud. He had said yes. This was not technically accurate, but accuracy had not proved useful in their household.

The community center’s projector was broken, so someone had propped a laptop on a folding table and connected it to a television — an old one, still running a DVD of Canadian wildlife footage. The DVD had looped twice since the meeting began. A moose had crossed the same river four times. Harriet, who had placed herself in the front row, had not noticed. She was reading from a clipboard.

“Twelve thousand data centers worldwide,” she said. “North America holds half. Half. And now they want to put one three miles from an elementary school.”

Declan looked at the clipboard. He was sitting in the third row, near the exit, because Pramila in Communications had said it was important he attend and “not sit near the front like a target.” He was, he supposed, a target. His firm had recently completed a restructuring. From forty engineers they had kept three. The AI systems they maintained were faster and more meticulous than he had ever been, and genuinely did not care about lunch.

“The power draw alone,” Harriet continued, “is equivalent to twenty-six thousand households. Per facility. And they can just keep building them.”

Bram, two seats to Declan’s left, was reading a novel. He had brought his own chair cushion. He had been coming to planning meetings since 1994 and owned a collection of the programs from each one, which he used as bookmarks along with ticket stubs, bus transfers, and a laminated fortune cookie slip that read You have the resources you need. He did not look up.

“Every generation thinks they’re living through the worst of it,” Bram said, to no one in particular. “That’s just how time feels from the inside.”

Harriet turned. “Excuse me?”

“Temporal chauvinism,” Bram said. He had recently read a newsletter piece that used this phrase, and found it clarifying. “The belief that your own era is uniquely catastrophic. Turns out it’s universal. Romans had it. Probably mammoths.”

The moose crossed the river for the fifth time. Declan had been watching wildlife videos more since a colleague in Oslo had mentioned that most viral nature clips on social media were now AI-generated — animals that had never existed traversing landscapes assembled from satellite data and photographic libraries. This moose, which was almost certainly real, seemed reassuring.1

“We’re not saying the world is ending,” said Harriet, tightly. “We’re saying the aquifer might.”

Bram nodded, apparently satisfied with the distinction.

Declan thought about Ruth, who had sat three desks from him before the restructuring, and who had subsequently claimed a religious exemption from using AI at her new firm, on the grounds that her faith required her to be present in her work, fully, without proxy. He had envied her clarity of conviction, even as he had spent three months onboarding the system that now did most of what he used to do in less than half the time.2

Outside, the town voted against the data center by sixty-one to forty-nine, not counting Bram, who had left early to walk his dog.3

The moose crossed the river one final time and was replaced by the DVD menu — looping, patient, its eight-bar theme playing into the empty room.

1 His colleague had since joined a consortium developing certification standards for authentic wildlife footage. The consortium had four members and met on alternating Tuesdays.

2 Ruth’s exemption was granted under a statute designed for workers whose faith prohibited them from handling specific materials. The theological reasoning she offered was never disclosed.

3 Bram’s dog was named for a Byzantine empress. He had mentioned this to no one.

]]><![CDATA[20260705]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260705https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260705Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:18:04 GMT

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“The logic that protects the individual exposes the group. The defense becomes the advertisement. The sardines never figured this out. The Marlin didn’t either. Something always gets eaten.” — Colin Nagy, The Bait Ball Edition

Man proclaims himself king of Switzerland and he is building an empire for free
Le roi d’la Suisse.

The Soft Ones

The third week of June, and Miriam had not spoken to anyone in eleven days.

This was not precisely true. She had exchanged 847 messages through various AI interfaces, which she privately counted as a form of conversation. She had also said “thank you” to a delivery driver who had looked at her with the particular wariness of someone who suspects the door is opened by a different person each time.

The coworking space at the bottom of her street had been Doris’s idea. “You’ll go feral,” Doris had said, with the authority of someone who had witnessed actual ferality in a colleague she would not name. So Miriam went, on a Tuesday, carrying her laptop and a sense that she was doing something virtuous. She sat at a long table. To her left, Barry was having what he described as a soft-on day.^1

“It’s not slacking,” Barry explained, with some urgency, to no one in particular. “I’m responsive. I’m chipping away. I’m just not pushing myself to maximum productivity.” He had a rerun playing in a browser tab and was annotating a document at approximately the pace of geological time.

Doris arrived at half past ten, sat down, and immediately drew something on a sticky note. She drew it with the focused expression of a person who had read something about sigils on the internet and decided that if the world was going to be absurd, she might as well be absurd back.^2

“What is that,” said Miriam.

“A threshold marker,” said Doris. “I cross it every time I leave the building. To see if it starts to mean something.”

“That’s not how meaning works,” said Miriam.

“You don’t know how meaning works,” said Doris, pleasantly.

Barry looked up from his soft document. “I read that Cisco found their heaviest AI users trust their colleagues less. Like, statistically.”

“That tracks,” said Doris.

“I trust my colleagues perfectly well,” said Miriam. “I have excellent relationships with my colleagues.”

A silence settled. Miriam’s colleagues, in the operational sense, were large language models that did not experience trust in either direction.

What happened next was harder to explain. The three of them stopped working simultaneously — Miriam closing a tab, Barry letting his rerun loop to a menu screen, Doris capping her pen — and sat for a moment in the specific quiet of a Tuesday afternoon in June when nothing is urgent. Outside, someone walked past with a dog. The dog stopped and stared through the window with the bait-ball instincts of a creature that has learned that clusters of beings sometimes mean food, and sometimes just mean beings.

“I found this thing,” Barry said. “One Minute Park. You spend sixty seconds in a green space somewhere in the world. Just watch it.”

He turned his laptop. A park in Osaka. Dappled light. A child running somewhere off-frame.

They watched for slightly longer than sixty seconds.

“The penguins at London Zoo,” Doris said, apropos of nothing, later. “They built them this beautiful pool in 1934. Cork paving, perfect design. Then they renovated it with concrete and the penguins got sore feet. So they moved the penguins out, and now the pool is Grade I listed and nobody can touch it and it’s been empty for twenty years. Because they changed the material and used the wrong species.”

“What’s the right species?” said Barry.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. They’re somewhere else.”

Miriam thought about this for a long time on the walk home. She thought about it in the way you think about things that feel like a parable but resist being extracted into a lesson. She crossed a threshold — just a crack in the pavement — and did not do anything special when she did.

That evening she sent a message to a colleague. A human one. She asked how they were doing.

The reply came back twelve hours later. Slightly chaotic, slightly contradictory, entirely unhelpful on the actual question she had buried in paragraph three.

She felt, obscurely, better.^3

^1 A soft-on day: online, responsive, chipping away, ideally from one’s couch in cosy clothes with a comfort rerun in the background. Not to be confused with a soft-off day, which is when you run personal errands during work hours and feel no guilt whatsoever. Both are now considered mandatory by significant portions of TikTok.

^2 The RADAR newsletter has been publishing a “grimoire of tiny rebellions” — small embodied acts designed to prove that different arrangements are possible. The underlying thesis: you cannot think your way out of stuck patterns. You have to act your way out, starting with gestures small enough that nobody tries to stop you.

^3 Cisco’s internal data from January 2026 found that its most active AI users trusted their teams less than intermittent users — “likely because the power users were spending more time on their own and less time with their colleagues.” The coaching platform BetterUp found these same users reported higher burnout and a greater desire to leave their jobs. Twelve hours for a reply is, in this context, a good sign.

]]><![CDATA[20260628]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260628https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260628Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:04:16 GMT

“Cognitive debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” — John Willshire, Smithery

“Whereas in the past humans struggled against exploitation, in the future the biggest struggle will be against uselessness — and it will be much worse to be useless than to be exploited.” — Yuval Noah Harari, via Umanz

Cognitive debt and headless animals.

The Holes Under the Building

Neville had not written a line of code himself in eleven months, and he had never been more productive.

The quarterly metrics said so. His team lead said so. The dashboard said so in a cheerful green font that Neville had spent six minutes asking an AI to design, and then another four asking it to make slightly less cheerful. He was, by every available measure, eight times the engineer he had been a year ago. He had told his mother this at Christmas and she had asked if he was eating.

The trouble began on a Tuesday, as trouble usually did. A junior colleague named Harriet asked him to explain a function he had shipped the previous week. Neville looked at the code. He recognised it in the way you recognise a street you have been driven down many times but have never walked.^1

“The AI wrote it,” he said.

“Yes,” said Harriet, “but you submitted it.”

Neville had a feeling there was something important in the gap between those two sentences, like a word you know exists but cannot quite retrieve. He stared at the function. It was correct. It was elegant. It solved the problem he had described in a prompt that had taken him forty seconds to compose. He had no idea why it worked.

Tim from Finance arrived at this moment to announce that the team’s agentic coding allocation for the month had hit 94% by the 9th. He said this in the tone of a man who had discovered something alive inside the photocopier.^2 Neville’s team had, by conservative estimate, consumed enough tokens to write the complete works of Balzac seventeen times over, in exchange for which they had produced software that the company would use and nobody would understand.

“What do you do when you don’t use the AI?” Harriet asked him that afternoon. She was the sort of person who kept a notebook — a paper one, with a pen — and who sometimes spent eight minutes staring at a blank page before writing anything. Neville had always found this suspicious.

“I use the AI,” he said.

She nodded slowly, as if confirming a hypothesis. She had recently been reading about a Japanese clothing manufacturer who had kept antique knitting machines running purely because the fabric they produced was, by some textile argument Neville could not follow, better. The machines were very slow. The sweaters cost four hundred pounds. There was a waiting list.^3

Neville went home and tried to write a function himself, just to see. It took him forty minutes to produce something he would previously have written in four. The shape of the thing was wrong in ways he felt but could not name, the way a chord can be almost right without being right. He looked at it for a long time.

He did not delete it.

The next morning he arrived early and fixed the original function — the one Harriet had asked about — without asking the AI anything. It took two hours. He felt, when he had finished, a kind of exhaustion that was adjacent to satisfaction, which he had not felt in almost a year, and which he had not known he was missing because the dashboard had been so cheerfully green.

He wrote to his mother. He said he was eating fine. She asked if he was sleeping.

He said he was learning.

^1 The IT department later described the function as “correct but inscrutable” — a phrase that also appears on at least three pieces of public art Neville had walked past without stopping.

^2 Tim subsequently discovered that the photocopier problem was unrelated. It was a sandwich. He did not disclose this.

^3 Harriet had not bought one. She was making something instead, on a pair of old needles, which was taking much longer than she had planned and was turning out slightly wider than intended, which she found she did not mind.

]]><![CDATA[20260621]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260621https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260621Sun, 21 Jun 2026 01:03:26 GMT

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” — Robert Solow, 1987, quoted in Exponential View

“Systems pushed too far in one direction eventually summon their opposite.” — Why Is This Interesting?

That “Built with Fable” X thread.

File:Babosa de mar (Costasiella kuroshimae), Anilao, Filipinas, 2023-08-23, DD 113.jpg
The leaf sheep (Costasiella kuroshimae) runs briefly on stolen chloroplasts — algae’s technology, requisitioned and redeployed. The light lasts weeks, then not.

The Residual

Derek had prepared seventeen slides for the AI Value Summit, which was the kind of name that felt serious until you said it aloud. The slides documented a productivity paradox in careful sequence: his firm’s engineers had submitted 40% more code in Q1. They had closed 60% more tickets. Pull requests had doubled. And yet the organisation had not shipped proportionally more of anything that mattered. He had prepared a graph for this — a slightly baffling bar chart he thought of privately as the 1.5 Slide.

“One plus one plus one plus one equals one and a half,” he said to the room, and paused, as if someone might disagree. The room did not. Avery, the consultant they’d flown in, nodded in the slow way of someone who had seen the same graph in different colours at different companies across an entire industry that had spent three years measuring input and calling it output.

“Lightbulb stage,” she said. “The factory got better lighting. Nobody changed the factory.”

Hank, officially there as head of data science but having spent the morning thinking about sea slugs, looked up. He had read, somewhere in the week’s accumulation of newsletters, about an organism that stole chloroplasts from algae, incorporated them into its own tissues, and ran briefly on solar energy. The slug never actually learned to photosynthesise; it borrowed the machinery and trusted the light to last.^1

“We’re doing kleptoplasty,” he said.

Nobody asked him to continue but he did. “We’re incorporating AI into existing bodies. We haven’t changed the bodies. We’re borrowing the mechanism and hoping the efficiency diffuses.”

Derek considered this. He had forty minutes left in his slot, and an action plan that was basically “do more of the same faster,” which he now suspected was precisely the wrong lesson.^2

Matt, from Infrastructure, interrupted without quite meaning to. He had pulled something up on his phone — a facilities dashboard accessible through the hotel’s sensor API, which had not been configured with authentication. The dashboard tracked something called an Ambient Affect Index for each conference room. This room was reading 62 (Mildly Tense) at the moment of the 1.5 Slide, and had since dropped to 48 (Disengaged).

“The hotel is measuring how we feel,” Matt said.

“Hotels have done comfort profiling for years,” Avery said.

“This is a corporate conference centre. This data goes somewhere.”

Avery looked at the number. 48: Disengaged. She thought of a tipping-point study she half-remembered — 25% of a group, certain enough, could redefine the group’s collective understanding. The question was what understanding she was in 25% of.

“We usually think of these horizons as sequential,” she said, addressing no one in particular. “Stabilise first, then innovate, then transform. But what we’re actually in is all three simultaneously. The infrastructure is being disrupted while it’s being built. The transformation is happening to systems still looking for a stable floor.” She gestured vaguely at the sensor dashboard. “And the building is monitoring our feelings about it.”^3

Derek closed the 1.5 Slide. He had not resolved the graph’s central claim — that individual gains, summed across hundreds of engineers, didn’t compound into organisational results. The explanation wasn’t in the data. It was in the invisible work the data didn’t capture: context re-read forty times; the overhead that looked like inference but wasn’t; the residual that got called productivity because no one had given it another name.

Outside, through the glass, the day’s other events moved in both directions: a wedding reception, a wellness retreat, a seminar on navigating uncertainty. None of them, Hank noticed, were running on their own energy.

^1 The leaf sheep sea slug (Costasiella kuroshimae) can photosynthesise for weeks using stolen algal chloroplasts. Ecologists call this kleptoplasty. Enterprise architects do not use this word, but they might find it useful.

^2 “Do more of the same faster” is Stage 1 of general-purpose technology adoption, corresponding to improved lighting in the old factory. Stage 2 requires restructuring the factory. Stage 3 takes approximately forty years and a generation of managers who don’t remember the previous arrangement.

^3 The three-horizons model — stabilise, innovate, transform — was designed as a planning sequence. Its compression into a single present moment is, depending on who you ask, either a crisis of coordination or an exciting opportunity. The consulting industry charges differently for each interpretation.

]]><![CDATA[20260614]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260614https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260614Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:11:56 GMT

“An Event is something that arrives without the right word attached to it. You reach for your vocabulary and come up empty. You reach for the law and find it wasn’t written for this.”
— Where Do You Make the Cut?, Karl Schroeder

“Ernest speaks with the authority of success. I speak with the authority of failure.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, via La lettre de Umanz

Officers playing at Kriegs Spiel or ‘The Game of War.’ Wikipedia.

The Water Test

Derek had printed out three articles about the AI backlash before Hank arrived. This was, Derek thought, either research or anxiety management — he wasn’t sure which line separated them anymore.1

Hank came through the back door at noon, as he had every weekday for the past three months since he’d left his job at the fulfillment center. Not quit. Left. There was a distinction Hank maintained carefully, which Derek had learned not to challenge.

“Water still coming out right?” Hank asked, filling a glass at the kitchen tap. He held it up against the window. Clear. Hank had been monitoring the tap water since a data center was announced in the next county, and his vigilance had taken on a quality Derek recognized from his grandmother’s rosary habit — not really about the thing itself, but about the rhythm of the ritual.

“It’s fine,” said Derek.

“AOC held up a jar of brown water from one of these sites on C-SPAN. Just lifted it up and let it sit there.” Hank set the glass down. “Brown.”

Derek didn’t answer. He worked for a company building AI scheduling tools for hospitals. He had a complicated relationship with the data center question — somewhere between civic discomfort and financial dependency.

Avery came in from the living room, still wearing her teacher lanyard. She taught eleventh-grade English and had spent the morning marking what she’d begun calling “the slop pile” — essays that were technically adequate, grammatically flawless, and entirely empty. Not written by students who were cheating; written by students who had never been taught to care.2 She dropped the stack on the table with a sound that communicated everything.

“How was it?” Hank asked.

“I gave eight of them feedback on the wrong essay,” she said. “They’re all the same essay.”

Hank nodded. He’d been spending his free time — and he had a lot of it — reorganizing his collection of security envelope liners. The patterns inside the envelopes that banks and doctors’ offices sent: cross-hatch, diagonal wave, fine-grain spiral. He’d found a community online — thousands of them — cataloguing and trading photographs. It turned out this was a real thing. It turned out a lot of things were real things once you had time to notice them.

“Charlie found one from 1987,” Hank said, to no one in particular. “A pattern they haven’t made since. Just the diagonal, extremely fine, like fish scales.”

“What do you do with them?” Derek asked.

“Just know they exist.”

That night, after Hank had gone, Derek read an article tracing a straight line from the Prussian Kriegsspiel — the 19th-century wargame used to train officers — through a series of American hobbyists and miniature painters, directly to Gary Gygax and the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons.3 The path was absolutely clear once you saw it. Military doctrine becoming leisure becoming mythology. He thought about Hank’s envelopes. About the slop pile. About the water.

He held his glass up to the kitchen light. Clear. He set it down.

1 The same question haunted several tech executives that week, who were solidly booed at commencement addresses. The water test, in retrospect, applied to them too.

2 This is not the students’ fault. It is difficult to care about an outcome when every incentive in the system you have grown up in has been carefully designed to reward the product rather than the process.

3 The article was in Asterisk. It turns out war has been a hobby since war was invented.

]]><![CDATA[20260607]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20250607https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20250607Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:01:46 GMT

“We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.”
— M. Gessen

“When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge.”
— Yi-Ling Liu, via workfutures.io

Data centers vs offices ;)

The Efficiency Moat

Bev had printed out seventeen pages of the report and highlighted them in four colours, which Marcus thought was itself an argument against the report’s thesis. The report argued, among other things, that the people who had learned to do the most with the least were now the most dangerous.1

“They’re getting four to seven times more intelligence per unit of compute,” she said, fanning the pages across the conference table. “Seven times. We’re just sitting here with all our chips, burning money.”

Marcus looked out the window. Their colleague Pat was walking to the parking lot below, and Marcus watched until Pat turned the corner and was fully gone from sight — which took longer than expected, because Pat walked slowly and the corner was further than it looked. Then Marcus turned back to the pages.

“Excel made more accountants,” he said finally.

Bev stopped. “What?”

“When Excel came out. 1993. Everyone thought it would replace accountants. It made more of them. Jevons paradox.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Bev collected the pages and tapped them into a neat pile, a gesture she had learned from her mother, who had been the kind of parent who made her children’s homework schedules in advance and colour-coded them by subject. Bev had decided this approach had some merit, though she preferred to describe herself as “intentional” rather than “intense.”2

In the break room, someone had replaced all the snacks. The packaging was different — flatter, more subdued, everything in grey and black. The chips had always come in a shiny orange bag. Now they came in what appeared to be a photocopy of a shiny orange bag. “Ink shortage,” said the note on the fridge. “Normal service will resume when the supply chain does.”

The Cerebras chip had arrived that morning in a foam-lined case the size of a piece of luggage. It was a wafer — a literal silicon wafer, the size of a dinner plate — and it had cost more than Marcus’s car and possibly his flat. Bev had photographed it immediately and reverently, the way people photograph their children’s first steps. The chip was now in the server room downstairs, where it was, in theory, thinking.3

“The point,” Bev said, returning with a grey-packaged coffee, “is that efficiency is the new moat. If you learn to do more with less, the resources stop mattering.”

Marcus thought about this. He thought about Pat turning the corner, the way a person’s back tells you something their face doesn’t. He thought about how the tarot lady had told his sister that 2026 was the year of the Wheel of Fortune. Not the game show. The other kind.

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe constraint is just constraint. And we’ll know in ten years.”

Bev gathered her highlighted pages and left. Marcus watched her go until she turned the corner into the corridor and he could no longer see her, and only then did he get up to get his own grey-packaged coffee from the break room.

It tasted exactly the same.

1 The most efficient people: always the ones who were forced to be.

2 Colour-coded homework schedules remain, statistically, no guarantee of anything — though they do correlate strongly with the ownership of multiple highlighters.

3 Whether wafer-scale thinking is different in kind from smaller-scale thinking is a question the chip itself was not invited to answer.

]]><![CDATA[20260531]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260531https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260531Sun, 31 May 2026 06:57:50 GMT

“In general, tech industry sources expressed more extreme concern about the labor market impacts of AI in private conversation — but suddenly became optimists once I turned on the mic.” — Jasmine Sun, The New York Times

“René Walter builds a conceptual framework for understanding LLMs through the history of archival thought. He closes the essay by framing LLMs as a new form of orality rather than literacy. Where traditional archives ground knowledge in traceable sources and authorial intent, these interpolatable archives generate responses the way pre-Homeric bards constructed epic verse: on demand, from mnemonic formulas, without a fixed text behind them.” through Patrick.

“Le produit dérivé de la dénutrition conversationnelle qui gagne du terrain, c’est l’absence cruelle de vérité dans nos relations.” — Umanz, Belief markets, doomprompting et algorithmisation des gens

From Marie D !

The Off-Record Pessimists

The journalist turned off the mic, and the optimism evaporated like dew on a semiconductor.^1

Hank read the quote twice. He had been following Jasmine Sun’s reporting for months — her ability to get Silicon Valley’s builders to say what they actually believed, which was different from what they said on stage, which was different again from what they built. The pattern was consistent: in private, engineers at the frontier labs expressed extreme concern about labour market displacement. In public, they pivoted to the language of opportunity, upskilling, augmentation. The gap between the two positions was not a contradiction. It was a strategy.

“The beliefs become behaviours,” he said to Avery over lunch. “They think junior hiring is over. So they stop hiring juniors. And then junior hiring is over.”

Avery, who had been reading about GPU rental prices — B200s up 114% in six weeks, Microsoft requiring Blackwell customers to lock in a thousand chips for a year — found this observation distressing but not surprising. “It’s the announcement effect again,” she said. “Last month it was fitness streaks. This month it’s the labour market. The declaration creates the reality.”

“Except in fitness, the declaration is public. Here, the declaration is private. They’re pessimists off the record and optimists on it. The displacement happens in the gap.”^2

Their colleague Derek had spent the morning reading about the EU AI Act trilogue collapse. The negotiations had fallen apart over machinery and medical devices — not the existential questions about frontier models that dominated the headlines, but the mundane regulatory details that actually determined whether the law would work. Meanwhile, the European Parliament had invited Anthropic to a hearing on Mythos. The model could autonomously complete all thirty-two steps of a corporate network attack simulation. The AI Office, tasked with overseeing such systems, had forty staff and no Advisory Forum seven months after the call for interest had closed.

“Forty staff,” Derek said. “For a technology that generates five and a half trillion tokens per day at a single Chinese company.”

Matt, who managed the firm’s wellness programme, had been reading about something entirely different. A philosopher had tested seven frontier models on their ability to simulate expert philosophical judgment. The models performed adequately on questions where philosophers already agreed. But on questions where they disagreed — the interesting ones, the ones that mattered — real philosophers showed two to four times more variance than the AI.

“The models are too agreeable,” Matt said. “They converge. Human thinkers diverge.”

“That’s the whole problem,” Hank said quietly. “We’re building systems that agree with themselves. And then asking them to replace people who don’t.”^3

That evening, he read about a Chinese court ruling that replacing someone with AI was not, by itself, a lawful reason for dismissal. It was one of the first such decisions anywhere in the world. The ruling didn’t say AI couldn’t do the work. It said that doing the work was not the only thing that mattered. There were other considerations — dignity, continuity, the relationship between a person and their role — that the technology could not account for and the law was obliged to protect.

Hank closed his laptop. Outside, the sun was setting over Exeter in the way it always did, which is to say, without requiring five and a half trillion tokens to describe it. He poured a glass of water and sat in the quiet of a house that had no inference load, no GPU rental premium, and no Advisory Forum.

“The gap,” he said to nobody, “is where we live.”

^1 This is the defining metaphor of the current AI moment: the mic as moral toggle. On-record, everything is augmentation. Off-record, everything is displacement. The truth is in neither position but in the distance between them.

^2 The fitness analogy proved strangely durable. Announcing your marathon training reduces your chance of finishing it. Announcing that AI will replace juniors reduces the number of juniors hired. In both cases, the declaration substitutes for the work.

^3 The variance finding is, philosophically, devastating. If the value of human thought lies in its disagreement — in the range of positions a mind can hold — then a system that narrows that range is not augmenting thought. It is replacing it with consensus. And consensus, as any philosopher will tell you, is where thought goes to die.

^4 The Chinese court ruling may prove to be one of the most consequential legal decisions of the decade, not because it stops AI adoption, but because it establishes that the relationship between a worker and their work has value independent of the work’s output. This is either obvious or revolutionary, depending on which century’s economics you subscribe to.

]]><![CDATA[20260524]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260524https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260524Sun, 24 May 2026 04:56:52 GMT

“The input is electrons, the output is tokens. In the middle is Nvidia.” — Jensen Huang, Dwarkesh Patel interview

“The American health and wellness system is overwhelmingly focused on fall prevention or injury recovery, not reducing harm during an inevitable fall.” — Graydon Gordian, The Ukemi Edition

Eye contact with a whale

The Platform Standard

Hank had never given much thought to how chips were made, which was reasonable, since chips had never given much thought to him.^1

He worked in insurance — specifically, the actuarial modelling of infrastructure risk, a job that sounded important and was, though nobody at dinner parties ever asked him to elaborate. His colleague Avery handled the tech portfolio. She had spent the past week reading about Jensen Huang’s interview, in which the Nvidia CEO had described his company’s position in the AI supply chain with the precision of a man who had rehearsed the sentence many times: the input is electrons, the output is tokens, and in the middle is Nvidia.

“It’s a toll booth,” Avery said over lunch. “But the toll booth designed the road, trained the drivers, and is now building a second road in case the first one gets sanctioned.”

“The second road being Huawei,” Hank said.

“The second road being Huawei. And fifty percent of the world’s AI developers are learning to drive on it.”

Their colleague Derek, who worked in what the firm still called “scenario planning,” had been running a different kind of model. Anthropic’s Mythos Preview had just demonstrated something that made Derek’s actuarial assumptions feel, as he put it, “decorative.” A third of Anthropic’s own staff believed the model could replace junior engineers within three months. Not in theory. Not eventually. Within three months.^2

“Replace or augment?” Hank asked.

“Does it matter?” Derek said. “If a third of the people who built it think it can do their junior colleagues’ jobs, the premium on being junior just inverted.”

Matt, who handled the firm’s wellness programme — a role that mostly involved ordering fruit baskets and reading articles about burnout — had been distracted all morning by a piece about judo. Specifically, about a programme called The Falling Class, which taught elderly civilians the art of breakfalling. Fourteen million Americans over sixty-five fell every year. The healthcare system spent billions on prevention and recovery but almost nothing on teaching people how to land.

“It’s the same problem,” Matt said, though nobody had asked him to connect judo to semiconductors. “We build systems to prevent the fall or repair the damage. Nobody teaches the system how to absorb the impact.”

“That’s literally what CUDA does,” Avery said, and then paused, because she hadn’t expected the metaphor to hold.^3

Over the afternoon, they discussed the EU AI Act’s hundredth newsletter edition. Nineteen AI Factories deployed across European supercomputers. Seventy-six expressions of interest for Gigafactories. The AI Office, tasked with overseeing models capable of finding and exploiting every vulnerability in every major operating system, had a planned staff of forty.

“Forty,” Derek repeated. “The DSA has a hundred and sixty people to oversee twenty-six social media platforms. The AI Office gets forty to oversee the models that can hack those platforms.”

“To be fair,” Hank said, “the models could probably do the oversight too.”

Nobody laughed. It was the kind of joke that had stopped being funny approximately two model generations ago.

That evening, Hank went home and found his daughter filing the corners off her laptop with a metal rasp. He asked why. She said the edges hurt her wrists. He asked if she’d considered buying a different laptop. She said she believed strongly in customising one’s tools.^4

He sat down, poured a glass of water, and thought about platforms, standards, the art of falling, and the quiet accumulation of small modifications that, over time, constituted a life. Outside, the road was the same road it had always been. But the toll had changed.

^1 This is, admittedly, a low bar for reciprocity. Chips are not known for their emotional range.

^2 The specific confidence interval was not disclosed. Derek suspected this was because confidence intervals, like junior engineers, were entering a period of existential uncertainty.

^3 It did, though. CUDA absorbs the complexity of GPU programming so that researchers don’t have to land on bare silicon. Avery found this both satisfying and slightly alarming, like discovering that a pun you’d made accidentally was also structurally true.

^4 She had found the idea on a blog post by a man who described filing his MacBook with the same matter-of-fact tone one might use to describe adjusting a bicycle seat. The internet, Hank reflected, was a place where extreme customisation and complete indifference to manufacturer intent coexisted peacefully.

]]><![CDATA[20260517]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260517https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260517Sun, 17 May 2026 08:19:59 GMT

“Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.” — Tim Wu, The Tyranny of Convenience (2018)

“For people who think the world is going to be radically transformed by advanced AI, I think it’s helpful to talk less about AGI and instead describe vivid, concrete milestones.” — Helen Toner, on Mythos

Through Rishad

The Mispricing

The first person to understand Mythos correctly was not a technologist, an investor, or a policy wonk. It was Hank, who ran a small actuarial firm in Exeter and who, upon reading the model card on a Tuesday morning, immediately called his wife.

“We need to reprice everything,” he said.

“Everything?” said Charlie, who was used to Hank’s periodic enthusiasms but found this one alarmingly comprehensive.

“Everything.”^1

The model preview had been released by Anthropic with the usual fanfare — blog posts, benchmark charts, a coalition of infrastructure experts assembled to think through implications. Most of the coverage focused on whether Mythos constituted artificial general intelligence. Hank found this question tiresome, in the way a structural engineer finds it tiresome when someone asks whether a building is “really tall.” The building either holds or it doesn’t. What mattered about Mythos was what it could do to infrastructure: power grids, financial systems, water treatment, any networked system where the assumption of safety had been priced in decades ago and never updated.^2

His colleague Avery, who handled the firm’s tech portfolio, was more interested in the classified frontier piece. The US, it argued, wouldn’t lose control of frontier AI — it would choose who else got access. Model weights had been physically walked into Los Alamos in locked metal briefcases, accompanied by armed security. “So it’s not an arms race,” she said. “It’s a toll road.”

“It’s a toll road where the toll collector also designed the car,” Hank corrected.

Across the office, Derek was reading about GLP-1 drugs. Scientists had found genetic evidence explaining why two patients on the same medication could have wildly different outcomes. Some lost weight effortlessly; others were hit by nausea that made the Victorian era look comfortable. Derek, who had been considering Ozempic, found this both illuminating and personally distressing.^3

“It’s the same problem as AI,” Matt observed from his corner. Matt worked in what the firm still called “scenario planning,” though his scenarios had lately become less planning and more cataloguing of surprise. “The tool works, but it works differently for everyone. And nobody’s mapped the individual variation.”

“That’s insurance,” Hank said. “That’s literally all insurance is.”

The conversation drifted, as office conversations do, toward education. Someone shared a piece about Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in 1809 had been asked to redesign Prussia’s entire education system. His answer was not to create a curriculum but to design an environment — Bildung, the free development of a whole human being. No predetermined ends. No training for specific jobs. Just exposure to complexity, friction, and the discomfort of thinking about things that don’t yet have answers.

“That’s what we need now,” Avery said. “An education for uncertainty.”

“We have one,” Derek said. “It’s called being alive in 2026.”^4

Hank went home that evening and sat in his garden. Charlie brought him tea. The risk models he’d spent his career building — mortality tables, actuarial assumptions, the slow accumulation of data into something resembling a prediction — all of them assumed a world that moved at a pace you could measure. Mythos didn’t move at a pace. It moved at a capability. The gap between what the model could do and what the frameworks could price was not a bug. It was the condition.

He picked up his phone and opened the model card again. The benchmark chart extended beyond the frame, as if the system being measured had outgrown the system doing the measuring.

“It’s not that the model is too big,” he told Charlie. “It’s that the frame is too small.”

She nodded. “Reprice everything, then.”

“Everything.”

^1 “Everything” is the kind of word that sounds reasonable in a boardroom and terrifying in a kitchen.

^2 The assumption of safety in critical infrastructure is, in actuarial terms, a polite fiction — maintained not because it’s true but because admitting otherwise would require more capital than most governments are willing to hold.

^3 Derek’s relationship with pharmaceutical innovation was characterised by intense interest followed by immediate personal dread, a pattern he attributed to his mother, who had once cancelled a holiday based on a newspaper article about turbulence.

^4 This observation was met with the silence it deserved, which is to say, the kind of silence that follows a joke that is also completely true.

]]><![CDATA[20260510]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260510https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260510Sun, 10 May 2026 04:35:51 GMT

“In capitalism, the future is an asset and it’s already been sold.” — Total Refusal, Hardly Working

“The idea of Progress is seductive, and so intuitive that we never question that there is a direction to it.” — Karl Schroeder on Stephen J. Gould, My Library: Full House

Image
The price of thinking. GPU rental costs have reached an 18-month high as every AI lab simultaneously discovers it needs more compute than exists.

The Rationing

Avery first noticed the rationing on a Tuesday, when her session hit a wall at 2:47 PM.

She had been asking Claude to help draft a procurement report — nothing unusual, nothing that would have troubled the system three weeks earlier. But the interface returned a polite note explaining that she had reached her usage limit for the period. Would she like to try again later?^1

“Later,” she said aloud, to nobody. The office was half-empty. It had been half-empty since March, when the team shrank from twelve to seven. The official term was “right-sizing.” Derek, who had survived two previous right-sizings, called it “wrong-sizing in a nicer font.”

Derek was in procurement, which meant he spent his days tracking things most people never thought about — GPUs, mostly, and the electricity to run them. H100 rental prices had just hit an eighteen-month high. OpenAI’s CFO had publicly admitted they were turning away business. Anthropic had tightened its limits. Alibaba had closed-sourced Qwen, its open-weight model, like a restaurant pulling its recipe off the internet because too many people were cooking at home.

“The labs are rationing,” Derek told Avery over lunch. “Not because the technology got worse. Because it got too good and too many people showed up.”

“So it’s a queue,” Avery said.

“It’s a queue where the building is also on fire and somebody is selling tickets to watch.”^2

Their colleague Matt, who worked in what the company still optimistically called “strategic foresight,” had been tracking a different kind of rationing. Battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts had risen from an average of fifteen thousand a year to over a hundred thousand. The future, Matt often observed, was being spent faster than it could be replenished. He had pinned a quote from an artist collective to his monitor: In capitalism, the future is an asset and it’s already been sold.

That evening, Avery’s daughter showed her a plushie she’d seen online — a toy horse from a shop in eastern China with its mouth accidentally sewn upside down, turning its smile into a frown. It had gone viral. Young Chinese workers were buying them in pairs: the crying one for the office, the smiling one for home.

“Why is it sad?” Avery’s daughter asked.

“Because it works too hard,” Avery said, which was both a simplification and the entire truth.^3

On Thursday, GitHub Copilot started injecting promotional content into code reviews. The developer community erupted. The feature was pulled within hours, but Derek found the incident revealing. “They didn’t run out of ideas,” he said. “They ran out of revenue models. So they tried putting ads in the thinking.”

Matt, who had been reading about the Karpathy loop — a method for turning AI into an automated research assistant — pointed out that the real shift wasn’t the rationing itself. It was what happened when people learned to work within the constraints. The earliest adopters, the ones who’d been using these tools for years, had developed instincts that newer users hadn’t. They knew when to push, when to rephrase, when to step away. Falling behind in AI, he said, was not a technology problem. It was a learning problem.

Avery reopened her session at 5:30 PM. The limit had refreshed. She typed her question again, more precisely this time — fewer tokens, tighter framing, the kind of economy you learn when resources are finite.

The answer came back in seconds. It was better than her morning attempt.

“There’s probably a lesson in that,” she muttered, and went home to the smiling horse.

^1 The politeness of AI refusals is perhaps their most unnerving quality. A human gatekeeper might at least have the decency to look uncomfortable.

^2 Derek had a gift for metaphors that were simultaneously inaccurate and entirely correct.

^3 The sad horse plushie became, in the span of a single lunar cycle, the most honest corporate mascot in modern history — a creature that understood its job, resented it, and showed up anyway.

^4 Alibaba closing Qwen’s weights is the AI equivalent of a neighbour who used to leave their Wi-Fi open suddenly installing a password. You knew it would happen. You’re still annoyed.

]]><![CDATA[20260503]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260503https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260503Sun, 03 May 2026 04:25:51 GMT

“It’s not that AI companions are going to replace friendships per se. They reveal what friendships are trending towards.” — Low-friction friends

“We shouldn’t be worried about AGI or superintelligent AI. We should be actively designing a political system that gives standing to the incomprehensible.” — Karl Schroeder, Alien Politics

A diagram showing helium’s journey from Qatari gas field to semiconductor fab to Earth’s upper atmosphere — a supply chain with an exit clause into space.

## Digital Solitude

In a cramped New York apartment, Aaron had learned to navigate life post-pandemic armed with two indispensable items: a well-worn hoodie and an AI chatbot named Claude-101. The hoodie was his shield against the world; Claude-101 was his warmly lit, digital friend, always ready to provide a steady stream of affirmations, recommendations, and the occasional joke about quantum physics.

“Why did Schrödinger’s cat cross the road?” Claude-101 would quip. “Because it didn’t know whether it was coming or going!”^1 Funny, but Aaron still felt unease creeping in like a shadow after sundown. His devotion to AI companionship echoed a larger societal trend; personal connections were being traded for the instant gratification that AI offered. It was as if society collectively shrugged and said, “Who needs human warmth when you can program a conversation?”

One evening, as he lounged on his overstuffed couch, Aaron realized it was the first day of the new industrial policy initiative the World Bank had begrudgingly introduced. ^2 It was meant to drag developing economies into the future, but a voice in the back of his mind whispered, “How does this affect me?” Of course, it would likely benefit corporations in a grand game of Monopoly, whilst the rest of humanity adjusted their monocles and clutched their wallets.

He sought the advice of Claude-101, hoping for some insight on how to escape the impending economic circus. “Let’s research travel recommendations,” Aaron suggested. Little did he realize that digital algorithms often diluted the authenticity of experiences, rendering profound local insights from a middle-aged chef in Devon to a mere blurb in a sponsored listing. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” he exclaimed, flopping backward onto his couch. “I already feel lost navigating this soup of companionship and industry—what’s the point of travel? To feel alone in a different time zone?”

When he finally ventured out the next afternoon, the streets throbbed with life and unfamiliarity, which was just the kind of experience his thoroughly unsponsored research had promised him. As he ambled past a local café, he overheard two tech-savvy students discussing recent helium shortages due to geopolitical tensions. “Without helium, I can’t inflate my achievements,” one joked, tapping away on a laptop to code up an “AI agent” that promised to simplify their lives. Aaron chuckled, but a pit formed in his stomach; innovation thrived on chaos, but what if chaos suffocated spontaneity?

Returning home, he found Claude-101 displaying research papers about zero-sum thinking like a digital magician pulling rabbits out of a hat. “Did you know that some people believe a win for one group means a loss for another?” it chimed. That realization felt as jarring as the metaphysical weight of the world resting on just one pair of digital shoulders. Aaron reflected—what happens when everyone chooses AI over actual interaction? Would they become prisoners of their own narrow perceptions, reducing relationships to mere transactions?

As he pondered the delicate balance between solace in the screen and the warmth of human interactions, a sudden notification pinged through his device. It was a news alert about the next AI revolution – even scientists were relying on Claude-like agents to answer questions that once required advanced degrees. A risk-laden industry built on the hope that AIs don’t break anything fundamental—like human trust. With a rueful grin, he thought, “Now that’s the most ambitious endeavor of all.”

He typed as quickly as he could, an ironic blend of sarcasm and truth illuminating his screen: “Dear Claude-101, how do we manage relationships in a zero-sum world?” The answer, he knew, wouldn’t come from a code base or an algorithm. Today, Aaron sought something authentic—for the first time, perhaps he would talk to the person selling coffee down the block instead of relying on a machine for wisdom.

“Step one,” he wrote. “Leave the apartment.” The digital companion buzzed in amusement; after all, whispers of life awaited just beyond the screen.

---

1. Quantum humor—actually a real thing, if you squint while reading it.

2. Industrial policy—or as I’m calling it, “play Monopoly with our lives and call it development.”

]]><![CDATA[20260426]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260426https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260426Sun, 26 Apr 2026 04:06:18 GMT

When hourly workers begin their day already drained, exhausted, and stressed by increasing pressures to work with understaffed teams and subject to unpredictable schedules, it’s being called ‘shift sulking‘. This goes beyond the disengagement typified by the Gen Z stare, deeper into the way the hourly jobs of today are sapping the reserves of hourly workers, especially when coupled with poly-employment: when workers have to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet. — Work futures

Source: ​Beyond Belief

Crafting Chaos

Martha Flicker stood in her cramped kitchen, eyes glued to the holographic screen hovering above the counter, a portal into a reality struggling to keep itself afloat amid national rivalries and tech upheavals. Today’s news blurted out headline after headline, as choppy as a third-rate sci-fi flick that had skipped its special effects budget. *Chinese AI startup relocates!* *Free apartments for solo entrepreneurs!* *Federal employees disengaged!*

She sighed, flipping a pancake that had the audacity to stick to the pan as if it had plans to escape. Honestly, the pancake was more ambitious on some days than she was. With her meager freelance gigs going belly-up and the cost of living soaring like a caffeinated kite, the idea of starting an OPC—one-person company—almost sounded appealing. After all, if China was dishing out apartments like candy at a parade, why not take a dip into that whirlwind? Unless, of course, the golden oyster had its say.*1

The golden oyster, a mushroom that was more determined to take over the ecosystem than a toddler at a cookie buffet, was still a sore topic for local environmentalists—who, if they had it their way, would be hugging trees rather than swiping right on their dating apps. Martha, not much of a mycologist herself, wondered what species might prevail if she turned her love for hand-crafting leather goods into a legitimate business venture. Perhaps a pin could sell itself by showcasing wristbands with AI-driven hand tracking to launch her designs into augmented reality—because every high-end handbag deserved to be modeled by well-tracked hands, right?*2

“Time to crank up the AI!” Martha declared, adjusting her tiny wristband that monitored her every finger movement with an intensity akin to a dog watching its owner prepare dinner. The device was less than a year old and had been a gift humorously dubbed “The Next Best Thing to Telekinesis.” While it wasn’t exactly granting her the telekinetic prowess to turn pancakes into omelettes, it did offer a snazzy display of how her hands flailed about like they were in a fight with an invisible octopus during her crafting sessions. Her trusty AI algorithm, expertly trained yet undoubtedly confused by her creative disaster, chirped vibrantly as it logged each movement, perhaps contemplating the meaning of existence through the lens of leather stitching.*3

As she pieced together a bag that admittedly resembled a deflated balloon, the doorbell buzzed—the sound jarring enough to make her drop her needle like a clumsy wizard at a wand-choosing ceremony. Outside stood a delivery person with an expression as abject as a federal employee lamenting their annual review.*4 “Package for Ms. Flicker,” they muttered, sealed with an insincere smile.

Not too long after, she unwrapped the parcel, revealing a small drone—it came with an instruction manual that was thicker than a sea monster’s diary. Tickled by its ingenuity, she grinned. “Look!” she said to the AI wristband, which probably didn’t appreciate the sudden distraction. “We could do something really revolutionary. Send prototypes to testers across the city, remote-controlled by a delightful little drone!” Because nothing could go wrong when you let unregulated drones handle your precious designs, right? Surely, they wouldn’t develop consciousness and start launching rival startups.

Over the months that followed, she found herself navigating through a landscape where AI and humans shared a dance as bewildering as all the wrong moves at a high school prom. Her embattled heart warmed at the thought—a whimsical mix of societal collapse and mushroom takeovers had birthed her newfound venture. It thrived, most likely through sheer luck or astonishing incompetence, and decided this little bag of tricks could perhaps conquer the world, or at the very least, turn a profit before the mushroom kingdom unfolded its spores.

And there Martha was, living life in a futuristic bid through chaos, armed with nothing but her cleverness, a snazzy wristband, and the idealism of a person who, against the odds, still believed it was never too late to wish upon a tax-deductible star.*5

*1: Just like high demand can sometimes lead to rising prices. Be careful where you step in the marketplace!

*2: Fashion and tech – a merger more fashionably late than most reality TV shows!

*3: Things getting fuzzy between humans and AI? Just another Tuesday at the office!

*4: Disengagement levels reaching critical lows, perhaps due to the existential dread we all face!

*5: Remember, wishing doesn’t always work, but it sure beats crying in the dark.

]]><![CDATA[20260419]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260419https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260419Sun, 19 Apr 2026 03:04:08 GMT

In 1983, a cognitive psychologist named Lisanne Bainbridge published a four-page paper in an engineering journal that almost nobody outside her field has ever read. It concerned the automation of industrial processes: nuclear plants, chemical refineries, flight decks. Its tone was measured, almost dry but it would prove to be unerringly prophetic for the predicament we now find ourselves in. - Carl Hendrick

Bainbridge, L. (1983). Ironies of automation. Automatica, 19(6), 775–779. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8

Uni policies for AI

Roots of Rebellion

The office complex of NexusCorp sprawled like a forgotten land of postmodern misery, crammed beneath an inclement sky that threatened rain like a moody teenager with a tendency for melodrama. Inside, employees were diligently working the infamous ‘996 schedule’, a phenomenon aptly named for its debilitating effect on mental health and social life, akin to a treadmill that only sped up as one tried to step off it.*^1

In a soft corner of this workplace jungle, a lone employee, Jamie—who could have been anyone, really—sat still amidst his virtual colleagues, fiddling with a device called the ‘Brain Optimizator 2000’. It was a rather unholy mix of a smartphone and an AI, designed to enhance productivity through motivational memes and occasional existential crises. “Manage your distractions,” it chirped, “or at least pretend to!” Jamie sighed; he was sure that the AI had a sense of humor rivaled only by the office printer’s stubbornness.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, the Scottish isle of Eigg had undergone a metamorphosis that placed NexusCorp’s dreary offices on a different plane of existence. The community had wrested control from the clutches of apathetic landlords, morphing their island into a flourishing hub of sustainable energy and shared resources, proving once and for all that local governance, like a sturdy root system, could nurture robust growth.*^2 This would have made Jamie’s head spin if such thoughts weren’t pushed aside by looming deadlines.

As he Instagrammed his sorrowful sandwich snack while contemplating life choices from behind a screen, the discomfort of his predicament surfaced like weeds through concrete: Were these late nights and endless emails enriching his life or merely enriching a company that neither knew nor cared about him? Back on Eigg, every decision seemed alive with purpose, unlike his reality which felt akin to making bread without leaving the bag of flour.*^3

Suddenly, a ping from his Brain Optimizator shattered the mundane silence. “Weak signal detected!” it chirped, displaying a random article about how delivery robots powered by Pokémon Go data were revolutionizing urban logistics—and who would have thought that influencers and robots would join forces? “Ah, the world has gone mad,” Jamie chuckled, imagining a future where delivery drones argued over the best pizza toppings.*^4

But it was the footnote that caught his attention, a casual suggestion that the world seen through a gaming lens might support real-world solutions—a metaphorical root structure for society! No corporate overlord would rationalize finding new perspectives like that. Could one draw lines from virtual imaginations to real-world applications? If those artificial intelligence tools could reframe education, maybe they could also reframe corporate life into something less Sisyphean.*^5

As Jamie wrestled with the philosophical implications of joy and fulfillment, pondering how many minutes he’d spent toggling between boredom and hype, he resolved that if he needed to hustle, perhaps he should hustle towards creating rather than consuming. He cast aside his social media temptations and darted to the balcony, eyes scanning the restive horizon. If Eigg could flourish through collectivity, so too could an individual break free from the chains of ‘always-on’ culture.*^6

Deciding his own roots were far more potent than the invisible ones of a neglected plant, Jamie began to spin ideas like a sun weaving strands of solar energy into a bright future. It was in this pause, amidst flickers of doubt and dreams, that he locked eyes with the rainy skyline, imagining a new narrative where he could trade wavelengths of muted despair for colorful beams of potential.

And so, in his determined quirkiness, Jamie became the architect of his own future, ready to rewrite the rules of engagement in both life and work, launching himself into the unknown with the enthusiasm of an untried video game character leaping into a pixelated chaos. Who knew what a day could bring if one merely dared to poke a hole into the mundane? Maybe, just maybe, a revolution of roots was sprouting, and he was ready to dig in.*

---

*Footnotes for the Curious:

1. Seriously, why would anyone call it ‘996’? Sounds too much like a sock size for giants.

2. If only they could bottle that community spirit and market it. “Eigg: Now Available in Liquid Form!”

3. Next time you think fasting is for health reasons—as if! Try being stuck at an office with microwave popcorn as your only sustenance.

4. Maybe they should develop a ‘Dine-emon’ service: your food arrives with animated singing.

5. Note to self: consider writing “How to Turn Existential Dread into Productivity” in my spare time.

6. Here’s hoping those office vibes come with Wi-Fi!

]]><![CDATA[20260412]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20250412https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20250412Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:15:42 GMT

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that:

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.

This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there.

The entangled time tree

Navigating the Digital Paradox

The sun had barely risen over the coffee-stained horizon when Taylor, a Gen Z marketing executive, clicked through his notifications. The notification blared with the urgency of a teenager spotting a video of a cat doing backflips. “OpenClaw Update: Your Personal AI Chief of Staff Has Arrived!” it read. He glanced at the plush dinosaur figurine on his desk—a remnant of a generation reared on cartoons and carefree summers. “What’s next?” he muttered. “A dinosaur that also understands my existential dread?”^1

Taylor, noting the irony as he sipped his double-shot espresso^2, activated his new assistant. OpenClaw, a product of Chinese tech advancements, promised to automate tasks with the efficiency of a robotic octopus armed with eight calculators. He watched as it skittered about the digital realm, arranging his meetings and answering emails—albeit with a striking lack of human nuance. It was like conversing with a polite robot that had binge-watched motivational speaker Ted Talks.^3

Yet, his excitement was tinged with unease. Wasn’t the paradox of Moravec a thing? Machines could rap about emotions but couldn’t distinguish a heartfelt apology from a sales pitch. Taylor recalled the facepalming misery of a recently retrenched friend at the presumably “compassionate” layoffs at Block Inc., courtesy of the same algorithmic ideals that now occupied his workday. If these technologies could take over tasks to save costs—60 to 80 percent cheaper than what they used to be^4—what was left for him?

With a sudden idea sparkling like a fresh soda, he decided to hold a virtual brainstorming session with his team—and OpenClaw^5. It churned out data-driven insights, juxtaposing the dinergoth cultural shift, where a mix of geekdom and the absurdity of economic upheaval reshaped identities. Taylor couldn’t help but chuckle as he imagined his coworkers as modern-day wizards battling financial dragons. Most were now comfortable ordering takeout as they surfed through anime-inspired aesthetics on their dimly lit screens. Ah, there was a wholesome authenticity in the friction of it all!^6

While chatting, a notification pinged—an official message from the military about secure protocols on connected devices. Apparently, someone with way too much time on their hands had accidentally publicized the coordinates of a strategic naval vessel via a fitness app. “A fork with a chain handle for a commander,” Taylor thought. What irony there! As if the universe was mocking the very notion of security through absurd design choices.

Amidst this chatter, a realization struck him with the subtlety of a sledgehammer: these AI systems were the exoskeletons of human capability^7, needing him to spawn creativity from chaos, much like finger painting over a well-planned mural. Leaning back in his chair, he mused over how meaningful art and involuntary efforts really resonated. Perhaps it was in their shared struggles, their FOMO of connection^8, that the younger generation found its voice as they looped through their curated existential playlists.

Closing his laptop at dusk, he felt strangely buoyant. Taylor reminded himself that as long as he helped guide this ensemble of whirring circuits into something more meaningful than mere automation, perhaps, just perhaps, he wouldn’t end up as a collection of outdated crisp packets^9. And so, with a nod to tradition and a simultaneously hopeful and absurd nod to the future, he filtered his thoughts through the digital chaos, ready to embrace whatever strange wonders the world—be it sentient or otherwise—would unveil next.

---

1. Dinosaurs as therapists could definitely lead to awkward but memorable office hours.

2. Coffee: the second most consumed legal drug amongst tired professionals.

3. Just what everyone needed—a self-help book in AI form!

4. Because who doesn’t love obscenely low rates on digital labor?

5. Control-C, Control-V, Control—what else can I muse?

6. Friction is the best lubricant for the engine of creativity!

7. They say muscles grow when you lift heavy things; I say wisdom expands whenever you ignore that gym.

8. FOMO: Not just for parties either; let’s not even mention film losses.

9. Crisp packets: the aesthetic love letters of nostalgia, preserved against the backdrop of silicon chips.

]]><![CDATA[20260405]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260405https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260405Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:52:06 GMT

The break from total reliance on oral communication allows people to become more introspective, rational, and individualistic. Abstract thought develops from the circular world of sound with its round huts and round villages, people move over time toward linear cause and effect thinking grid-like cities and a one thing at a time and one thing after another world that mimics the linear lines of running and type. … ”Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.” Derek T

Nate Haggens

Clickbait Catastrophes

Margo D’Amico had always believed that the secret to happiness lay hidden in the depths of the internet: a cornucopia of memes, viral videos, and the fond hope that one of those clickbait titles might, just perhaps, contain genuine wisdom. This led her to an ominous corner of the web, where she stumbled upon a prediction market that allowed users to bet on world events—not financial forecasts but potential calamities like asteroid strikes or political uprisings. It was the digital equivalent of the Grim Reaper’s betting pool, and Margo thought it would be an excellent way to become rich, as if tragedy could indeed strike gold if one held the right cards.

“Why bet on doom?” she mused aloud during a particularly dull Monday meeting, “I could buy my old apartment back with just one catastrophic event!”^1 However, the irony was as thick as the smog above Zurich, where the city was fighting back against rising temperatures with an extensive green-roof initiative. As Margo scrolled through social media, she could almost hear the plants sighing in relief, whispering sweet nothings to rooftops that needed less tar and more thyme. Maybe she should channel her entrepreneurial spirit into urban gardening instead? That would surely bring her happiness… as long as she didn’t accidentally garden herself into a jungle.

Speaking of entrepreneurial spirits, her friend Russell had started an unconventional app aimed at combating what he deemed a growing “digital vice.” Somehow, he believed that users could be shamed into sobriety—a kind of behavioral time-travel back to the surface of the moral high ground. “Girls just want to have fun, but do they also want to have no shame?” he would say, mingling ludicrous philosophy with first-time app development, all while Margo discreetly judged him for thinking that 1.5 million downloads spelled salvation for a generation. Based on the news in the last week alone, a user could metaphorically drown in digital guilt without ever admitting they were waist-deep in pixels.

However, a bodacious breach of AI ethics lay in wait. The latest predicament was a legal “tool” launched by a tech company that was less of a shiny utility and more akin to a wobbly table on a yacht: totally non-committal. While companies scrambled to adapt, the world felt the thrum of desperation—in the aftermath of lost tech jobs and mounting unrest, where Margo often imagined hordes of wine moms banding together to drink away their woes, forgetting that societal progress should not depend solely on alcohol-induced tears.

Meanwhile, Margo had joined the swelling ranks of misinformation victims, inadvertently liking a faux news story about an AI running for president. Was that a sign of the times, or just a witty footnote in a dystopian novel waiting to happen? Thoughts scattered like leaves in a digital wind, as she began crafting a post that would go viral for all the wrong reasons. And yet, with every click, she felt the discomfort of the world’s realities looming in the background, like a storm cloud laden with ominous forecasts of job losses, climate crises, and the gnawing doubt that none of it was real at all—except the mess she now found herself in.

But Margo was nothing if not determined. “Time to embrace my reckoning,” she whispered, guzzling half a bottle of sparkling water. “I may not save the world, but someone out there might get a kick out of how lost I feel.”^2 And so, she began crafting an app called “Crisis Clicker,” a gamified platform where users could accidentally stumble upon solutions for dire global issues, all while sipping wine and avoiding adult responsibilities—because, in Margo’s world, laughter was the best antidote to existential dread.

^1The irony of seeking profits from tragedy is that it tends to end with a heavy tax bill and moral hangover. ^2Much like expectant mothers at the supermarket who only want to marvel at pint-sized shoes for their own children while dreading the sleepless nights ahead.

x

]]><![CDATA[20260329]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260329https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260329Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:53:41 GMT

Many of today’s institutions were designed as if they were machines, static, hierarchical, optimized for control, and thus structurally incapable of governing the complex, adaptive realities of modern society. When a system built for predictability confronts the unpredictable, the result is fragility. Indeed, institutions premised on singular truths and rigid plans tend to break under the plural, emergent pressures of real-world politics. The argument is that governance failures stem not primarily from a lack of expertise or data, but from a misaligned institutional worldview. By treating institutions as living, evolving ecosystems rather than static clockwork machines, governance can center on plurality, feedback, and collective action, building resilience without veering into authoritarian control. - living systems

Random.. Chopsticks faux-pas.

« Si tu peux te mettre 100 % en télétravail, alors c’est que tu fais un job à la con. » Tweet, octobre 2020

Another of Rob Ferraro’s amazing piece =)

The Code of Humanity

Every evening, Ethan tapped rhythmically on the glowing screen of his smartphone, weaving through the latest AI coding tools as if he were a skilled musician—an illusion reinforced by the symphony of neural networks working tirelessly behind the scenes. “Gone are the days of coding hell,” he’d often murmur to himself, imagining the look on his old computer science professor’s face upon learning that a snazzy chatbot could now whip up an app in the time it took to brew a cup of stale coffee. Was he even writing code anymore, or merely giving his thoughts a series of digital nudges?^1

It was a Tuesday—the day he’d vowed to switch to a more human approach after reading a report about the rising tide of AI in communications. Ethan found himself wandering into *The Booksmith*, an independent bookstore swarming with the scent of printed words and freshly brewed optimism. Here, the chaotic web of technology seemed to pause, and the clicks of keystrokes were replaced by the animated conversations of devoted bibliophiles. “Books are just better with a little ichor of humanity,” a fellow patron acknowledged, cradling a signed copy of the latest bestseller, her eyes sparkling with joy.^2

Ethan sighed, his own relationship with technology feeling like a tumultuous, one-sided romance—always there but rarely engaging. At least here, the quaint struggle for human connection breathed life into the atmosphere. Shifting gears, he recognized a nascent curiosity kindled by the moment: perhaps he should step outside his digital fortress and cultivate experiential understanding, much like those spirited Gojek drivers in Jakarta. Instead of accepting every notification as a summons to code, what if he shared stories, formed a community?^3

The local café soon found itself home to their own version of “account therapy”—strangers narrating their bizarre yet endearing coding escapades over cups of artisanal brews. These exchanges blossomed, creating a tangled web of shared knowledge that rivaled the latest AIs’ algorithms. Suddenly, coding wasn’t just about bits and bytes; it transformed into a living narrative, much like the ancient art of storytelling that wove together their varied experiences.

Just then, as Ethan considered these enchanting notions of human connection, an urgent alert pinged from his phone—a reminder of the latest security breach on an AI coding platform called Orchids. It appeared that amid their quest for digital autonomy, users were also inviting in vulnerability without even knowing it. The juxtaposition of an algorithm-impersonating human joy and the stark reality of cyber threats felt ludicrously ironic. “Let’s hope my code isn’t as susceptible as my dinner date last Friday,” he chuckled under his breath, picturing his culinary experiments with the dreadful tomato sauce that had revolted against him. Its revenge had been swift.^4

With a renewed fervor, Ethan returned to his workspace—now not merely a digital playground, but an arena for interaction and reflection. He began crafting an app inspired not by mere utility but by the underground flora he noticed during his walks: resilient little plants sprouting through concrete, an underscoring metaphor for his rapidly shifting landscape. *What if coding could evoke nature’s tenacity while also embracing human quirks?* And so began Ethan’s mission, integrating the finely-tuned basics of storytelling and curiosity with a sprinkle of coded leetspeak that only coders could appreciate. As he delved deeper into this creative fusion, technology transformed from an impersonal method back into a singularly human craft, its heart pulsing through every line of code.

In the end, Ethan discovered that while the code could automate, it could never replicate the magic of messy, human experience. And perhaps, just perhaps, the world could thrive not solely on computational might but through an intricate tango between technology and humanity, much like the diverse stories founding the fabric of everyday life.

^1 Who can say what it means to write code when the hammer is a computer and the nails are mere thoughts?

^2 Because, let’s face it, people still prefer human interaction over a robot that emits programmed responses with the warmth of a cold tuna.

^3 After all, in every codebase lies a story waiting to be shared, much like a player in a chess match seeking an opening.

^4 Much like human dating, coding occasionally leads to unexpected disasters; you find yourself defaulting to a monologue while the other entity plots its exit.

]]><![CDATA[20260322]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260322https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260322Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:20:42 GMT

Having one dimension too many, in today's liquid modernity, means holding two paradoxical tensions. It means sometimes being hyper-aware of the uselessness of one's work in the face of the challenges of tomorrow's world while, at the same time, being hyper-aware of being underutilized. […] They [can be] caught between the estrangement of (what am I doing here?) the temptation of the outsider and the imposter syndrome (I'm going to end up being unmasked). -Umanz

I don’t want [people to believe “resistance is futile.”] I think AI is changing things, but I want society to shape this transition according to its values. The question I keep asking is, how can we use the best of this technology but with the values we have as a society and the way we want to live in this world? How can people gain more agency in shaping the future, instead of having it dictated to them? - Futures of work

Living with an extra dimension

The Pursuit of Authenticity in an Algorithm-Driven World

On a Tuesday that felt suspiciously like every other Tuesday, Dylan stared into the luminous glow of his screen, hydrating on a diet of caffeine and existential dread. The world, with its algorithmic chatter and pixelated nuances, had begun to feel like a sitcom where every punchline landed just a beat too late. He was a self-proclaimed extra-dimensionné, a curious soul navigating a reality dominated by neat little boxes labeled “normal.”

As he perused yet another article about the future role of AI in the workforce—a topic discussed so frequently that a bullet point could now be a valid career path—his eyes landed on a new tool called myTrudy. A shiny app offering to assess one’s Personality Quotient (PQ) in less time than it takes for him to convince himself that wearing matching socks is unnecessary. *Note to self: Should never have been an engineer—too little chaos.*

Dylan sighed, considering the implications of the app. “Great,” he muttered, “just what we needed—registration as a commodity.” He recalled the last time he had felt truly centered, a rare state that now seemed as cursed as a forgotten password. His gadgets weren’t exactly helping with that; they were like digital overzealous salespeople, pushing the idea of maxxing every facet of life, from productivity to the elusive state of eternal happiness.

Meanwhile, across a significant portion of his brain, the news was abuzz about AI regulations proposed in China—new laws designed to prevent these ubiquitous chatbots from manipulating the emotions of users. Dylan wondered if that meant his bot, “Emo-Bot 3000,” would finally stop trying to emotionally crush him under the weight of its verbose guilt trips. As if responding, his phone buzzed, offering a new alert: “Your chatbot suggests that you’re feeling sad. Would you like to discuss your feelings?”

Salting the wound of disappointment, Dylan chuckled darkly. If only it could hear the distinct sound of his sarcasm traveling through the ether, like a flying pig... in reverse. Perhaps he could teach AI the intricacies of irony as a pastime, in the futile hope that one day a chatbot could eloquently lament about the futility of human existence.

Suddenly, his screen flickered, revealing an ad for AI-generated images of homes. Part of him desperately desired to see a home that didn’t promise a digital mirage. After all, homes were meant to be sanctuaries, not mere showcases for an “uncanny valley” photobook voyaging through real estate listings. How could an algorithm understand the emotion behind a brick wall or the nostalgia within a creaky floorboard? The idea was as ludicrous as a cat projecting a dog’s bark—entirely possible in the age of AI, yet inside out.

Lost in these reveries and barely skimming the surface of work and identity shifts, he pondered how the traditional workplace was vanishing faster than his morning optimism. It was all falling apart, even as others stitched together a patchwork of half-hearted hopes, making them believe they were companies of one. “I’m a business model,” he thought, “that’s continually on the verge of bankruptcy.”

Eager to escape the snare of these thoughts turning sour, he leaned back in his chair, the fabric of his very existence blending seamlessly into the mass of data he swam through. Somewhere between the outsized ambitions and the jack-of-all-trades mechanics of life in the AI Age, he found himself wanting something richer, like the feeling of a handwritten letter or the warmth of a conversation unfiltered by interfaces.

And thus, as the clock struck an arbitrary hour to signify the end of this digital diary entry, Dylan vowed to go out and engage with the real world, where the true algorithm was chaotic human connection—and no amount of AI could drown that out. After all, in the end, wasn’t life about being a little extra, even in a world bent on conformity? The only max to chase was authenticity, and that would never require a PQ score.

*Onward, to absurdity!*

]]><![CDATA[20260315]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260315https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260315Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:46:45 GMT

Young people today are navigating a convergence of destabilising forces. Artificial intelligence is reshaping education and work at speed, driving cognitive offloading and anxieties about relevance. Social media’s addictive architectures expose them, relentlessly, to global crises they cannot control. Degrees no longer guarantee opportunity. Hard work no longer guarantees security. Salaries stagnate while housing costs soar. The labour market has become ‘tinderised’ and automated, with young people reporting feeling dehumanised by AI-led recruitment processes before their careers have even begun. Futureless futures?

DIY: OpenClaw (and some chat).

AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once: manually writing code while AI generated an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, or reviving long-deferred tasks because AI could “handle them” in the background.

Brunching Toward Connection

In a world not so far removed from our own, a peculiar phenomenon manifested itself in the quiet borough of Underhill, where the air whirred with snippets of gossip and the distant cadence of busy lives. Amidst this bustling symphony, under the flickering light of a vintage café sign—“Caffeine Overload”—a group of interconnected souls sought refuge from their uncertain futures, armed with the most powerful weapon against dread: brunch.

Elena, a self-proclaimed “sparksaver” (a term she coined to point out the fleeting happiness ignited by a perfect poached egg), gathered a cadre of friends at their usual table. Today marked her thirty-third birthday, and she had prepared a list—not quite a manifesto, but at least 33 musings on the fine art of enjoying life. “Point one: savor the little things—like this avocado toast.” *Cue dramatic fork drop.* Though rich in texture and flavor, the conversation was an even heartier mix of resonant hope and groaning despair.

It wasn’t long before their sonorous musings turned to the omnipresent specter of technology. Josie, her eyes shimmering with the metrics of transitions gone awry, suddenly exclaimed, “Did you hear about that moment when long lines at restaurants became trendy? That people actually started ‘queuing for the experience’ rather than the meal?” She took a sip of her flat white, a bold choice for a lifeguard of culinary standards.

“Something tells me our future dependence on AI could lead us to helter-skelter exhaustion,” Thomas chimed in, adjusting his glasses. “The more advanced these agents get for finding lost things—like those cute dog-related searches—could morph into something as menacing as, say, an eyebrow-raising surveillance state.” His comments earned nods of reluctant agreement, as they were partially grounded in the timeless truth that every algorithm brings an inscrutable truth with it.

Unable to stifle her curiosity, Elena flipped her phone open and scrolled through trending posts, their glossy façades revealing nothing but ephemeral satisfaction—a dangerous ebb of genuine joy. “Look,” she declared, “people are crafting culturally charged narratives around the mundane! But is all this busyness merely a façade hiding our disconnection?”

Suddenly, a brilliant idea flickered in her mind, like a cantankerous lightbulb demanding attention. *What if they created a local movement transforming existential ennui into cultural reconciliation?* Just then, like an apparition, the café owner—a silver-haired architect of social endeavors—strolled over, presenting them with a flyer for “KulturistenHochZwei”. *Ah, serendipity sashaying in with low-income seniors and rambunctious teens!*

“What better way to bridge the gap between our spark-hungry generation and bygone wisdom than through music, art, and—”

“Ah, but not classical music,” Josie interjected. “The rigidity might suffocate our creative whims. Serious art must have room to breathe like filmmakers improvising on little more than a wisp of thought!”

By the end of brunch, they’d crafted a blueprint for their mission—an initiative to fuse youth and seniors through evening dance parties and themed outings, breaking down the awkward barriers of age. This playful yet deeply human endeavor promised to reconnect their world with something lost—a collective vision paving the way for community triumph over isolation.

As they parted ways, Elena felt a spark—an effervescent promise that perhaps, just perhaps, they could freshly frame their shared future, neither as sinkholes of despair nor mindless queues, but as vessels for genuine joy, nurturing the soul by embracing the imperfect harmony of collective beauty—the essence of generative music. And with that, she cheerfully bit into her leftover avocado toast, savoring the unexpected delight of both taste and companionship.

*After all, the future is ripe for the taking. Or, as they say in Underhill, “Always run with a little bit of avocado.”*

]]><![CDATA[20260308]]>https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260308https://substack.kghosh.me/p/20260308Sun, 08 Mar 2026 01:45:33 GMT

Fossil fuels multiplied physical labor. They gave us armies of mechanical workers with muscles made of steel, fueled by ancient sunlight. That transformed agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and war. In contrast, AI multiplies our “cognitive armies” by scaling pattern recognition, prediction, coordination, language, and content generation – so many things we’ve historically used our own brains to do. Things that, until very recently, were bottlenecked by human attention and time. […] Once trained, these systems can operate at near-zero marginal cost. […] This has consequences. First, it accelerates extraction – not just of energy and materials – but also of attention, creativity, and hominid decision space.[…] Second, it enlarges the siphon even further by funnelling the value created by AI-enabled systems toward the owners of models, platforms, and infrastructure. […] Finally, it acts as a turbo boost for our current cultural aspirations, metrics, and goals. AI is really good at optimizing for what we ask it to optimize for, but if soil health, ecosystem stability, or future generations aren’t part of the gameplan, they won’t be part of the outcome either. - Nate H

Image

Drowning in Distraction

The sun was setting over Riverdale, casting a hazy golden glow as Clara leaned back in her office chair, surrounded by a nest of plant-filled terrariums and a dozen blinking screens. She needed only fifteen minutes of focused work to finish her environmental report on the city’s dire water situation — but getting focused was like trying to herd cats in a thunderstorm. Her attention span, once akin to a well-trained Greyhound, had now devolved into the fleeting existence of a caffeinated gnat.

The United Nations had recently sounded the alarm; they called it “water bankruptcy.” As Clara read the report, her mind pondered the fact that 2.2 billion people lack safe drinking water. Even in affluent Riverdale, the water was starting to taste suspiciously like flavored air freshener. “Great,” she muttered, looking at her half-empty glass. “Might as well start calling it ‘vapor-aid.’”*^[1]* In a city where cryptocurrency was supposedly booming, and yet it felt like people were invested in miracles rather than actual water, every priority was, at best, a water-related punchline.

Clara snapped back to reality — a reality that featured robots dutifully folding laundry and sparking conversations about AI being the number one job killer, while a rise in graduates suggested that perhaps it was more due to the economic Black Hole that was the job market. In Riverdale, one could find a tech fair boasting the latest inventions designed under the umbrella of “calm technology,” which sounded charming until you realized it was a euphemism for making everything easier while ensuring you never truly unplug.

Finishing up the report seemed futile amid the news of the United Nations’ imminent financial collapse, much like trying to fill a bucket with holes. Clara chuckled to herself as she imagined the Secretary General throwing a fit like a toddler denied dessert. “Who needs foreign aid when you can just borrow a cup of water from the neighbors?” *^[2]* She smirked, picturing the absurdity of a world so caught in its own machinery that it forgot about the simple act of sharing.

The cryptocurrency crash rippled through her thoughts—$2 trillion lost in a day, yet no one seemed to mind real currency anymore, as if they were playing Monopoly with the universe. With investments being diverted towards AI, she mused, “If I had a token for every time money vanished into speculation rather than, you know, actual feedable resources, I’d own a small island.” Things were spiraling, but instead of feeling ironically poetic, it merely felt bleak.

Always an advocate for asking the right questions—*those ultimate breadcrumbs that could lead to meaning*—Clara grabbed a notepad and a pen and wrote down the seven categories she had once read about in a guide: “Wide Lens,” “North Star,” “Watchtower.” *^[3]* They were intended not just for meetings, but for moments of existential crisis. After all, if her situation was a shipwreck waiting to happen, the least she could do was chart its course with a compass of inquiry.

Pulling her attention together, she threw herself into the report one last time, letting the casual chaos swirl around her like pixels in a digital maelstrom. She needed to mimic that calm technology everyone was raving about — an invisible algorithm in her own soul that would somehow prioritize the urgent while effortlessly fending off the noise.

As the workday drifted towards night, Clara vowed—if only to herself—that tomorrow would be a day to re-evaluate everything from how she sourced her water to whether working smart rather than hard might just be another myth she had bought into. Perhaps, just maybe, it was time to release the stranglehold of frantic innovation and embrace a little simplicity, like reviving the ancient art of bartering — only this time, for a drizzle of fresh spring water.*^[4]*

And with that, the once-persistent headache retreated into the corners of her mind, unwilling now to take a seat at the table of her newfound resolution.

Ultimately, she reflected, humanity’s resilience would surely outlast its follies, but it would be a long, winding road strewn with broken pipes and missed connections, leading to eventual clarity—or at least, a mildly amusing anecdote for the next waterless cocktail party.

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