20260712
#221
”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
Tech: AI has arrived in wildlife video feeds: slop animals. Cory Doctorow: build the post-American internet in Canada. All is recorded now, inc with smart glasses. Passports online. Drone swarms.
AI: AI-native startups run 25% smaller. Generalist frontier models now outperform specialist medical AI. Fei-Fei Li on a functional taxonomy of world models. LLM councils suppress idiosyncratic ideas.
AI strat: AI is crushing valuations of pre-ChatGPT startups. Momfluencers are pitching AI as a better co-parent than men. GenAI now drives 2% of traffic to Walmart and Target.
Society: 71% of Americans oppose local data centers. A worker in North Carolina successfully claimed a religious exemption from using AI at work as a Unitarian Universalist. Aidan Walker coins “cuck internet theory”.
Security: The European Commission publishes the Code of Practice for labelling AI-generated content. 60-strong Scientific Panel to advise on systemic risks from GPAI models.
Geopolitics: Ireland’s EU presidency (from July) plans to roll back digital regulation.
Foresight: What remains scarce after AGI? Oliver Burkeman on temporal chauvinism.
Art: Requiem for the DVD menu — a disappearing threshold (Dirt).
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.