Techgnosis

By now you have read enough about the latest AI essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

You have probably had enough Odyssey talk by now, but here’s another take, now as cold as a fish.

I started the Expanding Mind podcast in 2010 as an act of sublimation.

The philosopher-nerd Nick Bostrom defined the term “existential risk” in a paper in 2002.

Dear people who at least occasionally peruse the Burning Shore Substack newsletter: I try to get these things out at least once a month, and I have been delinquent of late.

Miscellany You may enjoy the following: Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking — A bleak and funny Harper’s essay by the sometimes amazing Sam Kriss focuses on Roy Lee, CEO of the odious AI cheat-tech startup Cluely.

I am confused and demoralized and unnerved right now so I kind of want to hide under a rock, but I am pretty sure that the heavy vibes radiate all the way down to the mantle.

This has been my third time through Moby Dick, a novel I first read in my late teens, and years later in the apocalyptic fall after 9/11.

One thing that the Christmas season really hits home is that, even if you are living on the atheist edge of what many experience as a secular, postmodern, polarized culture, there is no escaping Jesus.

2025 is the year they came for empathy.

Come all you faithless, you metalheads and cultural Marxists, you climate scientists and abortion docs, you Buddhists and Muslims and devotees of many-armed goddesses, and of course you Jews too, can’t forget the OGs, the queers and pinkos right alongside…