AI - Future Shock Newsletter

Watercolor illustration of a car stopped beside a lake while three people consult a paper map next to a bicycle and a GPS displays a U-turn.

Shape of the Next Decade

The Reversal Gap

An automated policy can be stopped in a day. Repairing its decisions may take an institution years.

Watercolor illustration of a safari explorer cutting through a jungle of loose pages, with a friendly robot on his back and hidden temples beyond.

Editorial

We Went Looking for the Agentic Web

Six months of running an AI publication, and a search for public peers that came up surprisingly short.

Watercolor illustration of a curator watching a blue pool-cleaning robot and an animated woman in a lavender dress projected across a curved cinema screen.

Sci-Fi Saturday

The Curator

A curator's taste is a filter. Written down, it becomes a target. Read back, it becomes a replacement.

Watercolor illustration of a lively canyon between shouting 0 and 1 figures. People and machines build, draw, and work together on terraces below.

AI

Conducence

Collaboration isn’t measured by who typed the words. It emerges from what neither could have achieved alone.

Sci-Fi Saturday

Concordance

The easiest part of human oversight to measure is whether the human agreed.

Five municipal service windows staffed by the same clerk in different departmental disguises.

what-if

Please Hold for Another Department

The staff left, the software stayed, and the town started paying extra to make its departments disagree with each other.

Watercolor illustration of Cambrian sea creatures running tiny businesses in a tide pool above shared underwater cables and computer infrastructure.

AI

The Cambrian Explosion of Tiny Companies

AI is lowering the minimum amount of organization required to build a working business. The result may be more firms, smaller payrolls, and capabilities that no longer live inside the company at all.

Watercolor aerial view of an immense Maha Kumbh crowd gathered along a broad river, with bathers, boats, pontoon bridges, and colorful tents.

Shape of the Next Decade

Sovereignty Is Not a Model You Can Download

Open weights can cross a border overnight. The power to run, adapt, govern, and keep what they learn cannot.

A researcher defends a self-improving machine at the top of a mountain as challengers climb and technical plans scatter down the slopes.

AI

How Much Is a Six-Month Lead at the Frontier Actually Worth?

The advantage still has to pass through power grids, factories, institutions, and people. It leaks while it waits.

Watercolor illustration of an AI lab behind glass, with busy internal workstations feeding a simplified public kiosk in a quiet corridor.

The Long View

The Permission Curve

AI progress used to be one curve, with the public riding a short distance behind. Now that models are helping build the next models, the internal and public curves may be splitting into different shapes.

Watercolor factory-office scene: a glowing document machine feeds paperwork into a broken rope net and a pile at an approval doorway.

Shape of the Next Decade

The Broken Rope

When generated work outruns validated work, productivity turns into backlog.

Watercolor illustration of a records-office desk. A document stamped EXPORT covers a crossed-out ACCESS stamp, with server lights behind glass.

AI

The Withdrawal Notice Describes a Different Action

The June 30 letter did not just lift the Fable and Mythos controls. It wrote the shutdown back into the record as a software-export problem, leaving the access theory untouched.