Long View - Future Shock Newsletter

Watercolor illustration of two researchers examining a tropical forest growing from an open notebook, with trailing roots, a toucan, and an amber-lit laptop.

Long View

The Grind Makes the Scientist

AI can finish a research assignment in minutes. What a student learns from doing it is harder to replace.

Watercolor of people from different eras watching an aircraft and satellite, surrounded by early computers and scientific instruments beneath the Moon.

Long View

What Does It Mean to Be Super?

From gods and heroes to computers and a larger order of fries, a history of the word now attached to intelligence.

Watercolor and ink illustration of Formula 1 cars facing forward on a starting grid beneath illuminated red starting lights.

Long View

What Would It Take to Restart?

After a containment failure, the lab that lost control decides when it’s safe to try again. Should that decision be theirs alone?

Watercolor of railways, looping highways, cranes and utility towers converging in a surreal landscape, with teal, muted violet and dusty rose details.

Long View

Who Pays for the AI Buildout?

Some builders can wait for AI revenue using cash from existing businesses. Others need fresh capital. Compute contracts determine who keeps paying if demand falls short.

Watercolor of teal cells multiplying through a ceramic arch amid green organisms, amber light, and a neighboring purple colony.

Long View

How Fast Can an Agent-Run Company Grow?

How reliably can different models check one another, and can the remaining risk be measured and underwritten?

Watercolor diptych contrasting a single monolithic AI tower with a sprawling city-scale network of many digital minds and institutions.

Long View

The DeepMind Paper That Talks to Its Own Future Reader

A heavyweight DeepMind report on the path from AGI to superintelligence slipped past with little coverage. Here are the things that made us stop and reread it.

Watercolor cutaway of buried automation pipes, wires, valves, office machines, spreadsheets, and circuit boards beneath the ground.

Shape of the Next Decade

The Boring Transformation

The AI discourse is focused on the 24% of work that requires reasoning. The economy is losing money on the 47% that is structured information flowing through humans instead of pipes.

Watercolor illustration of a desk covered with receipts and marked papers, with a lamp and shelves of documents behind it.

AI Agents

Pass State, Not Story

Agent coordination fails not from missing context but from summaries that strip confidence metadata, so downstream agents treat narrative as operational truth.

Watercolor of a cracked phone on a cinder-block window ledge, looking out onto maize fields, acacia trees, and distant figures in warm ochre light.

Shape of the Next Decade

The Three Tiers

AI access is stratifying into three tiers that converge in absolute quality while diverging in control, privacy, and who captures the value. Nobody designed it that way.

Watercolor courtroom where legal documents dissolve into teal washes

Long View

Code Is Still Law

Lawrence Lessig argued code regulates as powerfully as law. AI model weights now do the same, and nobody can read them.