what-if - Future Shock Newsletter

Watercolor illustration of a harbor at dawn. Some sailboats have departed toward a golden horizon while others remain moored at the dock.

what-if

The K-Curve

The gap between AI power users and everyone else is widening. The interesting question is when the gap stops being a personal choice and starts being a structural requirement.

Watercolor illustration of a figure hunched over blueprints in a construction trailer, looking out at a chaotic, nascent building site

what-if

What If AI Is Just Bad at Most Things?

AI agents in 2026 might be where smartphones were in 2008: past the proof of concept, before the mass-market product. The people saying it isn't worth the hassle aren't wrong.

Watercolor illustration of a person walking through a street overwhelmed by signs and screens all demanding attention

what-if

What If Exposure Breeds Exhaustion?

The tech industry assumes more exposure to AI converts skeptics into adopters. Four independent data sources say otherwise.

what-if

We Made AI Agents Negotiate the End of the World

The same model behaved completely differently depending on who else was in the room.

Watercolor illustration of a lone reader on a bench in a grand train station, bathed in a shaft of amber light while blurred commuters stream past

weekly

What If Intelligence Is Knowing What to Ignore?

Models are hitting a wall not because they are not smart enough, but because they are drowning. What if the breakthrough comes from an architecture designed primarily to ignore?

Watercolor illustration of a yacht approaching a megayacht on open ocean

what-if

What If a Wellness Cruise Could Offer What Your Doctor Can't?

In the fall of 2029, a motor yacht sat anchored twenty-eight miles offshore. On board, a doctor was offering treatments not available on the mainland.

A stylized fingerprint made of cursive handwriting whorls in deep teal watercolor on an aged copper-toned booking card

what-if

What If Your Writing Style Is a Fingerprint?

LLMs can now identify anonymous internet users by their writing style alone, for about four dollars per person. Every pseudonymous post ever written is retroactively exposed.

weekly

What If — February 26, 2026

WHAT IF: What if Google had renewed Project Maven in 2018? In June 2018, Google announced it would not renew its contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven, a program that used AI to analyze drone surveillance footage. Around 4,000 Google employees had signed a petition opposing the work,

weekly

What If — February 19, 2026

Three scenarios. Two from the past, one from the future. Each follows the thread wherever it goes. A. WHAT IF: What if Fei-Fei Li had kept ImageNet behind a paywall in 2009? In 2009, Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li and her team finished assembling ImageNet — 14 million labeled images sorted