AI Article Readings

The AI Superforecasters Are Here - By Scott Alexander 03.07.2026 33dk

In this post, Scott Alexander argues that AI superforecasters have arrived: not as a distant sci-fi milestone, but as systems already competing with elite human forecasters, making money in prediction markets, and producing cheap, fast probabilistic analysis on real-world questions. He explores what happens when forecasting becomes something anyone can query on demand, why this may reshape finance, policy, and prediction markets, and whether AI forecasting could become the “opinion layer” that lets future chatbots give useful, testable judgments without simply mirroring human bias.https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/the-ai-superforecasters-are-here?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0 - By Lydia Laurenson 03.07.2026 1sa 24dk

In this post, Lydia Laurenson reconstructs the strange, intense history of Leverage Research 1.0: an Effective Altruism-adjacent organization that began with grand ambitions to understand human behaviour and improve the world, then spiralled into experimental psychology, bodywork, occult language, blurred relationships, and institutional breakdown. Drawing on extensive interviews with former members, the piece is part investigation, part oral history, and part attempt to make sense of what happens when brilliant people try to engineer the human mind without clear safeguards. * 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:01:25 - The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0* 00:10:09 - Part 1. Founding Myths* 00:32:37 - Part 2. Body and Energy* 00:46:12 - Part 3. Practical Magic* 01:01:31 - Part 4. Intention War* 01:09:31 - Part 5. How It Ended* 01:22:53 - Credits* 01:23:46 - A Note About Comment Moderationhttps://open.substack.com/pub/lydialaurenson/p/the-inside-story-of-leverage-research?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Harari vs. Henrich - By Joseph Heath 28.06.2026 31dk

Joseph Heath argues that Yuval Harari’s account of human evolution in Sapiens rests on an outdated, intelligence-first story: humans got smarter, developed language, learned to cooperate, and then built culture. Against this, Heath presents Joseph Henrich’s much stranger and more compelling inversion: culture came first, reshaping cooperation, language, and eventually intelligence itself. The result is a sharp, accessible guide to one of the most interesting live debates in the human sciences.https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/harari-vs-henrich?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages - By Ada Palmer 27.06.2026 1sa 33dk

In this post, Ada Palmer challenges the familiar story that the Black Death “caused” the Renaissance, and that the Renaissance was a simple golden age after a dark medieval past. Instead, she uses the comparison with COVID to ask what history can and cannot tell us about crisis, recovery, myth-making, and the choices societies face after catastrophe. It is a thoughtful, bracing essay about why we should want something better than a new Renaissance—and why achieving that depends on human action, not historical inevitability.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:07:56 - Part 1: Renaissance Life was Worse than the Middle Ages (super-condensed version)* 00:35:12 - Part 2: Where did the Myth Come From in the First Place? (A Renaissance Story)* 00:52:43 - Part 3: Why is the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age Retold so Much? (a post-Renaissance story)* 01:18:40 - Conclusion: We Should Aim for Something Better than the Renaissancehttps://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

What Should Be Done- By Dean W. Ball 26.06.2026 21dk

In this post, Dean W. Ball argues that America is drifting into a de facto frontier AI licensing regime without clear standards, creating both economic risk and democratic danger. He makes the case for a more stable governance model: federalized safety-framework requirements, independent technical auditors, and regulation aimed at frontier AI labs as institutions rather than at individual model releases.https://open.substack.com/pub/hyperdimensional/p/what-should-be-done?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security - By Gwern 24.06.2026 1sa 9dk

In this post, Gwern argues for “Guardian Angels”: deeply personalized LLMs designed not as generic chatbots, but as trusted extensions of a specific person’s values, style, preferences, and goals. It’s a wide-ranging essay about productivity, security, AI-mediated work, and what it might take for future AI systems to genuinely amplify individuals rather than merely replace or manipulate them.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:06:27 - Chatbot Incentives Are Misaligned* 00:10:03 - Chatbot Problems* 00:10:44 - Mode-Collapse* 00:13:09 - Laziness* 00:13:52 - Brittle Because Fast* 00:16:41 - Too Helpful* 00:18:14 - Amnesiac* 00:20:03 - Chatbot Fixes* 00:20:07 - Cooperative RL* 00:22:47 - Continual Learning* 00:22:50 - Catastrophic Forgetting* 00:23:48 - Generalizing* 00:26:32 - Creative Writing* 00:30:03 - Over-Parameterizing* 00:30:30 - Extremely Large LMs* 00:30:57 - Active Learning* 00:33:14 - Preference Learning* 00:36:10 - Brain Imitation Learning* 00:37:05 - Personality Emulation* 00:39:01 - Guardian Angels* 00:40:48 - Principles* 00:42:07 - Anti-Principles* 00:47:06 - UX* 00:48:23 - Use-Cases: Politics & Politics* 00:51:17 - Hardware* 00:52:57 - Cost* 00:55:11 - Organization* 00:56:18 - Startup Business Model* 00:57:43 - Competition* 01:00:20 - Initial Steps* 01:01:35 - GBT* 01:04:18 - For Writing* 01:06:44 - Data Augmentationhttps://gwern.net/guardian-angel Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI sucks. Hating it is not enough - By Alice I. Cecile 24.06.2026 50dk

In this post, Alice I. Cecile argues that hating AI is understandable but insufficient: the harms are real, the technology works well enough to matter, and neither boycotts nor bans are likely to make it disappear. Instead, she makes a case for “bitter hope”: targeted regulation, decentralised access, harm reduction, and a politics aimed at redistributing the gains rather than pretending the machine can simply be uninvented. * 00:00 - Introduction* 04:35 - AI sucks. * 06:47 - Boycotts, data centers and NFTs. * 11:09 - Unfortunately AI does work. * 17:05 - Hating AI that works. * 25:15 - A budding Butlerian Jihad. * 27:44 - The limits of boycotts. * 32:28 - Regulation will save us! * 34:36 - Regulation will not save us? * 38:45 - A future worth fighting for. * 42:13 - Regulation that works. * 45:04 - Decentralization that matters. * 48:15 - A future I believe in. https://shaping.systems/blog/ai-sucks-hating-it-is-not-enough/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info? - By Scott Alexander 23.06.2026 26dk

In this post Scott Alexander investigates whether whole-body screening is really as irrational as many doctors say, walking through the rough cost-benefit maths behind false positives, missed cancers, anxiety, follow-up tests, and the value of early detection. He ends up in a characteristically uncomfortable middle ground: the standard medical caution may be justified, but the case against screening is less obvious than the slogans on either side suggest.https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Colder Wars, By Gwern 19.06.2026 29dk

In this post, Gwern argues that realistic interstellar warfare would be less like romantic space-navy fiction and more like an even colder, more unstable version of nuclear first-strike logic. Starting from Ender’s Game and Cold War doctrine, he suggests that vast distances, three-dimensional attack routes, asteroid-scale weapons, and weak attribution could make space conflict terrifyingly offense-dominant, with mutually assured destruction harder to sustain than on Earth.* 00:00 - Introduction* 00:23 - First-Strike* 01:25 - Why Strike First?* 04:39 - Fun Space Warfare* 07:44 - Grim Space Warfare* 13:05 - Easy Warfare* 19:55 - Defense* 20:55 - Counter-Point: Nowhere to Hide* 23:50 - Nuclear & Space First-Strikes* 25:58 - Second-Strike* 26:55 - Accountability* 28:05 - Deceiving MAD* 28:50 - Codahttps://gwern.net/colder-war Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Space Warfare Seems Mostly Defense Dominant - By Beren Millidge 19.06.2026 44dk

In this post, Beren Millidge argues that intergalactic warfare between mature Kardashev Type Three civilizations would probably be strongly defense-dominant. Although galaxy-scale attackers could use devastating beam weapons, relativistic kill vehicles, and self-replicating invasion probes, the sheer distances involved create enormous targeting delays, warning times, and energy costs. A sufficiently paranoid defender could survive by spreading out, staying mobile, building redundant infrastructure, and using vast sensor and laser networks, making conquest ruinously expensive and usually irrational. https://www.beren.io/2025-11-22-Space-Warfare-Seems-Mostly-Defense-Dominant Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Waiting For The Miracle 18.06.2026 1sa 19dk

In this post, Scott Alexander investigates the “sun miracles” associated with Fatima and Medjugorje, travelling to Bosnia in search of firsthand evidence and ending up with something stranger than either simple faith or simple debunking. Part travelogue, part epistemic self-experiment, and part perceptual psychology essay, it follows his attempt to explain how crowds of people can sincerely report seeing the sun spin, pulse, and change colour, and why the answer may lie less in fraud or mass hallucination than in the unsettling quirks of human vision. https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/waiting-for-the-miracle?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

The Capital Stack that Built the City - Part 1 - By Gevorg Yeghikyan 17.06.2026 1sa 17dk

In this article Gevorg Yeghikyan explores why some Western cities became worlds of apartment blocks while others became landscapes of row houses. Using Paris and London as the central contrast, he moves beyond familiar explanations about walls, density, culture, and zoning to build a deeper political-economic account of urban form: one shaped by inheritance law, land ownership, building codes, finance, developer scale, and tenure. The result is an ambitious framework for understanding not just nineteenth-century Paris, Berlin, London, and Madrid, but the recurring patterns behind how cities are still built today.https://open.substack.com/pub/arsurbis/p/the-capital-stack-that-built-the?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

The Keeper's Dharma - By Max Harms 13.06.2026 42dk

In this short story, Max Harms tells the strange, funny, and quietly moving tale of Pemberton, an elderly butler who has spent fifty years keeping his dead master legally “alive” so that a fortune can continue flowing to a village in India. When Krishna arrives from the Office of the Preserver to audit the household’s dharmic account, Pemberton’s elaborate machinery of forgery, puppetry, and moral compromise finally comes due. What follows is a sharp, humane fable about duty, fraud, devotion, and the terrible difficulty of doing good by wrongful means.https://open.substack.com/pub/raelifin/p/the-keepers-dharma?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

My AI Opinions - By Scott Alexander 11.06.2026 41dk

In this post, Scott Alexander lays out his current views on AI timelines, safety, geopolitics, and possible futures, offering probabilistic forecasts for AGI, superintelligence, diffusion, doom risk, AI pauses, and post-scarcity outcomes. He presents himself as worried but not maximally pessimistic: expecting transformative AI within decades, seeing serious alignment and misuse risks, but also leaving substantial room for successful safety work, international coordination, and even utopian possibilities.* 00:00 - Introduction* 00:17 - Timelines* 13:13 - Safety* 25:59 - Geopolitics* 33:15 - Other Outcomes Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Policy on the AI Exponential - By Dario Amodei 11.06.2026 37dk

In this post, Dario Amadei argues that AI’s exponential progress is now moving far faster than political institutions can comfortably respond, creating an urgent need for serious policy action. He sets out five areas where governments need to rethink their approach: frontier-model safety regulation, job displacement and macroeconomic policy, accelerating beneficial scientific uses of AI, protecting civil liberties from AI-enabled state or corporate power, and securing democratic leadership in the global AI race.* 00:00 - Introduction* 05:34 - One. Regulation and public safety* 11:41 - Two. Macroeconomics and tax policy* 19:08 - Three. Accelerating AI’s positive impact* 24:01 - Four. The state and civil liberties* 29:24 - Five. Securing leadership by democracies* 34:54 - A window of opportunityhttps://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

How LLMs Actually Work - By 0xkato 10.06.2026 41dk

In this post, 0xkato explains how modern transformer-based LLMs work, walking through the core machinery that turns text into token IDs, embeds them as vectors, tracks position, uses attention and feed-forward networks to process meaning, and then predicts the next token in a loop. The piece is pitched as an accessible, low-math introduction, showing how shared architecture, trained weights, model configuration, and post-training together shape systems like GPT, Claude, Gemini, and LLaMA.* 00:00 - Introduction* 02:40 - Tokenization* 05:45 - Embeddings* 08:36 - Positional encoding* 13:02 - Attention* 19:10 - Multi-head attention* 23:39 - Feed-forward network* 29:03 - Residual stream and layer normalization* 33:41 - Next-token prediction* 37:26 - Architecture vs trained weights* 39:50 - Where this is goinghttps://www.0xkato.xyz/how-llms-actually-work/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

When AI builds itself - By Anthropic 05.06.2026 36dk

In this article, Anthropic argues that AI systems are already playing a growing role in building and improving AI, speeding up coding, experimentation, and research workflows inside the company while raising the possibility—though not the certainty—of future “recursive self-improvement,” where AI could help design its own successors. The piece presents this as both a major opportunity for science, healthcare, and productivity, and a serious governance challenge, because the more AI development becomes automated, the more important oversight, verification, and coordination between labs and governments will become.https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

REVIEW: Anabasis, by Xenophon - By John Psmith 01.06.2026 49dk

In this article, John Psmith reviews Xenophon’s Anabasis as both a gripping ancient adventure story and a meditation on leadership under impossible pressure, using the retreat of the Ten Thousand to explore what it means to become an “operator”: someone who takes responsibility when institutions fail, keeps a fractious group alive, and cannot simply walk away once others depend on him.https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-anabasis-by-xenophon?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Book Review: Why Honor Matters - By ryan_b 31.05.2026 24dk

In this post, ryan_b reviews Tamler Sommers’ Why Honor Matters, exploring the case for honor as a local, social, psychologically realistic ethical framework rather than an abstract universal theory. The review walks through honor’s links to courage, hospitality, shame, solidarity, violence, revenge, and community, while keeping sight of its darker associations and the costs of trying to do without it entirely.* 00:00 - Introduction* 01:14 - One* 03:52 - Two* 07:42 - Three* 11:38 - Four* 16:18 - Five* 20:34 - Six* 23:34 - Conclusionhttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LgbuyRpXxbMhiCDq9/book-review-why-honor-matters Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Til death or the Singularity - By Ajeya Cotra 31.05.2026 6dk

In this post, Ajeya Cotra expands on her claim that near-term AI timelines could make modern marriage “shorter” than we usually imagine, arguing that the Singularity could either cut lives off through catastrophic risk or transform them so radically that ordinary lifelong vows may no longer fit the world people find themselves in. The essay is less a rejection of marriage than a reframing of commitment under extreme uncertainty: even if “til death” might really mean “til death or the Singularity,” a finite marriage can still be profound, stabilising, and worth choosing.https://open.substack.com/pub/acotra/p/til-death-or-the-singularity?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe