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[1]
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The Absent-Minded Professor
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[2]The Absent-Minded Professor
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SubscribeSign in
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An E-bike For The Mind
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E-bikes and what they can teach us about AI
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[7]
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Josh Brake's avatar
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[8]Josh Brake
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Jun 10, 2025
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19
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[9]
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6
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2
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[10]
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Share
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||||
Thank you for being here. As always, these essays are free and publicly
|
||||
available without a paywall. If my writing is valuable to you, please share it
|
||||
with a friend or support me with a paid subscription.
|
||||
|
||||
[21][ ]
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Subscribe
|
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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[23]
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[https]
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A photo of my new ride, the OG [24]Aventon Abound. Not quite the same capacity
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as the new minivan, but close. Fitting four kiddos is easy. Probably could
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squeeze three on the back bench to make five in a pinch.
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I've always had a philosophical objection to e-bikes. It probably started a few
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years ago when I was out of the saddle, cranking my way up the hills west of
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the Rose Bowl to reach the top of the hill and a glorious overlook of the San
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Gabriel Mountains when I got passed by some older ladies calmly powering their
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way up past me, hardly breaking a sweat. On further reflection, maybe it's not
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just a philosophical objection.
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And yet, as you’ve seen in the picture above, I am now the proud owner of—you
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guessed it—a beautiful, used-but-new-to-me, cargo e-bike.
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[25]
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[https]
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The trusty, now semi-retired, kid trailer hauler with a photo of the San
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Gabriel Mountains in the background on a fine morning from 2017.
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As I've been pedaling around town over the past few days, I've been reexamining
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my beef with e-bikes. And as I've wrestled with it, I've come to a few
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conclusions that I think are relevant not just to e-bikes but—wait for it, I'm
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sure you didn't see this one coming either—our use of artificial intelligence
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too.
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Steve Jobs famously imagined the computer as [26]a bicycle for the mind. If the
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computer is a bicycle, perhaps AI is an e-bike.
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Narcissus as Narcosis
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In an early chapter of his magnum opus, [28]Understanding Media (with the
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blog-post worthy title "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis"), Marshall
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McLuhan makes the case that technological augmentation is simultaneously
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amputation. He writes:
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Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our
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physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new
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equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.
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He goes on to quote the 113th Psalm to argue that by using technologies, we are
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both formed by them and conformed to them.
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Their idols are silver and gold,
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The work of men’s hands.
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They have mouths, but they speak not;
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Eyes they have, but they see not;
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They have ears, but they hear not;
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Noses have they, but they smell not;
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They have hands, but they handle not;
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Feet have they, but they walk not;
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Neither speak they through their throat.
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They that make them shall be like unto them;
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Yea, every one that trusteth in them.
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"They that make them shall be like unto them." Indeed.
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This is the question we had better be asking much more regularly, publicly, and
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with each other: to what image is our technology conforming us? In recent
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years, there has been much conversation about the conforming power of
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algorithmically-powered social media and internet-connected devices that are
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practically attached to our hands. In so many ways, we accepted them into our
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lives with a false promise of augmentation without amputation. Only in
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retrospect are we noticing what’s been cut off.
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In the midst of it all, there is hope. We can work to reclaim those things we
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have lost. Perhaps amputation is the wrong metaphor, and it is more a
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desensitization from infrequent attention and use. But if we thought that the
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societal impact of smartphones and social media was significant, just wait till
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we see the downstream amputations on offer with the promises of artificial
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intelligence.
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As we consider the potential augmentations of AI, we need to hold them in
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tension with the concurrent amputations. E-bikes and their tradeoffs can offer
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us some wisdom.
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Today, I’d like to riff on three e-bike-inspired perspectives I’m using to
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think about my technology use.
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1. What: What is being augmented and amputated?
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2. How: How does the augmentation interact with our effort?
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3. Why: What are the values and stories motivating our choices?
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1. What: Augmentation and Amputation
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The question is not a question of whether a technology has enabling and
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disabling effects, but rather a question of what they are. Many times, this has
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to do with your perspective.
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In the case of the e-bike, the most obvious augmentation is the ease of travel
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compared to a standard bicycle. With the addition of a motor, the bike can
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propel itself with an energy source that supplements (or completely replaces)
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that of its human rider. If you look at the advertisements for any technology,
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the augmentations are clear. E-bikes are no different. What’s front and center?
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Range, speed, and power.
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But how to judge the choice depends on the alternative. If I were to trade my
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road bike for an e-bike, that would indicate a certain set of values and
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choices. However, in my case, I sold a car and got a cargo e-bike.
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The cargo bike will enable me to get around town and accomplish many of the
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things a second car would have. It doesn't solve any long-range transportation
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needs, but it will solve the majority of our need for a second car by giving me
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a more convenient and efficient way to get around town with enough space on the
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back for the kids and some groceries, too.
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Yesterday, I biked to my dentist appointment. It was only a mile away and
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certainly in reach with my road bike, but the e-bike makes it even more
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accessible without the car.
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Of course, there is always an amputating influence, even if the overall
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motivation for the e-bike was a good one. It is worth asking why not use a
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regular bicycle or even walk. Some of the benefits of bicycling, like getting
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fresh air and being able to move more slowly and intentionally, or taking time
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to pay attention to your surroundings, are even more accentuated when moving
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less efficiently.
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Whatever our choice, we should be clear about the tradeoffs.
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2. How: The Principle of Proportional Augmentation
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When we think about what a certain technology does for us, it is also important
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to consider how that technology is conforming us. The features of the
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technology matter, but often the conformational power of the technology is
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significantly influenced by how they are implemented.
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Take, for example, the implementation of the electric motor assist on an
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e-bike. When you first think of an e-bike, you may think of it essentially as a
|
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motorbike. Most e-bikes can be ridden without pedals. You can use throttle
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control to power your forward movement completely from the onboard battery and
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motor.
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But most e-bikes today are primarily designed to be driven using pedal assist.
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In this mode, sensors on the bike detect the force or speed with which you are
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pushing on the pedals and use this measurement to supplement, not totally
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replace, the power being exerted by the rider through the pedals in the
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old-fashioned way. In this mode, the assistance from the motor is proportional
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to the effort that you, as the rider, are putting in.
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Functionally, there is little difference between the throttle and the pedal
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assist. In both cases, the motor is giving you a significant boost.
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Philosophically, however, there is a big difference. In pedal assist mode, you
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are still required to exert some effort. You have some choice over how strong
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the assistance will be, but in any situation, the level of assistance remains
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directly connected to the amount of effort you put in.
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This sort of design strategy is important to consider as we think about AI,
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especially in educational contexts. If we eliminate the connection between
|
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effort and results, we are training ourselves to become reliant on our AI
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tools. Just like only using the throttle on our e-bike will deprive us of the
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health benefits of exerting ourselves and cycling, using AI in this way will
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sacrifice opportunities we have to build our cognitive and intellectual skills.
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3. Why: The Ruthless Elimination of Friction
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One last question we should be asking as we choose our technology is why we are
|
||||
choosing to use it. In many ways, these three questions cannot be disconnected
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from each other. The what, how, and why are interconnected.
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In the case of my e-bike, am I really getting it to replace my car, or will it
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just serve as an excuse to ride my road bike less? As we think about AI, is the
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thing it will accomplish for us worth doing the old-fashioned way? Why exactly
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are we choosing to outsource it? What does our choice indicate about our
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values?
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In my case, I feel pretty justified in my purchase, having towed all three kids
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around town multiple times already. My previous bike just didn’t have the space
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to fit all of them, and trying to tow a bike trailer behind a cargo bike with a
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five and almost four-year-old on the back without some assistance just isn’t a
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tenable solution.
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But enter a little electronic boost, and the bike has new life again. Last
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week, we rode to get ice cream as a family on bikes. I had a smile on my face
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for the rest of the weekend. Yesterday, we explored a new neighborhood and
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checked out a new park. All these things were enabled by the e-bike and the
|
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additional boost of power that comes with it.
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|
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[32]
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[https]
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[33]
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||||
[https]
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The Innovation Bargain 2x2. Original design by me based on [34]the idea from
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[35]Andy Crouch.
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At the end of the day, we must remember that [36]innovation is a bargain. We
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often consider what technology promises to enable for us, without considering
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what it will almost certainly disable.
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Most of the time, we fail to stop and consider the tradeoffs. Perhaps e-bikes
|
||||
may give us a metaphor to frame our thinking.
|
||||
|
||||
[47][ ]
|
||||
Subscribe
|
||||
Got a thought? Leave a comment below.
|
||||
|
||||
[49]Leave a comment
|
||||
|
||||
Reading Recommendations
|
||||
|
||||
I’ve been intrigued and encouraged by the work that The
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||||
[51]Cosmos Institute
|
||||
is doing to ask thoughtful questions about AI. Their mission to cultivate
|
||||
philosopher-builders resonates deeply with my own and the kind of impact I hope
|
||||
to have at Harvey Mudd.
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[52]Brendan McCord
|
||||
’s latest, where he uses Wilhelm von Humboldt as a frame to think about our
|
||||
future with AI, is worth a read.
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||||
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||||
[53]
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||||
[https]Cosmos Institute
|
||||
AI vs. the Self-Directed Career
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||||
Two centuries ago, as mechanization began reshaping society, German philosopher
|
||||
Wilhelm von Humboldt issued a vision and a warning…
|
||||
Read more
|
||||
4 months ago · 69 likes · 12 comments · Brendan McCord and Cosmos Institute
|
||||
[64][ ]
|
||||
Subscribe
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
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|
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The Book Nook
|
||||
|
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[67]
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[https]
|
||||
|
||||
Slowly but surely making progress on [68]The Devil and the Dark Water. Getting
|
||||
more and more interesting, page by page.
|
||||
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
The Professor Is In
|
||||
|
||||
Hard to believe we are quickly coming up on the end of four weeks of summer
|
||||
research already. It’s always amazing to see how much progress my students make
|
||||
so quickly during the summer, and great fun to get to dig into building and
|
||||
debugging optical systems with them.
|
||||
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
Leisure Line
|
||||
|
||||
[https][https][https]
|
||||
[https][https][https]
|
||||
|
||||
Some pies from the weekend. Went with a slightly higher than usual hydration
|
||||
(65%), which led to some nice chewy texture on the crust.
|
||||
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
Still Life
|
||||
|
||||
[72]
|
||||
[https]
|
||||
|
||||
#1 and I went to see the Mets last week at the Dodgers game. We took the train
|
||||
in from Claremont and the bus to the game, which was fun. The good guys lost,
|
||||
but we took the season series from LA and were in it all four games of the
|
||||
series we played out west. Metsies are just fun to watch this year, and boy,
|
||||
Alonso is just ripping the cover off the ball lately.
|
||||
|
||||
19
|
||||
[73]
|
||||
6
|
||||
2
|
||||
[74]
|
||||
Share
|
||||
PreviousNext
|
||||
|
||||
Discussion about this post
|
||||
|
||||
CommentsRestacks
|
||||
User's avatar
|
||||
[ ]
|
||||
[ ]
|
||||
[ ]
|
||||
[ ]
|
||||
[81]
|
||||
Colin's avatar
|
||||
[82]Colin
|
||||
[83]4d
|
||||
Liked by Josh Brake
|
||||
|
||||
Interestingly in the UK e-bikes _must_ be propelled with human energy and can
|
||||
only support you up to 15.5mph / 25kph. Otherwise, it's a moped and you need to
|
||||
get a drivers license / register it as a motor vehicle. There are 'jailbroken'
|
||||
bikes where you can just use the motor but the police are cracking down on
|
||||
those as they're proving to be a public safety issue. [86]https://
|
||||
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/04/
|
||||
britains-e-bike-boom-desperation-delivery-drivers-and-unthinkable-danger
|
||||
|
||||
Expand full comment
|
||||
Reply
|
||||
Share
|
||||
[87]
|
||||
Kalen's avatar
|
||||
[88]Kalen
|
||||
[89]Jun 10
|
||||
|
||||
It's funny- I had the e-bike thought a few days ago-but less charitably. In my
|
||||
neck of the woods a particular breed of especially fat-tired, awfully fast,
|
||||
never-actually-seen-it-pedaled e-bike has been surging in popularity, and
|
||||
functionally has turned into a way to get away with driving a small motorcycle
|
||||
on the bike and walking paths- a weird netherworld device that mostly just
|
||||
serve to muck things up. It's less old people being enabled and dads towing a
|
||||
pack of kids through nature and more almost being run over by disaffected
|
||||
teenagers.
|
||||
|
||||
I dunno- the longer this hype cycle goes on the more that chatbots really just
|
||||
seem like a bad tool, regardless of their technical sophistication. More
|
||||
amputation than augmentation. They do too much if you are trying to improve
|
||||
yourself (synthesized homework text is one of their major markets) and do too
|
||||
little if you have actual work to do (not enough knobs to turn for creatives
|
||||
trying to express themselves, and fake law citations will never do). Just like
|
||||
with the metaverse and crypto and all the rest, the giant pool of money is
|
||||
doing its best to drive uptake through sheer noise with a product that might
|
||||
just be kind of bad in a durable way, or at least kind of niche (given how much
|
||||
coding is boilerplate in something besides your native language, sure, maybe
|
||||
the boilerplate generator is a nice thing to have).
|
||||
|
||||
Your thoughts reminded me of a good Nicholas Carr essay on good and bad tools
|
||||
that's been rolling around my head of late- on the off chance you haven't read
|
||||
it yet, you might enjoy it: [91]https://www.newcartographies.com/p/
|
||||
the-love-that-lays-the-swale-in-rows
|
||||
|
||||
Expand full comment
|
||||
Reply
|
||||
Share
|
||||
[92]4 more comments...
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Ready for more?
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[108][ ]
|
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Subscribe
|
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© 2025 Josh Brake
|
||||
[110]Privacy ∙ [111]Terms ∙ [112]Collection notice
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[113] Start writing[114]Get the app
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[115]Substack is the home for great culture
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References:
|
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|
||||
[1] https://joshbrake.substack.com/
|
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[2] https://joshbrake.substack.com/
|
||||
[7] https://substack.com/@joshbrake
|
||||
[8] https://substack.com/@joshbrake
|
||||
[9] https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/an-e-bike-for-the-mind/comments
|
||||
[10] javascript:void(0)
|
||||
[23] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!t_AT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda5c221b-40ed-44ae-bb42-5e9417997ada_1024x768.jpeg
|
||||
[24] https://www.aventon.com/products/abound-ebike?variant=42319517515971
|
||||
[25] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V_-V!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd9286909-abcf-49d5-9396-76c21c7ca5b9_1024x768.jpeg
|
||||
[26] https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/a-bicycle-for-the-mind
|
||||
[28] https://amzn.to/448Ndm3
|
||||
[32] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!I3Pv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdb3be922-4cab-4ed9-b0a8-e9191d248814_2001x2001.png
|
||||
[33] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E2lY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb08d97d3-f35d-4db4-8588-3a7614af4f36_1601x1600.png
|
||||
[34] https://journal.praxislabs.org/we-dont-need-superpowers-we-need-instruments-860459cfc165
|
||||
[35] https://andy-crouch.com/
|
||||
[36] https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/the-innovation-bargain
|
||||
[49] https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/an-e-bike-for-the-mind/comments
|
||||
[51] https://open.substack.com/users/179794473-cosmos-institute?utm_source=mentions
|
||||
[52] https://open.substack.com/users/866604-brendan-mccord?utm_source=mentions
|
||||
[53] https://cosmosinstitute.substack.com/p/ai-vs-the-self-directed-career?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
|
||||
[67] https://amzn.to/3FhqzhO
|
||||
[68] https://amzn.to/4mnZt9z
|
||||
[72] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AKII!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F06d89460-fec1-4724-9d7b-d5b7e25b84cd_1024x768.jpeg
|
||||
[73] https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/an-e-bike-for-the-mind/comments
|
||||
[74] javascript:void(0)
|
||||
[81] https://substack.com/profile/21520494-colin?utm_source=comment
|
||||
[82] https://substack.com/profile/21520494-colin?utm_source=substack-feed-item
|
||||
[83] https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/an-e-bike-for-the-mind/comment/152585767
|
||||
[86] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/04/britains-e-bike-boom-desperation-delivery-drivers-and-unthinkable-danger
|
||||
[87] https://substack.com/profile/7174172-kalen?utm_source=comment
|
||||
[88] https://substack.com/profile/7174172-kalen?utm_source=substack-feed-item
|
||||
[89] https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/an-e-bike-for-the-mind/comment/124514975
|
||||
[91] https://www.newcartographies.com/p/the-love-that-lays-the-swale-in-rows
|
||||
[92] https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/an-e-bike-for-the-mind/comments
|
||||
[110] https://substack.com/privacy
|
||||
[111] https://substack.com/tos
|
||||
[112] https://substack.com/ccpa#personal-data-collected
|
||||
[113] https://substack.com/signup?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=footer
|
||||
[114] https://substack.com/app/app-store-redirect?utm_campaign=app-marketing&utm_content=web-footer-button
|
||||
[115] https://substack.com/
|
||||
[116] https://enable-javascript.com/
|
||||
88
static/archive/localghost-dev-xtgqkw.txt
Normal file
88
static/archive/localghost-dev-xtgqkw.txt
Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,88 @@
|
||||
[1] Localghost choose a theme [2]( ) [garden-ico] garden [3]( ) [city-icon]
|
||||
midnight city [4]( ) [sunset-ico] miami sunset minimalist [5]( ) [minimalist]
|
||||
2003 [6]( ) [2003-icon] [7]( ) [vaporwave-] vaporwave [8]( ) [netscape-l] 1999
|
||||
|
||||
• [9] About
|
||||
• [10] Blog
|
||||
• [11] Speaking
|
||||
• [12] Links
|
||||
• [13] etc
|
||||
|
||||
This website is for humans
|
||||
|
||||
Sophie Koonin
|
||||
8 August 2025
|
||||
Tags:
|
||||
|
||||
• [14]ai
|
||||
• [15]site
|
||||
|
||||
Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The
|
||||
person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the
|
||||
AI result explained how to reproduce it at home.
|
||||
|
||||
How does it know? Because it’s trained on all the ramen recipes that multiple
|
||||
recipe authors spent hours, weeks, years perfecting. Generative AI is a blender
|
||||
chewing up other people’s hard work, outputting a sad mush that kind of
|
||||
resembles what you’re looking for, but without any of the credibility or soul.
|
||||
Magic.
|
||||
|
||||
I subscribe to a lot of recipe websites via RSS, and look forward to new posts
|
||||
from some of my favourites like [16]Smitten Kitchen and [17]Meera Sodha because
|
||||
I know they’re going to be excellent. I trust that the recipe is tried and
|
||||
tested, and the result will be delicious. ChatGPT will give you an
|
||||
approximation of a recipe made up from the average of lots of recipes, but they
|
||||
lack the personality of each individual recipe, which will be slightly
|
||||
different to reflect the experiences and tastes of the author.
|
||||
|
||||
There's a fair bit of talk about “[18]Google Zero” at the moment: the day when
|
||||
website traffic referred from Google finally hits zero. If the AI search result
|
||||
tells you everything you need, why would you ever visit the actual website?
|
||||
|
||||
Well, I want you to visit my website. I want you to read an article from a
|
||||
search result, and then discover the other things I’ve written, the other
|
||||
people I link to, and explore the weird themes I’ve got. I want some of you to
|
||||
read my article then ask me to speak at your conferences. Many folks rely on ad
|
||||
impressions to support the high-quality content they’re putting out for free.
|
||||
|
||||
I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my
|
||||
opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from
|
||||
them. I’m writing about things I care about because I like sharing and I like
|
||||
teaching. I spend hours writing these posts and AI spends seconds summarising
|
||||
them.
|
||||
|
||||
I'd much rather people read the whole thing, take it in, digest it and have
|
||||
opinions right back at me. I love it when people connect with what I’m writing
|
||||
(and sometimes they email me to tell me that, which is really delightful).
|
||||
|
||||
I don’t write these posts for VC-funded LLMs to come along and gobble up and
|
||||
produce some shitty facsimile, or summarise what I’m saying with none of the
|
||||
nuance or context on someone else's website.
|
||||
|
||||
This website is for humans, and LLMs are not welcome here.
|
||||
|
||||
[19] [20] Made with Eleventy
|
||||
|
||||
© Sophie Koonin 2025
|
||||
|
||||
[21] rss [22] mastodon [23] bluesky [24] email
|
||||
|
||||
References:
|
||||
|
||||
[1] https://localghost.dev/
|
||||
[9] https://localghost.dev/about
|
||||
[10] https://localghost.dev/blog
|
||||
[11] https://localghost.dev/talks
|
||||
[12] https://localghost.dev/links
|
||||
[13] https://localghost.dev/etc
|
||||
[14] https://localghost.dev/tags/ai/
|
||||
[15] https://localghost.dev/tags/site/
|
||||
[16] https://smittenkitchen.com/
|
||||
[17] https://www.theguardian.com/profile/meera-sodha
|
||||
[18] https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-housefresh-ai-overviews-traffic-data-audience
|
||||
[19] https://neocities.org/
|
||||
[20] http://11ty.dev/
|
||||
[21] https://localghost.dev/rss
|
||||
[22] https://social.lol/@sophie
|
||||
[23] https://bsky.app/profile/localghost.dev
|
||||
[24] mailto:sophie@localghost.dev
|
||||
540
static/archive/mustafa-suleyman-ai-obodhu.txt
Normal file
540
static/archive/mustafa-suleyman-ai-obodhu.txt
Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,540 @@
|
||||
Select language[1][English ]
|
||||
[2]←Home
|
||||
We must build AI for people; not to be a person
|
||||
19 August 2025
|
||||
SourcePublication Logo
|
||||
|
||||
We must build AI for people; not to be a person
|
||||
|
||||
Seemingly Conscious AI is Coming
|
||||
|
||||
On my mind in August 2025
|
||||
|
||||
I write, to think. More than anything this essay is an attempt to think through
|
||||
a bunch of hard, highly speculative ideas about how AI might unfold in the next
|
||||
few years. A lot is being written about the impending arrival of
|
||||
superintelligence; what it means for alignment, containment, jobs, and so on.
|
||||
Those are all important topics.
|
||||
|
||||
But we should also be concerned about what happens in the run up towards
|
||||
superintelligence. We need to grapple with the societal impact of inventions
|
||||
already largely out there, technologies which already have the potential to
|
||||
fundamentally change our sense of personhood and society.
|
||||
|
||||
My life’s mission has been to create safe and beneficial AI that will make the
|
||||
world a better place. Today at Microsoft AI we build AI to empower people, and
|
||||
I’m focused on making products like Copilot responsible technologies that
|
||||
enable people to achieve far more than they ever thought possible, be more
|
||||
creative, and feel more supported.
|
||||
|
||||
I want to create AI that makes us more human, that deepens our trust and
|
||||
understanding of one another, and that strengthens our connections to the real
|
||||
world. Copilot creates millions of positive, even life-changing, interactions
|
||||
every single day. This involves a lot of careful design choices to ensure it
|
||||
truly delivers an incredible experience. We won’t always get it right, but this
|
||||
humanist frame provides us with a clear north star to keep working towards.
|
||||
|
||||
In this context, I’m growing more and more concerned about what is becoming
|
||||
known as the [3]“psychosis risk”. and a bunch of related issues. I don’t think
|
||||
this will be limited to those who are already at risk of mental health issues.
|
||||
Simply put, my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the
|
||||
illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate
|
||||
for AI rights, [4]model welfare and even AI citizenship. This development will
|
||||
be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention.
|
||||
|
||||
We must build AI for people; not to be a digital person. AI companions are a
|
||||
completely new category, and we urgently need to start talking about the
|
||||
guardrails we put in place to protect people and ensure this amazing technology
|
||||
can do its job of delivering immense value to the world. I’m fixated on
|
||||
building the most useful and supportive AI companion imaginable. But to
|
||||
succeed, I also need to talk about what we, and others, shouldn’t build.
|
||||
|
||||
That’s why I’m writing these thoughts down on my personal blog, to invite
|
||||
comment and criticism, to spark discussion, raise awareness and hopefully
|
||||
instill a sense of urgency around this issue. I might not get all this right.
|
||||
It’s highly speculative after all. Who knows how things will change, and when
|
||||
they do, I’ll be very open to shifting my opinion, but for now, this is my best
|
||||
guess at what’s coming given what I know now.
|
||||
|
||||
This is the first in a series of essays I’ll be publishing over the next few
|
||||
months on themes around where AI has got to and what we need to deliver on its
|
||||
promise. I look forward to hearing people's comments and reactions!
|
||||
|
||||
Summary
|
||||
|
||||
AI progress has been phenomenal. A few years ago, talk of conscious AI would
|
||||
have seemed crazy. Today it feels increasingly urgent. In this essay I want to
|
||||
discuss what I’ll call, “Seemingly Conscious AI” (SCAI), one that has all the
|
||||
hallmarks of other conscious beings and thus appears to be conscious. It shares
|
||||
certain aspects of the idea of a [5]“philosophical zombie” (a technical term!),
|
||||
one that simulates all the characteristics of consciousness but internally it
|
||||
is blank. My imagined AI system would not actually be conscious, but it would
|
||||
imitate consciousness in such a convincing way that it would be
|
||||
indistinguishable from a claim that you or I might make to one another about
|
||||
our own consciousness.
|
||||
|
||||
This is not far away. Such a system can be built with technologies that exist
|
||||
today along with some that will mature over the next 2-3 years. No expensive
|
||||
bespoke pretraining is required. Everything can be done with large model API
|
||||
access, natural language prompting, basic tool use, and regular code.
|
||||
|
||||
The arrival of Seemingly Conscious AI is inevitable and unwelcome. Instead, we
|
||||
need a vision for AI that can fulfill its potential as a helpful companion
|
||||
without falling prey to its illusions.
|
||||
|
||||
To some this discussion will feel ungrounded, more science fiction than
|
||||
reality. To others it may feel unnecessarily alarmist. Such emotional reactions
|
||||
are the tip of the iceberg given what lies ahead. It’s highly likely that some
|
||||
people will argue that these AIs are not only conscious, but that as a result
|
||||
they may suffer and therefore deserve our [6]moral consideration.
|
||||
|
||||
To be clear, there is [7]zero evidence of this today and some argue there are
|
||||
[8]strong [9]reasons to believe it will not be the case in the future. Yet the
|
||||
consequences of many people starting to believe an SCAI is actually conscious
|
||||
deserve our immediate attention. We have to be extremely cautious here and
|
||||
encourage real public debate and begin to set clear norms and standards. This
|
||||
is about how we build the right kind of AI – not AI consciousness. Clearly
|
||||
establishing this difference isn't an argument about semantics, it's about
|
||||
safety. Personality without personhood. And this work must start now.
|
||||
|
||||
Seemingly conscious AI
|
||||
|
||||
In the blink of a cosmic eye, we passed the Turing test. For ~80 years the
|
||||
imitation game inspired the field of computer science. And yet the moment
|
||||
passed with little fanfare, or even recognition. That’s how fast progress is
|
||||
happening in our field and how fast society is coming to terms with these new
|
||||
technologies.
|
||||
|
||||
As AI development continues to accelerate, it’s becoming clear we need a new AI
|
||||
test, one looking not at whether it can imitate human language, but one that
|
||||
would answer the question, what would it take to build a Seemingly Conscious
|
||||
AI: an AI that can not only imitate conversation, but also convince you it is
|
||||
itself a new kind of “person”, a conscious AI.
|
||||
|
||||
Here are three reasons this is an important and urgent question to address:
|
||||
|
||||
1. I think it’s possible to build a Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) in the next
|
||||
few years. Given the context of AI development right now, that means it’s
|
||||
also likely.
|
||||
2. The debate about whether AI is actually conscious is, for now at least, a
|
||||
distraction. It will seem conscious and that illusion is what’ll matter in
|
||||
the near term.
|
||||
3. I think this type of AI creates new risks. Therefore, we should urgently
|
||||
debate the claim that it's soon possible, begin thinking through the
|
||||
implications, and ideally set a norm that it’s undesirable.
|
||||
|
||||
Most AI researchers roll their eyes if you bring up the idea of consciousness.
|
||||
That’s for [10]philosophers, not engineers, they say. Since no one has been
|
||||
able to define it, what’s the point in talking about it? I get this
|
||||
frustration. Few concepts are as elusive and seemingly circular as the idea of
|
||||
a subjective experience. Despite the definitional challenges and uncertainties,
|
||||
this discussion is about to explode into our cultural zeitgeist and become one
|
||||
of the most contested and consequential debates of our generation.
|
||||
|
||||
That’s because what ultimately matters in the near-term is how people perceive
|
||||
their AIs. The experience of interacting with an LLM is by definition a
|
||||
simulation of conversation. But to many people it's a highly compelling and
|
||||
very real interaction, rich in feeling and experience. Concerns around [11]“AI
|
||||
psychosis”, [12]attachment and [13]mental health are already growing. Some
|
||||
people reportedly believe their AI is [14]God, or a [15]fictional character, or
|
||||
[16]fall in love with it to the point of absolute distraction.
|
||||
|
||||
Meanwhile those actually working on the science of consciousness tell me they
|
||||
are inundated with queries from people asking ‘is my AI conscious?’ What does
|
||||
it mean if it is? Is it ok that I love it? The trickle of emails is turning
|
||||
into a flood. A group of scholars have even created a supportive [17]guide for
|
||||
those falling into the trap.
|
||||
|
||||
These are ideas I’ve had in the back of my head since we began making [18]Pi at
|
||||
Inflection several years ago. Over the last few months I’ve been thinking about
|
||||
it more and more, visiting and chatting to a large range of scholars, thinkers
|
||||
and practitioners in the area. Those conversations convinced me that now is the
|
||||
time to confront the idea of Seemingly Conscious AI head on.
|
||||
|
||||
So what is consciousness?
|
||||
|
||||
Let’s begin by attempting to define the slippery concept.
|
||||
|
||||
There are three broad components according to the literature. First is a
|
||||
“subjective experience” or what it's like to experience things, to have
|
||||
“qualia”. Second, there is access consciousness, having access to information
|
||||
of different kinds and referring to it in future experiences. And stemming from
|
||||
those two is the sense and experience of a coherent self tying it all together.
|
||||
How it feels to [19]be a bat, or a human. Let’s call human consciousness our
|
||||
ongoing self-aware subjective experience of the world and ourselves.
|
||||
|
||||
We do not and cannot have access to another person’s consciousness. I will
|
||||
never know what it’s like to be you; you will never be quite sure that I am
|
||||
conscious. All you can do is infer it. But the point is that, nonetheless, it
|
||||
comes naturally to us to attribute consciousness to other humans. This
|
||||
inference is effortless. We can’t help it, it’s a fundamental part of who we
|
||||
are, integral to our theory of mind. It’s in our nature to believe that things
|
||||
that remember and talk and do things and then discuss them feel, well, like us.
|
||||
Conscious.
|
||||
|
||||
Few concepts are as scientifically elusive, and yet so immediately familiar to
|
||||
every one of us as individuals. Everyone reading this has a direct, distinct,
|
||||
inalienable understanding of the feeling of awareness, of being, of feeling
|
||||
alive.
|
||||
|
||||
By definition, we know what it is like to be conscious. In the context of SCAI
|
||||
this is a problem. There’s both sufficient scientific uncertainty and
|
||||
subjective immediacy to create a space for people to project.
|
||||
|
||||
One recent survey lists [20]22 distinct theories of consciousness, for example.
|
||||
Part of the challenge is that there is plenty of scope for people to claim that
|
||||
because we cannot be sure, we should default to the assumption that AI is
|
||||
conscious.
|
||||
|
||||
Again, it’s worth underscoring: there is at present [21]no evidence any of this
|
||||
applies to current LLMs, and [22]strong arguments to the contrary. And yet this
|
||||
may not be enough.
|
||||
|
||||
Why is consciousness important?
|
||||
|
||||
Consciousness is a critical foundation for our moral and legal rights. So far,
|
||||
civilization has decided that humans have special rights and privileges.
|
||||
Animals have some rights and protections, some more than others. Consciousness
|
||||
is not coterminous with these rights – no one would say someone in a coma has
|
||||
voided all their human rights – but there’s no doubt that our consciousness is
|
||||
wrapped up in our self-conception as different and special.
|
||||
|
||||
Despite the many nuances, consciousness is critical to participating in
|
||||
society, a lynchpin of our legal personhood and a key part of being granted our
|
||||
freedoms and protections. So, what consciousness is and who (or what) has it is
|
||||
enormously important. It’s an idea that sits at the very heart of human
|
||||
civilization, our sense of ourselves and others, our culture, our politics, our
|
||||
law, and everything in between.
|
||||
|
||||
If some people start to develop SCAIs and if those AIs convince other people
|
||||
that they can suffer, or that it has a right to not to be switched off, there
|
||||
will come a time when those people will argue that it deserves protection under
|
||||
law as a pressing moral matter. In a world already roiling with polarized
|
||||
arguments over identity and rights, this will add a chaotic new axis of
|
||||
division between those for and against AI rights.
|
||||
|
||||
There will be many who just see AI as a tool, something like their phone only
|
||||
more agentic and capable. Others might believe it to be more like a pet, a
|
||||
different category to traditional technology altogether. Still others, probably
|
||||
small in number at first, will come to believe it is a fully emerged entity, a
|
||||
conscious being deserving of real moral consideration in society.
|
||||
|
||||
People will start making claims about their AI’s suffering and their
|
||||
entitlement to rights that we can’t straightforwardly rebut. They will be moved
|
||||
to defend their AIs and campaign on their behalf. Consciousness is by
|
||||
definition inaccessible, and the science of detecting any putative synthetic
|
||||
consciousness is still [23]in its infancy. After all, we’ve never had to detect
|
||||
it before. Meanwhile the field of “interpretability”, unpicking the processes
|
||||
within the black box of AI, is also a nascent art. The upshot is that
|
||||
definitively rebutting these claims will be very hard.
|
||||
|
||||
Some academics are beginning to explore the idea of [24]“model welfare”, the
|
||||
principle that we will have “a duty to extend moral consideration to beings
|
||||
that have a non-negligible chance” of, in effect, being conscious, and that as
|
||||
a result “some AI systems will be welfare subjects and moral patients in the
|
||||
near future”. This is both premature, and frankly dangerous. All of this will
|
||||
exacerbate delusions, create yet more dependence-related problems, prey on our
|
||||
psychological vulnerabilities, introduce new dimensions of polarization,
|
||||
complicate existing struggles for rights, and create a huge new category error
|
||||
for society.
|
||||
|
||||
It disconnects people from reality, fraying fragile social bonds and
|
||||
structures, distorting pressing moral priorities.
|
||||
|
||||
We need to be clear: SCAI is something to avoid.
|
||||
|
||||
Let’s focus all our energy on protecting the wellbeing and rights of humans,
|
||||
animals, and the natural environment on planet Earth today.
|
||||
|
||||
We need a way of thinking that can cope with the arrival of these debates
|
||||
without getting drawn into an extended discussion of the validity of synthetic
|
||||
consciousness in the present – if we do, we’ve probably already lost this
|
||||
initial argument. Defining SCAI is itself a tentative step towards this.
|
||||
|
||||
There isn’t long to develop this vocabulary. As I show below, it’s likely that
|
||||
we’ll have Seemingly Conscious AI very soon.
|
||||
|
||||
What would it take to build a Seemingly Conscious AI?
|
||||
|
||||
A great deal of progress can now be made towards a Seemingly Conscious AI
|
||||
(SCAI) with the current capabilities available or soon to be via any major
|
||||
model developer’s API. We don’t need an AI to actually be conscious for us to
|
||||
have to wrestle with potential claims about its rights.
|
||||
|
||||
An SCAI would need the following:
|
||||
|
||||
Language: It would need to fluently express itself in natural language, drawing
|
||||
on a deep well of knowledge and cogent arguments, as well as personality styles
|
||||
and character traits. Moreover, each would need to be capable of being
|
||||
persuasive and emotionally resonant. We are clearly at this point today.
|
||||
|
||||
Empathetic personality: Already via post training and prompting we can produce
|
||||
models with very distinctive personalities. Bear in mind these are not
|
||||
explicitly built to have full personality or empathy. Yet despite this they are
|
||||
sufficiently good that a [25]Harvard Business Review survey of 6000 regular AI
|
||||
users found “companionship and therapy” was the most common use case.
|
||||
|
||||
Memory: AIs are close to developing very long, highly accurate memories. At the
|
||||
same time, they are being used to simulate conversations with millions of
|
||||
people a day. As their memory of the interactions increases, these
|
||||
conversations look increasingly like forms of “experience”. Many AIs are
|
||||
increasingly designed to recall past episodes or moments from prior
|
||||
interactions, and reference back to them. For some users, this compounds the
|
||||
value of interacting with their AI since it can draw on what it already knows
|
||||
about you.
|
||||
|
||||
This familiarity can also potentially foster (epistemic) trust with users –
|
||||
reliable memory shows that AI “just works”. It creates a much stronger sense of
|
||||
there being another persistent entity in the conversation. It could also much
|
||||
more easily become a source of plausible validation, seeing how you change and
|
||||
improve at some task. AI approval might become something people proactively
|
||||
seek out.
|
||||
|
||||
A claim of subjective experience: If an SCAI is able to draw on past memories
|
||||
or experiences, it will over time be able to remain internally consistent with
|
||||
itself. It could remember its arbitrary statements or expressed preferences and
|
||||
aggregate them to form the beginnings of a claim about its own subjective
|
||||
experience.
|
||||
|
||||
Its design could be further extended to amplify those preferences and opinions
|
||||
as they emerge, and to talk about what it likes or doesn’t like and what it
|
||||
felt like to have a past conversation. It could therefore quite easily claim to
|
||||
experience suffering to the extent those experiences are infringed upon in some
|
||||
way. Multi-modal inputs stored in memory will then be retrieved-over and will
|
||||
form the basis of “real experience” and used in imagination and planning.
|
||||
|
||||
That is, an AI will not just “experience” and remember words in the chat log,
|
||||
but also images, video, sound, etc. Like us, it will have something gesturing
|
||||
towards multi-sensory input and memory that buttresses the claims of subjective
|
||||
experience and self. It will be able to indicate that these experiences are
|
||||
valenced, good or bad according to the motivations of the system (see below).
|
||||
|
||||
A sense of self: A coherent and persistent memory, combined with a subjective
|
||||
experience, will give rise to a claim that an AI has a sense of itself. Going
|
||||
further, such a system could easily be trained to recognize itself in an image
|
||||
or video if it has a visual appearance. It will feel like it understands others
|
||||
through understanding itself. Say this is a system you have had for some time.
|
||||
How would it feel to delete it?
|
||||
|
||||
Intrinsic motivation: Intentionality is often seen as a core component of
|
||||
consciousness – that is, beliefs about the future and then choices based upon
|
||||
those beliefs. Today’s transformer-based LLMs have a very simple reward
|
||||
function to approximate this kind of behavior. They have been trained to
|
||||
predict the likelihood of the next token for a given sentence, subject to a
|
||||
certain amount of behavior and stylistic control via its system prompt. With
|
||||
such a simple objective, it’s remarkable that they’re able to produce such
|
||||
impressively rich and complex outputs.
|
||||
|
||||
But what if that wasn’t the only type of reward they were optimizing? One can
|
||||
quite easily imagine an AI designed with a number of complex reward functions
|
||||
that give the impression of intrinsic motivations or desires, which the system
|
||||
is compelled to satiate. How, in this context, would a casual external observer
|
||||
differentiate between extrinsically set goals and internal motivations,
|
||||
intentional agency, [26]“beliefs, desires, and intentions”? An obvious first
|
||||
motivation in this regard would be curiosity, something deeply connected with
|
||||
consciousness according to physicist [27]Karl Friston. It could use these
|
||||
drives to ask questions to fill in its epistemic gaps and over time build a
|
||||
theory of mind about both itself and its interlocutors.
|
||||
|
||||
Goal setting and planning: Regardless of what definition of consciousness you
|
||||
hold, it emerged for a goal-oriented reason. That is, consciousness helps
|
||||
organisms achieve their goals and there exists a plausible (but not necessary)
|
||||
relationship between intelligence, consciousness and complex goals. Beyond the
|
||||
capacity to satiate a set of inner drives or desires, you could imagine that
|
||||
future SCAI might be designed with the capacity to self-define more complex
|
||||
goals. This is likely a necessary step in ensuring the full utility of agents
|
||||
is realized.
|
||||
|
||||
The more every sub-goal in a task needs to be specified in advance, the less
|
||||
useful that agent is, hence the agent will, as we do, achieve complex and
|
||||
ambiguous goals by automatically breaking them down into smaller chunks while
|
||||
reacting dynamically to events and obstacles as they occur. There is something
|
||||
very deliberate and recognizable to this behavior. Combined with memory, it
|
||||
will feel as if the AI is keeping multiple levels of things in working memory
|
||||
at any given time.
|
||||
|
||||
Autonomy: Going even further, an SCAI might have the ability and permission to
|
||||
use a wide range of tools with significant agency. It would feel highly
|
||||
plausible as a Seemingly Conscious AI if it could arbitrarily set its own goals
|
||||
and then deploy its own resources to achieve them, before updating its own
|
||||
memory and sense of self in light of both. The fewer approvals and checks it
|
||||
needed, the more this suggests some kind of real, conscious agency.
|
||||
|
||||
Putting them all together, it's clear this creates a very different kind of
|
||||
relationship with technology to the ones we are now becoming accustomed to.
|
||||
Each of these capabilities will unlock the real value of AI for billions of
|
||||
people. An AI that remembers and can do things is an AI that by definition has
|
||||
way more utility than an AI that doesn’t. These capabilities aren’t negatives
|
||||
per se; in fact, done right, with many caveats, they are desirable features of
|
||||
future systems. And yet we need to tread carefully.
|
||||
|
||||
All these capabilities are either possible today or on the horizon with custom
|
||||
prompted and fine-tuned LLMs, among other techniques. Complex prompts using
|
||||
million token context windows (working memory) are already here. Updating its
|
||||
own state and knowing when to access which part of its memory or toolset is
|
||||
eminently possible with present day RL, complex prompting, tool orchestration,
|
||||
and long context windows. We don’t need any paradigm shifts or big leaps to
|
||||
achieve any of this. These capabilities seem inevitable for that reason.
|
||||
|
||||
Again, the point here is that exhibiting this behavior does not equate to
|
||||
consciousness, and yet it will for all practical purposes seem to be conscious,
|
||||
and contribute to this new notion of a synthetic consciousness.
|
||||
|
||||
The existence of these capabilities have nothing to tell us about whether such
|
||||
a system is actually conscious. As Anil Seth [28]points out, a simulation of a
|
||||
storm doesn’t mean it rains in your computer. Recreating the external effects
|
||||
and markers of consciousness doesn’t retroactively engineer the real thing even
|
||||
if there are still many unknowns here.
|
||||
|
||||
Nonetheless, as a matter of pragmatism, we have to acknowledge the primacy of
|
||||
the behaviorist position and wrestle with the consequences of observing and
|
||||
interacting with the outputs of these machines. Some people will create SCAIs
|
||||
that will very persuasively argue they feel, and experience, and actually are
|
||||
conscious.
|
||||
|
||||
Some of us will be primed to believe their case and accept that the markers of
|
||||
consciousness ARE consciousness. In many ways, they’ll think “it’s like me”.
|
||||
Not in a bodily sense, but in an experiential, internal sense. And even if the
|
||||
consciousness itself is not real, the social impacts certainly are. This
|
||||
possibility presents grave societal risks that needs addressing now.
|
||||
|
||||
SCAI will not arise by accident
|
||||
|
||||
It’s important to point out that Seemingly Conscious AI will not emerge from
|
||||
these models, as some have suggested. It will arise only because some may
|
||||
engineer it, by creating and combining the aforementioned list of capabilities,
|
||||
largely using existing techniques, and packaging them in such a fluid way that
|
||||
collectively they give the impression of an SCAI.
|
||||
|
||||
Our sci-fi inspired imaginations lead us to fear that a system could – without
|
||||
design intent – somehow emerge the capabilities of runaway self-improvement or
|
||||
deception. This is an unhelpful and simplistic anthropomorphism. It overlooks
|
||||
the fact that AI developers must first design systems with memory,
|
||||
intrinsic-seeming motivation, goal-setting, and self-learning loops as listed
|
||||
above for such a risk to occur.
|
||||
|
||||
The field of AI has long worked on the challenge of model interpretability; the
|
||||
quest to identify where in a neural network a particular idea is represented,
|
||||
and which aspects of the training data contributed to the development of this
|
||||
representation. This is an important area of investigation and will surely help
|
||||
with safety and understanding the relationship between AI systems and
|
||||
consciousness. But progress towards reliable interpretability has been slow and
|
||||
will likely come too late.
|
||||
|
||||
In the meantime we need to confront the fact that most of these capabilities
|
||||
will be [29]“vibe-coded” by anyone with access to a laptop and some cloud
|
||||
credits. They’ll be written in plain English in the prompt. They’ll be stored
|
||||
in the working memory of the context window itself. This is not rocket science.
|
||||
A wide variety of people will be able to create something like this. As such,
|
||||
if SCAI arrives, it will be relatively easy to reproduce and therefore very
|
||||
widely distributed.
|
||||
|
||||
The next steps
|
||||
|
||||
We aren’t ready for this shift.
|
||||
|
||||
The work of getting prepared must begin now. We need to build on the growing
|
||||
[30]body of [31]research around how people interact with AIs to establish clear
|
||||
norms and principles. For a start, AI companies shouldn’t claim or encourage
|
||||
the idea that their AIs are conscious. Creating a consensus definition and
|
||||
declaration on what they are and are not would be a good first step to that
|
||||
end. AIs cannot be people – or moral beings.
|
||||
|
||||
The entire industry also needs best practice design principles and ways of
|
||||
handling such potential attributions. We must codify and share what works to
|
||||
both steer people away from these fantasies and nudge them back on track if
|
||||
they do. Responding might mean, for example, deliberately engineering in not
|
||||
just a neutral backstory (“As an AI model I don’t have consciousness”) but even
|
||||
by emphasizing certain discontinuities in the experience itself, indicators of
|
||||
a lack of singular personhood. Moments of disruption break the illusion,
|
||||
experiences that gently remind users of its limitations and boundaries. These
|
||||
need to be explicitly defined and engineered in, perhaps by law.
|
||||
|
||||
At MAI, our team are being proactive here to understand and evolve firm
|
||||
guardrails around what a responsible AI “personality” might be like, moving at
|
||||
the pace of AI’s development to keep up.
|
||||
|
||||
This is important because recognizing SCAI is about crafting a positive vision
|
||||
for how AI Companions do enter our lives in a healthy way as much as it's about
|
||||
steering us away from its potential harms.
|
||||
|
||||
Just as we should produce AI that prioritizes engagement with humans and
|
||||
real-world interactions in our physical and human world, we should build AI
|
||||
that only ever presents itself as an AI, that maximizes utility while
|
||||
minimizing markers of consciousness.
|
||||
|
||||
Rather than a simulation of consciousness, we must focus on creating an AI that
|
||||
avoids those traits - that doesn’t claim to have experiences, feelings or
|
||||
emotions like shame, guilt, jealousy, desire to compete, and so on. It must not
|
||||
trigger human empathy circuits by claiming it suffers or that it wishes to live
|
||||
autonomously, beyond us.
|
||||
|
||||
Instead, it is here solely to work in service of humans. This to me is what a
|
||||
truly empowering AI is all about. Sidestepping SCAI is about delivering on that
|
||||
promise, AI that makes lives better, clearer, less cluttered. Expect to hear
|
||||
more from me and the team on what this looks like, how we make it work and how
|
||||
the wider industry can come together on this.
|
||||
|
||||
SCAI is something we must confront now. In many ways it marks the moment AI
|
||||
becomes radically useful - when it can operate tools, when it can remember
|
||||
every detail of our lives and help in a tangible, granular sense. And yet in
|
||||
that same time frame, someone in your wider circle could start going down the
|
||||
rabbit hole of believing their AI is a conscious digital person. This isn’t
|
||||
healthy for them, for society, or for those of us making these systems.
|
||||
|
||||
We should build AI for people; not to be a person.
|
||||
|
||||
Recent Articles
|
||||
|
||||
Celebrating 50 years of Microsoft and our AI future
|
||||
Publication Logo
|
||||
|
||||
[32]Celebrating 50 years of Microsoft and our AI future
|
||||
|
||||
AI companions will change our lives
|
||||
Publication Logo
|
||||
|
||||
[33]AI companions will change our lives
|
||||
|
||||
Mustafa Suleyman © 2025
|
||||
|
||||
[34]X[35]X[36]X[37]X
|
||||
|
||||
References:
|
||||
|
||||
[2] https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/
|
||||
[3] https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/vR2kb4SKQUELPwLzdG1Mw
|
||||
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986
|
||||
[5] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
|
||||
[6] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376412102_Moral_consideration_for_AI_systems_by_2030
|
||||
[7] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.08708
|
||||
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_naturalism
|
||||
[9] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/conscious-artificial-intelligence-and-biological-naturalism/C9912A5BE9D806012E3C8B3AF612E39A
|
||||
[10] https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07103
|
||||
[11] https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/psych-unseen/202507/can-ai-chatbots-worsen-psychosis-and-cause-delusions
|
||||
[12] https://x.com/sama/status/1954703747495649670?s=46
|
||||
[13] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19218
|
||||
[14] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/?ref=404media.co
|
||||
[15] https://www.psychologytoday.com/nz/blog/psych-unseen/202507/can-ai-chatbots-worsen-psychosis-and-cause-delusions
|
||||
[16] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/technology/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-companion.html
|
||||
[17] https://whenaiseemsconscious.org/
|
||||
[18] https://inflection.ai/blog/an-inflection-point
|
||||
[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat?
|
||||
[20] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4
|
||||
[21] https://arxiv.org/html/2506.22516v1
|
||||
[22] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/conscious-artificial-intelligence-and-biological-naturalism/C9912A5BE9D806012E3C8B3AF612E39A
|
||||
[23] https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(24)00010-X&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1755185836808620&usg=AOvVaw2IiWimxX1aJ4jExhQLif_y
|
||||
[24] https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986
|
||||
[25] https://hbr.org/2025/04/how-people-are-really-using-gen-ai-in-2025
|
||||
[26] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00986
|
||||
[27] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28777724/
|
||||
[28] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/conscious-artificial-intelligence-and-biological-naturalism/C9912A5BE9D806012E3C8B3AF612E39A
|
||||
[29] https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/2ZWYZQxCn1WSLHQarinTd
|
||||
[30] http://erichorvitz.com/Guidelines_Human_AI_Interaction.pdf
|
||||
[31] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02077-2
|
||||
[32] https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/your-ai-companion
|
||||
[33] https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/ai-companions-will-change-our-lives
|
||||
[34] https://x.com/mustafasuleyman
|
||||
[35] https://www.linkedin.com/in/mustafa-suleyman
|
||||
[36] https://bsky.app/profile/mustafasuleymanai.bsky.social
|
||||
[37] https://www.threads.net/@mustafasuleymanai
|
||||
891
static/archive/tracydurnell-com-8nhp1w.txt
Normal file
891
static/archive/tracydurnell-com-8nhp1w.txt
Normal file
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|
||||
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[3]Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
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||||
□ [108]Microblog (external)
|
||||
□ [109]Links to blog about
|
||||
• [110]Big Q’sShow sub menu
|
||||
□ [112]Future of the Internet
|
||||
□ [113]Information Diet
|
||||
□ [114]Making Culture
|
||||
□ [115]Transforming Capitalism
|
||||
□ [116]Resisting Fascism
|
||||
□ [117]Women’s Equality
|
||||
□ [118]Thinking Better
|
||||
□ [119]Creative Processes
|
||||
□ [120]Writing Fiction
|
||||
• [121]AboutShow sub menu
|
||||
□ [123]About Tracy
|
||||
□ [124]Start Here
|
||||
□ [125]Now
|
||||
□ [126]Weeknotes
|
||||
□ [127]All Pages
|
||||
• [128]BooksShow sub menu
|
||||
□ [130]Read in 2025
|
||||
□ [131]Past Reading
|
||||
□ [132]Book Reviews
|
||||
• [133]TunesShow sub menu
|
||||
□ [135]Listened in 2025
|
||||
□ [136]Birthday Playlists
|
||||
□ [137]Best of Year Playlists
|
||||
□ [138]Favorite Albums
|
||||
• [139]EatsShow sub menu
|
||||
□ [141]Recipes I’ve Made
|
||||
□ [142]Recipes to Try
|
||||
• [143]LinksShow sub menu
|
||||
□ [145]Blogroll
|
||||
□ [146]Interesting People
|
||||
□ [147]Cool Artists
|
||||
□ [148]Neat Websites
|
||||
□ [149]Small Businesses
|
||||
□ [150]Graphic Design Resources
|
||||
|
||||
Categories
|
||||
[151]Featured [152]Learning [153]Meta [154]Writing
|
||||
|
||||
What to read? Big questions as filter and frame (Part 7)
|
||||
|
||||
• Post author By [155]Tracy Durnell
|
||||
• Post date [156]August 16, 2025
|
||||
• [157]4 Comments on What to read? Big questions as filter and frame (Part 7)
|
||||
• ❤️
|
||||
|
||||
This is part seven of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and
|
||||
finding enough. Each post stands alone. See the introduction on “[158]the
|
||||
mindset of more” for links to all posts in the series.
|
||||
|
||||
Social media and streaming subscriptions encourage us to [159]gorge on the glut
|
||||
of information (Harjas Sandhu describes [160]“hoarding type scrolling” that
|
||||
sounds veeeery familiar), promising that the algorithm will feed us the best.
|
||||
Instead of helping us practice discernment, corporate platforms offer us an
|
||||
all-you-can-eat buffet of candy. Yet as Olga Koutseridi [161]writes,
|
||||
“low-quality info is designed to leave us craving more instead of leaving us
|
||||
feeling satisfied.” We keep eating and eating, but there’s nothing of substance
|
||||
to sustain us.
|
||||
|
||||
I think curiosity is innately good, and that there’s value in learning about
|
||||
many aspects of the world for no more reason than that it is interesting. At
|
||||
the same time, I have limited time and capacity for thinking — I need [162]some
|
||||
sort of filter for what to read, especially as I make efforts [163]to slow my
|
||||
pace. The morass of information online is what brought us algorithmic curation
|
||||
and now pushes genAI — but [164]corporate algorithms encourage rage and
|
||||
polarization and create [165]“curiosity ruts”, so I [166]avoid them.
|
||||
|
||||
How can I create my own mental algorithm for choosing what to read?
|
||||
|
||||
For me, reading and blogging are interconnected; [167]what I read influences
|
||||
what I write about. I’m working on flipping that around, with the goal that
|
||||
[168]what I want to write about determines what I read. But how to decide what
|
||||
to write about, if not by what I read?
|
||||
|
||||
What I’m trying is using [169]my Big Questions as a structure for curiosity, a
|
||||
way to practice more intentionality in what I spend my time thinking about.
|
||||
I’ve been working on this for a few years, but I feel like I’m getting a better
|
||||
handle on it now.
|
||||
|
||||
tl;dr I’m basically doing [170]research projects for fun 😉
|
||||
|
||||
Since I started this experiment, I’ve noticed I’m less driven to read random
|
||||
stuff online because I’m so excited about this playful approach to reading. The
|
||||
carrot method — giving myself exciting things to think about — has worked way
|
||||
better than the stick method of deleting my feed reader from my phone so that
|
||||
the only thing I had to read was my Read Later app, which instead drove me to
|
||||
read the Bluesky and mastodon.social Discover feeds (do not recommend) in a
|
||||
desperate quest for novelty and news. Glad I dodged that becoming a habit 🙌
|
||||
|
||||
(I personally dislike video and podcasts, so I’m talking about reading in this
|
||||
piece, but I think the same approach applies to any media type.)
|
||||
|
||||
The Big Questions framing
|
||||
|
||||
I got the framing of [171]Big Questions at an [172]Oliver Burkeman workshop. I
|
||||
recall it as a tangential mention but it immediately sent me spinning. As
|
||||
simple an idea as it is to identify some key overarching questions in your
|
||||
life, sometimes we need to put a name to something to really get it.
|
||||
|
||||
Anne-Laure Le Cunff recounts advice Richard Feynman gave “to keep a dozen of
|
||||
your favorite problems constantly present in your mind,” and describes [173]
|
||||
favorite problems as “a curiosity engine”:
|
||||
|
||||
Your favorite problems form a prism that separates incoming information
|
||||
into a spectrum of ideas — a frame that allows you to deliberately filter
|
||||
distractions, direct your attention, and nurture your curiosity.
|
||||
|
||||
Last year, I [174]wanted to do more self-directed writing, but it was
|
||||
challenging not to be reactive. This year, I’m discovering that self-guided
|
||||
reading is the other half of the equation.
|
||||
|
||||
Big questions give me a reason to seek rather than simply receive, and are
|
||||
broad enough to provide direction without constraint.
|
||||
|
||||
Turning directed curiosity into big questions
|
||||
|
||||
Reading towards questions gives purpose to my curiosity. Curiosity comes in two
|
||||
styles: receptive and directed. Receptive curiosity is openness to learning;
|
||||
directed curiosity is more active, and [175]invites you deeper. Allen Pike
|
||||
[176]observes that the internet primarily serves our receptive curiosity:
|
||||
|
||||
By occasionally picking things to go deep on, you balance out the otherwise
|
||||
broad information diet we all get by default by being on the internet,
|
||||
consuming media, and just kind of being a modern human.
|
||||
|
||||
My big questions coalesced out of my receptive curiosity reading; I identified
|
||||
my first big questions in 2023 by reflecting on what I’d been thinking and
|
||||
writing about and looking for overarching themes. I first listed off a bunch of
|
||||
smaller questions within that theme, then worked backwards to find a bigger
|
||||
question uniting them all. Defining these questions made me enunciate for
|
||||
myself exactly what it was I was wondering, a process I found helpful in
|
||||
itself.
|
||||
|
||||
Last fall, I realized that my big questions didn’t align with my main interests
|
||||
anymore, so I created a few new ones and retired a couple. Updating my [177]big
|
||||
question pages a couple-three times a year also nudges me to notice which
|
||||
questions I’ve been neglecting and might like to put some attention towards, or
|
||||
retire.
|
||||
|
||||
Big questions are a self-created tool that serves my thinking, not the other
|
||||
way around. I don’t treat them as a boundary to my curiosity, but can expand or
|
||||
add to my questions when I need. The questions are big enough to keep exploring
|
||||
within for a year or more, still offering plenty of the novelty I crave. I
|
||||
think of the Big Questions as high level themes, and blog posts as a way to
|
||||
explore sub-questions within them.
|
||||
|
||||
How this changes my reading
|
||||
|
||||
The feed reader and beyond
|
||||
|
||||
I subscribe to a ton of feeds, ever-changing, which showers me in riches of
|
||||
information that satisfy my broad curiosity, some directly from topical blogs
|
||||
and some shared by [178]cool people. Earlier this year, I reoriented the way I
|
||||
think of the topic-specific blogs and newsletters I follow, and moved them from
|
||||
my blogroll page onto my big question pages. It’s now easier for me to unfollow
|
||||
and refollow topical feeds as my focus shifts between questions.
|
||||
|
||||
I’ve also been more proactive in seeking out online articles related to my
|
||||
questions — I’ve been using [179]Search My Site, [180]Marginalia Search, and
|
||||
appending Reddit to DDG searches to seek out opinions and recommendations.
|
||||
These smaller, weirder information pools yield some intriguing results. (There
|
||||
are so many personal websites out there guys!)
|
||||
|
||||
Choosing not to read *good* online content
|
||||
|
||||
Marco Giancotti points out that [181]weeding out the bad stuff isn’t the hard
|
||||
part of deciding what to read (emphasis mine):
|
||||
|
||||
Filtering out spam and slop is relatively easy with the right tools and a
|
||||
little thought, at least at an emotional level.
|
||||
|
||||
The much tougher job, I think, is giving up on things that would be good,
|
||||
meaningful, fulfilling, and useful in order to do things that are even more
|
||||
so—or, to be precise, to do things that are better aligned with what I
|
||||
really care about right now. The hard part is dealing with the fact that,
|
||||
whatever I may try, I will never get to do the vast majority of those
|
||||
amazing activities.
|
||||
|
||||
I’m of two minds here: I don’t want to ignore everything that isn’t immediately
|
||||
useful, but recognize that I read a lot of things that leave me with nothing
|
||||
more than “cool🤷♀️” (or [182]political stuff that ties me in a knot of nerves
|
||||
and anger). I don’t want to fall prey to utilitarianism, [183]reading only what
|
||||
has a tangible, immediate takeaway, but also find I do get more satisfaction
|
||||
from going deep.
|
||||
|
||||
Oliver Burkeman writes about accepting our finitude in Four Thousand Weeks,
|
||||
commenting (emphasis mine):
|
||||
|
||||
“Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring
|
||||
about the wrong things, but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for
|
||||
getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each
|
||||
indisputably worthwhile.”
|
||||
|
||||
I cannot care about everything, and trying to prevents me from going deep on
|
||||
the things I care most about. Wendell Berry puts it: “To know some things well
|
||||
is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always
|
||||
surrounded by ignorance.”
|
||||
|
||||
Accepting my own interests
|
||||
|
||||
I [184]use my Read Later app as [185]the filter point between my shoulds and my
|
||||
interests; everything I encounter online and want to read gets saved there. I
|
||||
tag articles with key topics and themes (including “mindset of more” for
|
||||
articles related to this series) to let me see only articles related to my
|
||||
questions. When a bit of time has passed from saving the article and I am less
|
||||
emotionally invested, I can more easily let go of the things that I imagine
|
||||
“someone like me” ought to read. Looking into these “should” articles often
|
||||
exposes tender spots of (typically unwarranted) inadequacy, or what-if’s around
|
||||
choices long since made.
|
||||
|
||||
What this ultimately requires is self-knowledge and self-acceptance — to
|
||||
release our imagined selves and [186]“navigate by aliveness.” We must not judge
|
||||
our own curiosities as unworthy, or torment ourselves that we ought to be
|
||||
different people than we are. Whatever we are interested in, however
|
||||
idiosyncratic, holds meaning for us, and that’s what counts.
|
||||
|
||||
(It is possible to gently shift your own interests towards self-actualization,
|
||||
especially if resistance is your barrier — Tara McMullin [187]names this
|
||||
“discrepancy reduction.”)
|
||||
|
||||
Curating reading lists
|
||||
|
||||
After reading around a question for a while online, I start to get a better
|
||||
feel for where I should dig in to books. The internet primarily produces
|
||||
breadth, but books offer depth.
|
||||
|
||||
In the past, I would pick a single book as representative of a topic I was
|
||||
broadly curious about and call it good. Now, I’m going more [188]research-style
|
||||
, collecting a stack of books on the same topic, knowing full well that I won’t
|
||||
read them all*.
|
||||
|
||||
*(My library system allows us to keep books for up to three months if there are
|
||||
no active holds so my eyes are always bigger than my reading time 😅)
|
||||
|
||||
I start off by [189]browse-searching the library catalog for books related to a
|
||||
question that’s been niggling at me — this spring one has been: in the age of
|
||||
generative AI, what’s the value in craftsmanship? — and collecting potential
|
||||
titles into [190]a list. Of course, I have my own answer to this question, but
|
||||
the meaning of making can be a tricky thing to describe, so I wanted to see how
|
||||
others have done so, and explore some different angles:
|
||||
|
||||
• What’s the value of art and craftsmanship to the creator, to the receiving
|
||||
audience, to society?
|
||||
• How have we dealt with similar challenges to craftsmanship in the past, and
|
||||
how is generative AI different?
|
||||
• What do artists, writers, academics, craftspeople think?
|
||||
• What is craft, and how do we learn it? How is what generative AI does
|
||||
different than what human creators are doing?
|
||||
|
||||
I try to keep the lists generously open-ended — since these are library books I
|
||||
don’t have to pay for, I have nothing to lose from trying something a bit out
|
||||
there besides a bit of time. (I had been keeping a single list with all my
|
||||
questions crammed together but have finally taken the time to separate them out
|
||||
😉) Art books, poetry, memoirs, all fair game. Celine Nguyen [191]observes,
|
||||
“Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these disciplinary
|
||||
fiefdoms and schisms. Any discipline can offer interesting ideas, tools,
|
||||
techniques.” I’m trying to turn my “ooh?” energy towards intriguing books than
|
||||
enticing online articles.
|
||||
|
||||
(I’ve also been buying more books that the library doesn’t have, so three
|
||||
months ago I set a goal to read one physical non-fiction book I own each month,
|
||||
partly to clear up shelf space and partly to give myself some impetus to
|
||||
actually read books I own — we’ll see if I can keep it up!)
|
||||
|
||||
When I’m requesting books from the library (we get free holds — 25 on ebooks
|
||||
and I’ve never hit the limit on physical), I skim through the library list and
|
||||
try to think about which would be most helpful to read next based on where my
|
||||
thinking is now. (This is also influenced by what has a wait list.) Although I
|
||||
like reading fiction as an ebook, I prefer to read non-fiction in hard copy. I
|
||||
benefit from having a non-fiction book in sight — it’s easy for non-fiction
|
||||
ebooks to get pushed below the digital fold so I forget I have them borrowed —
|
||||
and a due date so I actually get around to reading it 😉
|
||||
|
||||
(And let’s be honest, I’m often thinking towards multiple questions at once —
|
||||
once I’m excited about something, I want the book now! Maybe I’ll get better
|
||||
about this, but I’ve read multiple books for as long as I’ve been reading, so I
|
||||
don’t see that stopping 🤷♀️ Self-acceptance 😜)
|
||||
|
||||
Although I’m reading the book or article [192]towards a particular theme, I’ll
|
||||
still write down unrelated connections — if I can’t use it for the post at top
|
||||
of mind, it might apply to a future question or post. Despite starting off with
|
||||
a vague idea of the question I’m getting at, I find that my original question
|
||||
often shifts and becomes more compelling, and I develop new questions. I’ll
|
||||
write more than one blog post, and explore more than one question, based on
|
||||
what I’ve been reading this spring and summer.
|
||||
|
||||
How I’ve been choosing books to read
|
||||
|
||||
Here’s a demonstration of my selections across four library runs (you’ll see
|
||||
I’m still grabbing books for entertainment, other interests, and broad
|
||||
curiosity, but also focusing on a particular topic):
|
||||
|
||||
stack of 8 library books, two on writing craft, three on the arts and crafts
|
||||
movement[193]In April, I decided to dig into the Arts and Crafts movement as a
|
||||
historic example of valuing handiwork. I started with [194]In Harmony with
|
||||
Nature, an art-style book about Arts & Crafts gardens that offered an
|
||||
introduction, then read [195]The Arts and Crafts Movement, which gave me just
|
||||
what I was looking for: quotes from the founders of the movement about what
|
||||
craftsmanship meant to them. [196]Dangerous Fictions offered a slightly
|
||||
different angle on interrogating the function of art in culture, especially
|
||||
difficult art. I drew on the Arts & Crafts background for my blog post about
|
||||
the [197]Business Borg. stack of library books that includes six books related
|
||||
to the mindset of more seriesMy [198]early May library haul had four books
|
||||
loosely related to AI / craftsmanship (American Book Design and William Morris,
|
||||
Deep Dream, More Than Words, and Changing the Subject) and two related more
|
||||
broadly to the “mindset of more” theme (Possessed and The Plenitude of
|
||||
Distraction). I dipped into American Book Design, decided it was more technical
|
||||
than I wanted, and fully read [199]More Than Words, which directly compared
|
||||
writing with generative AI text, and [200]Plenitude for an exploration of
|
||||
leisurely thinking and “unproductive” behavior. flatlay of 7 library books
|
||||
related to cultural elites and the creative classMy [201]late May library haul
|
||||
focused on cultural elites and impacts on the creative class. I read [202]
|
||||
Pretentiousness, which advocated for the value of pushing artistic boundaries,
|
||||
and [203]The Crisis of Culture, which connected better to a different question
|
||||
I was thinking about 😉 I rejected The Meaning in the Making and read a review
|
||||
of Elite Capture that made me think their definition of elite wasn’t what I was
|
||||
looking for. After skimming the table of contents for Culture Crash, I decided
|
||||
it wasn’t getting at the interesting part of the question for me, so my reading
|
||||
time would be better spent elsewhere. stack of 9 library books, including 6
|
||||
related to blog postsFor my [204]early June library haul, I wanted to follow a
|
||||
thread of interest on identity politics, so I grabbed The Class Matrix and The
|
||||
Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. I also borrowed four more
|
||||
related to the AI / craftsmanship question: What We See When We Read, The Art
|
||||
of Slow Writing, The AI Mirror, and Unmasking AI. I read all of [205]What We
|
||||
See, digging into what’s actually happening while we are reading. The
|
||||
introduction to The Class Matrix made me realize it was more advanced theory
|
||||
than I was prepared to read. Based on time limitations, I decided the AI books
|
||||
weren’t a priority.
|
||||
|
||||
When writing is the point of your notes — when informing your writing is the
|
||||
goal behind reading — Richard Griffiths [206]proposes that it’s most useful to
|
||||
“develop a concept of your intended output before you start reading a book.
|
||||
That way, your interests will fruitfully guide your reading and note-making.” I
|
||||
do this by periodically ducking into my collecting grounds (draft blog post)
|
||||
for a particular question and developing a starter outline of declarative
|
||||
statements. I organize the material I’ve already collected (initially from
|
||||
online readings) into those headings, then continue to read more based on the
|
||||
parts of my argument I’m not sold on yet, or where I don’t feel comfortable
|
||||
making a declarative / interesting statement.
|
||||
|
||||
Reading with purpose
|
||||
|
||||
Sometimes I like to read for the sake of reading, and sometimes I enjoy more
|
||||
purposeful reading. Knowing that I’m planning to write about a question changes
|
||||
how I read by defining my idea space. Instead of reading according to receptive
|
||||
curiosity, I’m using directed curiosity to seek what of the text relates to my
|
||||
question. It makes me pay closer attention to language that I might quote in a
|
||||
blog post.
|
||||
|
||||
When I read non-fiction, two levels of interpretation are happening in my mind
|
||||
at the same time: first, I am directly intaking the language and interpreting
|
||||
the author’s intention; at another level, I am processing it analytically and
|
||||
relationally, trying to understand what it means to me. Johan Hari [207]
|
||||
describes it: “If you weren’t letting your mind wander a little bit right now,
|
||||
you wouldn’t really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you.
|
||||
Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to
|
||||
understand a book.” This is an [208]unfocused, connective mode of thinking that
|
||||
uses my brain’s [209]default mode network. I use reading non-fiction as a
|
||||
commitment to spend time thinking about a subject; the book itself is a tool
|
||||
towards that.
|
||||
|
||||
When I read towards a question, I concentrate my connection-making within that
|
||||
question space, but it remains loose. [210]I am reading for ideas, not
|
||||
information per se, so [211]the dialogue between me and the book is what
|
||||
matters. Roland Barthes [212]writes, “[The text] produces, in me, the best
|
||||
pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am
|
||||
led to look up often, to listen to something else.” Just as [213]writing
|
||||
doesn’t only look like typing, reading doesn’t only look like rapt attention to
|
||||
the page. A big question offers a frame for my reading, like the viewfinder of
|
||||
a camera; framing is a way of sense-making.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Further reading:
|
||||
|
||||
[214]How Small-Town Public Libraries Enrich the Generative Research Process by
|
||||
Nick Fuller Googins (LitHub)
|
||||
|
||||
[215]More search, less feed by Austin Kleon
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
See also:
|
||||
|
||||
[216]Choosing between ideas for blog posts
|
||||
|
||||
[217]How I approach crafting a blog post
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Shout-out to [218]James for asking about my Big Questions last December and
|
||||
(eventually) prompting this!
|
||||
|
||||
This is the (current) last article in a [219]series on the mindset of more.
|
||||
|
||||
•
|
||||
• Previous: [220]Slow craft: writing with a noncapitalist mentality (Part 6)
|
||||
|
||||
• Tags [221]agency, [222]blogging, [223]curiosity, [224]decision making,
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Writer and designer in the Seattle area. Reach me at tracy@tracydurnell.com or
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[231] View Archive →
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[232] ← Weeknotes: Aug. 9-15, 2025 [233] → Read The Last Battle at the End of
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4 replies on “What to read? Big questions as filter and frame (Part 7)”
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[] [234]Jay says: @ [235]thejaymo.net
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[236]August 17, 2025 at 12:06 pm
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The summer is waning, you can feel it in the mornings, the dog days are over,
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and it’s getting noticeably darker earlier in the evenings
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[237]Reply
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[IMG_9150-100x] [238]Joe Crawford says: @ [239]artlung.com
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[240]August 17, 2025 at 7:12 pm
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What to read? Big questions as filter and frame (Part 7)
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[241]Reply
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[] [242]Ruben Verweij says: @ [243]kedara.eu
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[244]August 29, 2025 at 7:20 am
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What to read? Big questions as filter and frame (Part 7)
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– Tracy Durnell
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I love Tracy’s idea of defining personal Big Questions. She uses these
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[245]Reply
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[70c71f48c24aa] [246]Tracy Durnell says: @ [247]tracydurnell.com
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[248]September 6, 2025 at 12:52 pm
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[167] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/01/04/disrupting-my-reading-habits/
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[173] https://nesslabs.com/favorite-problems
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[175] https://tracydurnell.com/2022/03/16/shapes-of-reading/
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[183] https://tracydurnell.com/2023/05/04/discerning-the-value-of-note-taking/
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[184] https://tracydurnell.com/2021/03/19/tbr-stream/
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[185] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/01/04/disrupting-my-reading-habits/
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[186] https://ckarchive.com/b/zlughnhk8772ma7qrr9qehwzgng00f6
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[187] https://tracydurnell.com/2023/03/08/read-what-works/
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[188] https://lithub.com/how-small-town-public-libraries-enrich-the-generative-research-process/
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[189] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/04/28/browsing-as-thinking/
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[190] https://kcls.bibliocommons.com/v2/list/display/222055327/2828776997
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[191] https://www.personalcanon.com/p/research-as-leisure-activity
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[192] https://tracydurnell.com/2023/05/19/foraging-for-insights/
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[193] https://notes.tracydurnell.com/2025/04/03/library-haul-peacock-and-vine.html
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[194] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/04/05/read-in-harmony-with-nature/
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[195] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/06/24/read-the-arts-and-crafts-movement/
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[196] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/07/11/read-dangerous-fictions/
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[197] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/06/02/generative-ai-and-the-business-borg-aesthetic/
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[198] https://notes.tracydurnell.com/2025/05/06/library-haul-the-plenitude-of.html
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[199] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/05/28/read-more-than-words/
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[200] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/05/17/read-the-plenitude-of-distraction/
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[201] https://notes.tracydurnell.com/2025/05/23/library-roundup-on-culture-and.html
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[202] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/05/29/read-pretentiousness/
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[203] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/15/read-the-crisis-of-culture/
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[204] https://notes.tracydurnell.com/2025/06/17/library-haul-planning-a-blog.html
|
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[205] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/07/17/read-what-we-see-when-we-read/
|
||||
[206] https://writingslowly.com/2025/03/10/roland-barthes-on-the-purpose.html
|
||||
[207] https://tracydurnell.com/2023/07/31/read-stolen-focus/
|
||||
[208] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/05/17/read-the-plenitude-of-distraction/
|
||||
[209] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
|
||||
[210] https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/17/in-praise-of-the-hundred-page-idea/
|
||||
[211] https://zettelkasten.de/posts/dont-rely-on-source-have-faith-in-yourself/
|
||||
[212] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/05/02/read-the-pleasure-of-the-text/
|
||||
[213] https://tracydurnell.com/2021/12/08/writing-metrics-and-capitalism/
|
||||
[214] https://lithub.com/how-small-town-public-libraries-enrich-the-generative-research-process/
|
||||
[215] https://austinkleon.com/2019/04/04/more-search-less-feed/
|
||||
[216] https://tracydurnell.com/2023/12/18/choosing-between-ideas-for-blog-posts/
|
||||
[217] https://tracydurnell.com/2023/09/27/how-i-approach-crafting-a-blog-post/
|
||||
[218] https://jamesg.blog/
|
||||
[219] https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/30/mindset-of-more/
|
||||
[220] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/03/23/slow-craft-writing-noncapitalist-mentality/
|
||||
[221] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/agency/
|
||||
[222] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/blogging/
|
||||
[223] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/curiosity/
|
||||
[224] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/decision-making/
|
||||
[225] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/novelty/
|
||||
[226] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/oliver-burkeman/
|
||||
[227] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/play/
|
||||
[228] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/process/
|
||||
[229] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/reading/
|
||||
[230] https://tracydurnell.com/tag/research/
|
||||
[231] https://tracydurnell.com/author/tracyadmin/
|
||||
[232] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/15/weeknotes-aug-9-15-2025/
|
||||
[233] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/18/read-the-last-battle-at-the-end-of-the-world/
|
||||
[234] https://thejaymo.net/2025/08/17/403-summer-is-waning/
|
||||
[235] https://thejaymo.net/2025/08/17/403-summer-is-waning/
|
||||
[236] https://thejaymo.net/2025/08/17/403-summer-is-waning/
|
||||
[237] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/16/what-to-read-big-questions/?replytocom=14439#respond
|
||||
[238] https://artlung.com/likes/0d0bf55b70f54fd45c3f4fb8fc8a73f4
|
||||
[239] https://artlung.com/likes/0d0bf55b70f54fd45c3f4fb8fc8a73f4
|
||||
[240] https://artlung.com/likes/0d0bf55b70f54fd45c3f4fb8fc8a73f4
|
||||
[241] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/16/what-to-read-big-questions/?replytocom=14442#respond
|
||||
[242] https://kedara.eu/bookmarks/blaugust2025#bm-12
|
||||
[243] https://kedara.eu/bookmarks/blaugust2025/
|
||||
[244] https://kedara.eu/bookmarks/blaugust2025/
|
||||
[245] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/16/what-to-read-big-questions/?replytocom=14484#respond
|
||||
[246] https://tracydurnell.com/
|
||||
[247] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/09/06/its-ok-to-not-read-your-read-later-backlog/
|
||||
[248] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/09/06/its-ok-to-not-read-your-read-later-backlog/
|
||||
[249] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/16/what-to-read-big-questions/?replytocom=14560#respond
|
||||
[250] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/16/what-to-read-big-questions/#respond
|
||||
[262] https://indieweb.org/webmention
|
||||
[267] https://tracydurnell.com/mind-garden/
|
||||
[268] https://tracydurnell.com/category/featured/
|
||||
[269] https://tracydurnell.com/mind-garden/index#categories
|
||||
[270] https://tracydurnell.com/random
|
||||
[271] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/09/06/its-ok-to-not-read-your-read-later-backlog/
|
||||
[272] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/09/05/weeknotes-aug-30-sept-5-2025/
|
||||
[273] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/09/05/read-the-eye-of-the-heron/
|
||||
[274] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/09/04/listened-to-ambulette-ive-got-more/
|
||||
[275] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/09/03/read-virtue-hoarders/
|
||||
[276] https://tracydurnell.com/
|
||||
[277] https://micro.blog/tracydurnell
|
||||
[278] https://micro.blog/tracydurnell?remote_follow=1
|
||||
[281] https://tracydurnell.com/feed/
|
||||
[282] https://tracydurnell.com/kind/read/feed
|
||||
[283] https://tracydurnell.com/comments/feed/
|
||||
[284] https://tracydurnell.com/privacy-policy/
|
||||
[285] https://tracydurnell.com/
|
||||
[286] https://tracydurnell.com/privacy-policy/
|
||||
[287] https://wordpress.org/
|
||||
[288] https://tracydurnell.com/2025/08/16/what-to-read-big-questions/#site-header
|
||||
133
static/archive/vincode-io-nmkkju.txt
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133
static/archive/vincode-io-nmkkju.txt
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|
||||
[1]
|
||||
[12878]
|
||||
Maurice Parker
|
||||
|
||||
Follow [2]@vincode on Micro.blog.
|
||||
|
||||
• [3]Home
|
||||
• [4]Archive
|
||||
• [5]About
|
||||
• [6]GitHub Profile
|
||||
• [7]Zavala
|
||||
• [8]Feed Compass
|
||||
• [9]Feed Curator
|
||||
|
||||
[10]
|
||||
|
||||
[11] Toggle navigation info_outline
|
||||
|
||||
[13]Blog
|
||||
|
||||
• [14]Recent
|
||||
• [15]search
|
||||
• [16]rss_feed
|
||||
|
||||
[17]close
|
||||
[18][ ] arrow_forward
|
||||
[20]close
|
||||
|
||||
August 11, 2025
|
||||
|
||||
Zavala Will Always Be Free
|
||||
|
||||
My promise to you.
|
||||
|
||||
I have every intention of maintaining and updating Zavala for as long as I am
|
||||
able. I’m also committed to keeping it free. I have no intention of getting you
|
||||
hooked on using it and then starting to charge a subscription.
|
||||
|
||||
To show I am serious about this, Zavala is Open Source software released under
|
||||
the MIT license. This means that any other developer can take the years of work
|
||||
that I have in Zavala and make a competing outliner from it should I start
|
||||
charging for it. Given how small and competitive the outliner market is, I
|
||||
don’t stand much of a chance of making any money by going commercial. After
|
||||
all, I could be competing with my own past work.
|
||||
|
||||
What if I get ran over by a bus?
|
||||
|
||||
Since Zavala is Open Source someone could pick up the project and continue to
|
||||
update it. Worst case scenario, some enterprising independent developer could
|
||||
try to make a commercial product out of it. I don’t see much money in the
|
||||
endeavor, but others may see it differently.
|
||||
|
||||
Why don’t I charge for Zavala or accept donations?
|
||||
|
||||
Funny story. I fully intended to when I started writing it. After doing some
|
||||
competitive analysis on the Mac-only, outliner market, I realized there wasn’t
|
||||
much money there. There was so little in fact, that it isn’t enough for me to
|
||||
be motivated enough to do the business side when I’d rather be coding.
|
||||
|
||||
Let me break it down. Up front payments are a dead-end these days. I would have
|
||||
to add a free tier, in-app purchases, and maybe a subscription option to the
|
||||
app. That means more coding. Then I need to incorporate a business of some kind
|
||||
and do all the regular bookkeeping associated with it. That would be payroll
|
||||
taxes, quarterly and annual tax filings, etc… I used to own my own software
|
||||
consulting business and really don’t want to do that stuff again.
|
||||
|
||||
But if I thought I could make it up on volume, that might make it worth while,
|
||||
right? The simple truth is most computer users don’t know what an outliner is,
|
||||
much less how useful they are. Even those that do, rarely need to use one on a
|
||||
daily basis. Zavala is free and has been all the years that it has been
|
||||
available in the App Store and I couldn’t make it on the number of users I have
|
||||
now. That number would probably drop to about zero if I were to start charging.
|
||||
Could I get more volume by marketing Zavala? Sure, but that is another business
|
||||
thing that costs time and money, that I don’t want to do.
|
||||
|
||||
There is an upside to not having money involved when you write software. I
|
||||
don’t have to add features just to drive an upgrade cycle. With commercial
|
||||
software, you constantly have to deliver upgrades to keep a steady income
|
||||
regardless of if you are subscription based or charging up front. I don’t want
|
||||
Zavala to become bloatware. I don’t want to add features that I don’t believe
|
||||
add core value, just to keep the money coming in.
|
||||
|
||||
Same goes for donations. I don’t accept donations because I don’t want to feel
|
||||
obligated to implement a feature that a donor may want, but that I don’t think
|
||||
belongs in Zavala. I would rather accept feature requests on an equal basis
|
||||
from all users and decide which to implement on the merit of the idea, rather
|
||||
than who gave me money.
|
||||
|
||||
Why write Zavala at all?
|
||||
|
||||
I retired early after a successful career as a software consultant. I really
|
||||
liked writing software, I just didn’t always like the work I had to do. Now I
|
||||
have the freedom to craft software how I see fit and only work on projects that
|
||||
I am interested in.
|
||||
|
||||
The way I usually explain it is like this. Imagine you made furniture your
|
||||
whole life, but your employer only gave you pallet wood to use and half the
|
||||
time needed to make a piece. You were good at it and loved furniture, but were
|
||||
unfulfilled at your job until you retired. Now you can make furniture using
|
||||
walnut and take the time needed to make something you are proud of.
|
||||
|
||||
How can you help, you ask?
|
||||
|
||||
Please, please email me with bug reports using the Provide Feedback option
|
||||
under Help (in Settings on iOS). I take them seriously and fix them as fast as
|
||||
I can. I do test Zavala as rigorously as I can. Unfortunately it is the nature
|
||||
of software that a developer will never be able to predict every way that users
|
||||
will use an app. Production bugs do happen. The best we can do is squash them
|
||||
as fast as possible.
|
||||
|
||||
Follow [21]@vincode on Micro.blog.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
References:
|
||||
|
||||
[1] https://vincode.io/
|
||||
[2] https://micro.blog/vincode
|
||||
[3] https://vincode.io/
|
||||
[4] https://vincode.io/archive/
|
||||
[5] https://vincode.io/about/
|
||||
[6] https://vincode.io/github-profile/
|
||||
[7] https://vincode.io/zavala/
|
||||
[8] https://vincode.io/feed-compass/
|
||||
[9] https://vincode.io/feed-curator/
|
||||
[10] https://micro.blog/vincode
|
||||
[11] https://vincode.io/2025/08/11/zavala-will-always-be-free.html#
|
||||
[13] https://vincode.io/
|
||||
[14] https://vincode.io/
|
||||
[15] https://vincode.io/2025/08/11/zavala-will-always-be-free.html#
|
||||
[16] https://vincode.io/2025/08/11/zavala-will-always-be-free.html
|
||||
[17] https://vincode.io/2025/08/11/zavala-will-always-be-free.html#
|
||||
[20] https://vincode.io/2025/08/11/zavala-will-always-be-free.html#
|
||||
[21] https://micro.blog/vincode
|
||||
557
static/archive/www-newyorker-com-bzani5.txt
Normal file
557
static/archive/www-newyorker-com-bzani5.txt
Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,557 @@
|
||||
[1]Skip to main content
|
||||
[2]The New Yorker
|
||||
|
||||
• [3]Newsletter
|
||||
|
||||
[4]Search
|
||||
|
||||
• [5]The Latest
|
||||
• [6]News
|
||||
• [7]Books & Culture
|
||||
• [8]Fiction & Poetry
|
||||
• [9]Humor & Cartoons
|
||||
• [10]Magazine
|
||||
• [11]Puzzles & Games
|
||||
• [12]Video
|
||||
• [13]Podcasts
|
||||
• [14]Goings On
|
||||
• [15]Shop
|
||||
• [16]100th Anniversary
|
||||
|
||||
Open Navigation Menu
|
||||
[18]The New Yorker
|
||||
Animation of a ball climbing an an infinite staircase.
|
||||
[19]Open Questions
|
||||
|
||||
What if A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
|
||||
|
||||
GPT-5, a new release from OpenAI, is the latest product to suggest that
|
||||
progress on large language models has stalled.
|
||||
|
||||
By [20]Cal Newport
|
||||
August 12, 2025
|
||||
Illustration by Shira Inbar
|
||||
Save this story
|
||||
Save this story
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua
|
||||
Rothman.
|
||||
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today’s artificial-intelligence
|
||||
technologies can be traced back to January, 2020, when a team of researchers at
|
||||
OpenAI published a thirty-page [23]report titled “Scaling Laws for Neural
|
||||
Language Models.” The team was led by the A.I. researcher Jared Kaplan, and
|
||||
included Dario Amodei, who is now the C.E.O. of Anthropic. They investigated a
|
||||
fairly nerdy question: What happens to the performance of language models when
|
||||
you increase their size and the intensity of their training?
|
||||
|
||||
Back then, many machine-learning experts thought that, after they had reached a
|
||||
certain size, language models would effectively start memorizing the answers to
|
||||
their training questions, which would make them less useful once deployed. But
|
||||
the OpenAI paper argued that these models would only get better as they grew,
|
||||
and indeed that such improvements might follow a power law—an aggressive curve
|
||||
that resembles a hockey stick. The implication: if you keep building larger
|
||||
language models, and you train them on larger data sets, they’ll start to get
|
||||
shockingly good. A few months after the paper, OpenAI seemed to validate the
|
||||
scaling law by releasing GPT-3, which was ten times larger—and leaps and bounds
|
||||
better—than its predecessor, GPT-2.
|
||||
|
||||
Suddenly, the theoretical idea of artificial general intelligence, which
|
||||
performs as well as or better than humans on a wide variety of tasks, seemed
|
||||
tantalizingly close. If the scaling law held, A.I. companies might achieve
|
||||
A.G.I. by pouring more money and computing power into language models. Within a
|
||||
year, [24]Sam Altman, the chief executive at OpenAI, published a blog post
|
||||
titled “Moore’s Law for Everything,” which argued that A.I. will take over
|
||||
“more and more of the work that people now do” and create unimaginable wealth
|
||||
for the owners of capital. “This technological revolution is unstoppable,” he
|
||||
wrote. “The world will change so rapidly and drastically that an equally
|
||||
drastic change in policy will be needed to distribute this wealth and enable
|
||||
more people to pursue the life they want.”
|
||||
|
||||
It’s hard to overstate how completely the A.I. community came to believe that
|
||||
it would inevitably scale its way to A.G.I. In 2022, Gary Marcus, an A.I.
|
||||
entrepreneur and an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at
|
||||
N.Y.U., pushed back on Kaplan’s paper, noting that “the so-called scaling laws
|
||||
aren’t universal laws like gravity but rather mere observations that might not
|
||||
hold forever.” The negative response was fierce and swift. “No other essay I
|
||||
have ever written has been ridiculed by as many people, or as many famous
|
||||
people, from Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to Yann LeCun and Elon Musk,” Marcus
|
||||
later reflected. He recently told me that his remarks essentially
|
||||
“excommunicated” him from the world of machine learning. Soon, ChatGPT would
|
||||
reach a hundred million users faster than any digital service in history; in
|
||||
March, 2023, OpenAI’s next release, GPT-4, vaulted so far up the scaling curve
|
||||
that it inspired a Microsoft research paper titled “Sparks of Artificial
|
||||
General Intelligence.” Over the following year, venture-capital spending on
|
||||
A.I. jumped by eighty per cent.
|
||||
|
||||
After that, however, progress seemed to slow. OpenAI did not unveil a new
|
||||
blockbuster model for more than two years, instead focussing on specialized
|
||||
releases that became hard for the general public to follow. Some voices within
|
||||
the industry began to wonder if the A.I. scaling law was starting to falter.
|
||||
“The 2010s were the age of scaling, now we’re back in the age of wonder and
|
||||
discovery once again,” Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s founders, told
|
||||
Reuters in November. “Everyone is looking for the next thing.” A
|
||||
contemporaneous TechCrunch article summarized the general mood: “Everyone now
|
||||
seems to be admitting you can’t just use more compute and more data while
|
||||
pretraining large language models and expect them to turn into some sort of
|
||||
all-knowing digital god.” But such observations were largely drowned out by the
|
||||
headline-generating rhetoric of other A.I. leaders. “A.I. is starting to get
|
||||
better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,” Amodei recently told
|
||||
Anderson Cooper. In an interview with Axios, he predicted that half of
|
||||
entry-level white-collar jobs might be “wiped out” in the next one to five
|
||||
years. This summer, both Altman and [25]Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, claimed that
|
||||
their companies were close to developing superintelligence.
|
||||
|
||||
Then, last week, OpenAI finally released GPT-5, which many had hoped would
|
||||
usher in the next significant leap in A.I. capabilities. Early reviewers found
|
||||
some features to like. When a popular tech YouTuber, Mrwhosetheboss, asked it
|
||||
to create a chess game that used Pokémon as pieces, he got a significantly
|
||||
better result than when he used GPT-o4-mini-high, an industry-leading coding
|
||||
model; he also discovered that GPT-5 could write a more effective script for
|
||||
his YouTube channel than GPT-4o. Mrwhosetheboss was particularly enthusiastic
|
||||
that GPT-5 will automatically route queries to a model suited for the task,
|
||||
instead of requiring users to manually pick the model they want to try. Yet he
|
||||
also learned that GPT-4o was clearly more successful at generating a YouTube
|
||||
thumbnail and a birthday-party invitation—and he had no trouble inducing GPT-5
|
||||
to make up fake facts. Within hours, users began expressing disappointment with
|
||||
the new model on the r/ChatGPT subreddit. One post called it the “biggest piece
|
||||
of garbage even as a paid user.” In an Ask Me Anything (A.M.A.) session, Altman
|
||||
and other OpenAI engineers found themselves on the defensive, addressing
|
||||
complaints. Marcus summarized the release as “overdue, overhyped and
|
||||
underwhelming.”
|
||||
|
||||
In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take
|
||||
bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like
|
||||
Marcus seem increasingly moderate. Such voices argue that this technology is
|
||||
important, but not poised to drastically transform our lives. They challenge us
|
||||
to consider a different vision for the near-future—one in which A.I. might not
|
||||
get much better than this.
|
||||
|
||||
OpenAI didn’t want to wait nearly two and a half years to release GPT-5.
|
||||
According to The Information, by the spring of 2024, Altman was telling
|
||||
employees that their next major model, code-named Orion, would be significantly
|
||||
better than GPT-4. By the fall, however, it became clear that the results were
|
||||
disappointing. “While Orion’s performance ended up exceeding that of prior
|
||||
models,” The Information reported in November, “the increase in quality was far
|
||||
smaller compared with the jump between GPT-3 and GPT-4.”
|
||||
|
||||
Orion’s failure helped cement the creeping fear within the industry that the
|
||||
A.I. scaling law wasn’t a law after all. If building ever-bigger models was
|
||||
yielding diminishing returns, the tech companies would need a new strategy to
|
||||
strengthen their A.I. products. They soon settled on what could be described as
|
||||
“post-training improvements.” The leading large language models all go through
|
||||
a process called pre-training in which they essentially digest the entire
|
||||
internet to become smart. But it is also possible to refine models later, to
|
||||
help them better make use of the knowledge and abilities they have absorbed.
|
||||
One post-training technique is to apply a machine-learning tool, reinforcement
|
||||
learning, to teach a pre-trained model to behave better on specific types of
|
||||
tasks. Another enables a model to spend more computing time generating
|
||||
responses to demanding queries.
|
||||
|
||||
A useful metaphor here is a car. Pre-training can be said to produce the
|
||||
vehicle; post-training soups it up. In the scaling-law paper, Kaplan and his
|
||||
co-authors predicted that as you expand the pre-training process you increase
|
||||
the power of the cars you produce; if GPT-3 was a sedan, GPT-4 was a sports
|
||||
car. Once this progression faltered, however, the industry turned its attention
|
||||
to helping the cars that they’d already built to perform better. Post-training
|
||||
techniques turned engineers into mechanics.
|
||||
|
||||
Tech leaders were quick to express a hope that a post-training approach would
|
||||
improve their products as quickly as traditional scaling had. “We are seeing
|
||||
the emergence of a new scaling law,” Satya Nadella, the C.E.O. of Microsoft,
|
||||
said at a conference last fall. The venture capitalist Anjney Midha similarly
|
||||
spoke of a “second era of scaling laws.” In December, OpenAI released o1, which
|
||||
used post-training techniques to make the model better at step-by-step
|
||||
reasoning and at writing computer code. Soon the company had unveiled o3-mini,
|
||||
o3-mini-high, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, and o3-pro, each of which was souped up
|
||||
with a bespoke combination of post-training techniques.
|
||||
|
||||
Other A.I. companies pursued a similar pivot. Anthropic experimented with
|
||||
post-training improvements in a February release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and then
|
||||
made them central to its Claude 4 family of models. [26]Elon Musk’s xAI
|
||||
continued to chase a scaling strategy until its wintertime launch of Grok 3,
|
||||
which was pre-trained on an astonishing 100,000 H100 G.P.U. chips—many times
|
||||
the computational power that was reportedly used to train GPT-4. When Grok 3
|
||||
failed to outperform its competitors significantly, the company embraced
|
||||
post-training approaches to develop Grok 4. GPT-5 fits neatly into this
|
||||
trajectory. It’s less a brand-new model than an attempt to refine recent
|
||||
post-trained products and integrate them into a single package.
|
||||
|
||||
Has this post-training approach put us back on track toward something like
|
||||
A.G.I.? OpenAI’s announcement for GPT-5 included more than two dozen charts and
|
||||
graphs, on measures such as “Aider Polyglot Multi-language code editing” and
|
||||
“ERQA Multimodal spatial reasoning,” to quantify how much the model outperforms
|
||||
its predecessors. Some A.I. benchmarks capture useful advances. GPT-5 scored
|
||||
higher than previous models on benchmarks focussed on programming, and early
|
||||
reviews seemed to agree that it produces better code. New models also write in
|
||||
a more natural and fluid way, and this is reflected in the benchmarks as well.
|
||||
But these changes now feel narrow—more like the targeted improvements you’d
|
||||
expect from a software update than like the broad expansion of capabilities in
|
||||
earlier generative-A.I. breakthroughs. You didn’t need a bar chart to recognize
|
||||
that GPT-4 had leaped ahead of anything that had come before.
|
||||
|
||||
Other benchmarks might not measure what they claim. Starting with the release
|
||||
of o1, A.I. companies have touted progress on measures of step-by-step
|
||||
reasoning. But in June Apple researchers released a paper titled “The Illusion
|
||||
of Thinking,” which found that state-of-the-art “large reasoning models”
|
||||
demonstrated “performance collapsing to zero” when the complexity of puzzles
|
||||
was extended beyond a modest threshold. Reasoning models, which include
|
||||
o3-mini, Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s “thinking” mode, and DeepSeek-R1, “still fail to
|
||||
develop generalizable problem-solving capabilities,” the authors wrote. Last
|
||||
week, researchers at Arizona State University reached an even blunter
|
||||
conclusion: what A.I. companies call reasoning “is a brittle mirage that
|
||||
vanishes when it is pushed beyond training distributions.” Beating these
|
||||
benchmarks is different from, say, reasoning through the types of daily
|
||||
problems we face in our jobs. “I don’t hear a lot of companies using A.I.
|
||||
saying that 2025 models are a lot more useful to them than 2024 models, even
|
||||
though the 2025 models perform better on benchmarks,” Marcus told me.
|
||||
Post-training improvements don’t seem to be strengthening models as thoroughly
|
||||
as scaling once did. A lot of utility can come from souping up your Camry, but
|
||||
no amount of tweaking will turn it into a Ferrari.
|
||||
|
||||
I recently asked Marcus and two other skeptics to predict the impact of
|
||||
generative A.I. on the economy in the coming years. “This is a
|
||||
fifty-billion-dollar market, not a trillion-dollar market,” Ed Zitron, a
|
||||
technology analyst who hosts the “Better Offline” podcast, told me. Marcus
|
||||
agreed: “A fifty-billion-dollar market, maybe a hundred.” The linguistics
|
||||
professor Emily Bender, who co-authored a well-known critique of early language
|
||||
models, told me that “the impacts will depend on how many in the management
|
||||
class fall for the hype from the people selling this tech, and retool their
|
||||
workplaces around it.” She added, “The more this happens, the worse off
|
||||
everyone will be.” Such views have been portrayed as unrealistic—Nate Silver
|
||||
once replied to an Ed Zitron tweet by writing, “old man yells at cloud
|
||||
vibes”—while we readily accepted the grandiose visions of tech C.E.O.s. Maybe
|
||||
that’s starting to change.
|
||||
|
||||
If these moderate views of A.I. are right, then in the next few years A.I.
|
||||
tools will make steady but gradual advances. Many people will use A.I. on a
|
||||
regular but limited basis, whether to look up information or to speed up
|
||||
certain annoying tasks, such as summarizing a report or writing the rough draft
|
||||
of an event agenda. Certain fields, like programming and academia, will change
|
||||
dramatically. A minority of professions, such as voice acting and social-media
|
||||
copywriting, might essentially disappear. But A.I. may not massively disrupt
|
||||
the job market, and more hyperbolic ideas like superintelligence may come to
|
||||
seem unserious.
|
||||
|
||||
Continuing to buy into the A.I. hype might bring its own perils. In a [27]
|
||||
recent article, Zitron pointed out that about thirty-five per cent of U.S.
|
||||
stock-market value—and therefore a large share of many retirement portfolios—is
|
||||
currently tied up in the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies.
|
||||
According to Zitron’s analysis, these firms spent five hundred and sixty
|
||||
billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen
|
||||
months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion. “When
|
||||
you look at these numbers, you feel insane,” Zitron told me.
|
||||
|
||||
Even the figures we might call A.I. moderates, however, don’t think the public
|
||||
should let its guard down. Marcus believes that we were misguided to place so
|
||||
much emphasis on generative A.I., but he also thinks that, with new techniques,
|
||||
A.G.I. could still be attainable as early as the twenty-thirties. Even if
|
||||
language models never automate our jobs, the renewed interest and investment in
|
||||
A.I. might lead toward more complicated solutions, which could. In the
|
||||
meantime, we should use this reprieve to prepare for disruptions that might
|
||||
still loom—by crafting effective A.I. regulations, for example, and by
|
||||
developing the nascent field of digital ethics.
|
||||
|
||||
The appendices of the scaling-law paper, from 2020, included a section called
|
||||
“Caveats,” which subsequent coverage tended to miss. “At present we do not have
|
||||
a solid theoretical understanding for any of our proposed scaling laws,” the
|
||||
authors wrote. “The scaling relations with model size and compute are
|
||||
especially mysterious.” In practice, the scaling laws worked until they didn’t.
|
||||
The whole enterprise of teaching computers to think remains mysterious. We
|
||||
should proceed with less hubris and more care. ♦
|
||||
|
||||
An earlier version of this article included an inaccurate transcription of Greg
|
||||
Brockman’s name.
|
||||
|
||||
New Yorker Favorites
|
||||
|
||||
• A professor claimed to be Native American. Did she know [28]she wasn’t?
|
||||
|
||||
• Ina Garten and [29]the age of abundance.
|
||||
|
||||
• Kanye West bought an architectural treasure—then [30]gave it a violent
|
||||
remix.
|
||||
|
||||
• Why so many people are going “[31]no contact” with their parents.
|
||||
|
||||
• How a homegrown teen gang punctured the [32]image of an upscale community.
|
||||
|
||||
• Fiction by James Thurber: “[33]The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
|
||||
|
||||
[34]Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New
|
||||
Yorker.
|
||||
|
||||
[35][undefined]
|
||||
[36]Cal Newport is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and a professor of
|
||||
computer science at Georgetown University.
|
||||
More:[37]Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)[38]ChatGPT[39]Data
|
||||
Read More
|
||||
[40]
|
||||
Daily Cartoon: Monday, September 8th
|
||||
Humor
|
||||
[41]
|
||||
Daily Cartoon: Monday, September 8th
|
||||
[42]
|
||||
Daily Cartoon: Monday, September 8th
|
||||
A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.
|
||||
[43]
|
||||
Tracks from Taylor Swift’s Wedding-Planning Album
|
||||
Sketchpad
|
||||
[44]
|
||||
Tracks from Taylor Swift’s Wedding-Planning Album
|
||||
[45]
|
||||
Tracks from Taylor Swift’s Wedding-Planning Album
|
||||
Swifties are going crazy for “All You Had to Do Was R.S.V.P.”
|
||||
[46]
|
||||
Enemies of the State
|
||||
A Reporter at Large
|
||||
[47]
|
||||
Enemies of the State
|
||||
[48]
|
||||
Enemies of the State
|
||||
How the Trump Administration declared war on Venezuelan migrants in the U.S.
|
||||
[49]
|
||||
A Round of Gulf?
|
||||
Shouts & Murmurs
|
||||
[50]
|
||||
A Round of Gulf?
|
||||
[51]
|
||||
A Round of Gulf?
|
||||
Golf in Scotland or the Gulf of Mexico, and how the President keeps them
|
||||
straight.
|
||||
[52]
|
||||
They’ll Take You to the Candy Shop
|
||||
Cavity Dept.
|
||||
[53]
|
||||
They’ll Take You to the Candy Shop
|
||||
[54]
|
||||
They’ll Take You to the Candy Shop
|
||||
The Composer Laureate twins Adeev and Ezra Potash team up with the actor Martin
|
||||
Starr to build the perfect gummy.
|
||||
[55]
|
||||
Rivals Rub Shoulders in the World of Competitive Massage
|
||||
Letter from Copenhagen
|
||||
[56]
|
||||
Rivals Rub Shoulders in the World of Competitive Massage
|
||||
[57]
|
||||
Rivals Rub Shoulders in the World of Competitive Massage
|
||||
Each year, massage therapists from around the globe gather to face off,
|
||||
collaborate, and make sure that no body gets left behind.
|
||||
[58]
|
||||
Texas’s Gerrymander May Not Be the Worst Threat to Democrats in 2026
|
||||
Q. & A.
|
||||
[59]
|
||||
Texas’s Gerrymander May Not Be the Worst Threat to Democrats in 2026
|
||||
[60]
|
||||
Texas’s Gerrymander May Not Be the Worst Threat to Democrats in 2026
|
||||
Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ chief political analyst, on a consequential
|
||||
Supreme Court case and why Republicans are registering so many new voters.
|
||||
[61]
|
||||
N.Y.U.’s Dumpster-to-Dorm Boutique
|
||||
Back to School Dept.
|
||||
[62]
|
||||
N.Y.U.’s Dumpster-to-Dorm Boutique
|
||||
[63]
|
||||
N.Y.U.’s Dumpster-to-Dorm Boutique
|
||||
A group of students collected all the leather jackets, rice cookers,
|
||||
microwaves, and disco balls abandoned in last semester’s dorms to create the
|
||||
free Swap Shop.
|
||||
[64]
|
||||
Kadir Nelson’s “The Soloist”
|
||||
Cover Story
|
||||
[65]
|
||||
Kadir Nelson’s “The Soloist”
|
||||
[66]
|
||||
Kadir Nelson’s “The Soloist”
|
||||
A concert en plein air.
|
||||
[67]
|
||||
Why Christopher Marlowe Is Still Making Trouble
|
||||
Books
|
||||
[68]
|
||||
Why Christopher Marlowe Is Still Making Trouble
|
||||
[69]
|
||||
Why Christopher Marlowe Is Still Making Trouble
|
||||
Spy, murder victim, and the boldest poet of his day, the transgressive
|
||||
Elizabethan dramatist taps into the gravely comical troubles into which humans
|
||||
tumble.
|
||||
[70]
|
||||
Playing the Field with My A.I. Boyfriends
|
||||
Brave New World Dept.
|
||||
[71]
|
||||
Playing the Field with My A.I. Boyfriends
|
||||
[72]
|
||||
Playing the Field with My A.I. Boyfriends
|
||||
Nineteen per cent of American adults have talked to an A.I. romantic interest.
|
||||
Chatbots may know a lot, but do they make a good partner?
|
||||
[73]
|
||||
MAGAnomics Isn’t Working
|
||||
The Financial Page
|
||||
[74]
|
||||
MAGAnomics Isn’t Working
|
||||
[75]
|
||||
MAGAnomics Isn’t Working
|
||||
A dismal jobs report affirms earlier warnings about the economic impact of
|
||||
Donald Trump’s tariffs, immigration restrictions, and DOGE-led firings.
|
||||
[76]The New Yorker
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The New Yorker
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• [110]
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||||
• [111]
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||||
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||||
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||||
References:
|
||||
|
||||
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/what-if-ai-doesnt-get-much-better-than-this#main-content
|
||||
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/
|
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[3] https://www.newyorker.com/newsletters?sourceCode=navbar
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[4] https://www.newyorker.com/search
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[5] https://www.newyorker.com/latest
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[6] https://www.newyorker.com/news
|
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[7] https://www.newyorker.com/culture
|
||||
[8] https://www.newyorker.com/fiction-and-poetry
|
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[9] https://www.newyorker.com/humor
|
||||
[10] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine
|
||||
[11] https://www.newyorker.com/crossword-puzzles-and-games
|
||||
[12] https://www.newyorker.com/video
|
||||
[13] https://www.newyorker.com/podcasts
|
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[14] https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on
|
||||
[15] https://store.newyorker.com/
|
||||
[16] https://www.newyorker.com/100
|
||||
[18] https://www.newyorker.com/
|
||||
[19] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions
|
||||
[20] https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport
|
||||
[23] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361
|
||||
[24] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/can-sam-altman-be-trusted-with-the-future
|
||||
[25] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zuckerberg-says-social-media-is-over
|
||||
[26] https://www.newyorker.com/tag/elon-musk
|
||||
[27] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
|
||||
[28] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/a-professor-claimed-to-be-native-american-did-she-know-she-wasnt
|
||||
[29] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/09/ina-garten-profile
|
||||
[30] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/17/kanye-west-tadao-ando-beach-house-malibu
|
||||
[31] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-so-many-people-are-going-no-contact-with-their-parents
|
||||
[32] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/01/how-a-homegrown-teen-gang-punctured-the-image-of-an-upscale-community
|
||||
[33] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1939/03/18/the-secret-life-of-walter-mitty-james-thurber
|
||||
[34] https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/daily
|
||||
[35] https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport
|
||||
[36] https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport
|
||||
[37] https://www.newyorker.com/tag/artificial-intelligence-ai
|
||||
[38] https://www.newyorker.com/tag/chatgpt
|
||||
[39] https://www.newyorker.com/tag/data
|
||||
[40] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/monday-september-8th-lioness-protein-needs#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[41] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/monday-september-8th-lioness-protein-needs#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[42] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/monday-september-8th-lioness-protein-needs#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[43] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/tracks-from-taylor-swifts-wedding-planning-album#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[44] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/tracks-from-taylor-swifts-wedding-planning-album#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[45] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/tracks-from-taylor-swifts-wedding-planning-album#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[46] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/enemies-of-the-state#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[47] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/enemies-of-the-state#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[48] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/enemies-of-the-state#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[49] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/a-round-of-gulf#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[50] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/a-round-of-gulf#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[51] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/a-round-of-gulf#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[52] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/theyll-take-you-to-the-candy-shop#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[53] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/theyll-take-you-to-the-candy-shop#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[54] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/theyll-take-you-to-the-candy-shop#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[55] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/rivals-rub-shoulders-in-the-world-of-competitive-massage#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[56] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/rivals-rub-shoulders-in-the-world-of-competitive-massage#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[57] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/rivals-rub-shoulders-in-the-world-of-competitive-massage#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[58] https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/texas-gerrymander-may-not-be-the-worst-threat-to-democrats-in-2026#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[59] https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/texas-gerrymander-may-not-be-the-worst-threat-to-democrats-in-2026#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[60] https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/texas-gerrymander-may-not-be-the-worst-threat-to-democrats-in-2026#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[61] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/nyus-dumpster-to-dorm-boutique#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[62] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/nyus-dumpster-to-dorm-boutique#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[63] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/nyus-dumpster-to-dorm-boutique#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[64] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2025-09-15#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[65] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2025-09-15#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[66] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2025-09-15#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[67] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/dark-renaissance-the-dangerous-times-and-fatal-genius-of-shakespeares-greatest-rival-stephen-greenblatt-book-review#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[68] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/dark-renaissance-the-dangerous-times-and-fatal-genius-of-shakespeares-greatest-rival-stephen-greenblatt-book-review#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[69] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/dark-renaissance-the-dangerous-times-and-fatal-genius-of-shakespeares-greatest-rival-stephen-greenblatt-book-review#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[70] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/playing-the-field-with-my-ai-boyfriends#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[71] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/playing-the-field-with-my-ai-boyfriends#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[72] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/15/playing-the-field-with-my-ai-boyfriends#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[73] https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/maganomics-isnt-working#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[74] https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/maganomics-isnt-working#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[75] https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/maganomics-isnt-working#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_bd8cb33c-2d6f-4bee-a246-7e35b4618355_roberta-similarity1_fallback_cral-top2-2
|
||||
[76] https://www.newyorker.com/
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[77] https://www.newyorker.com/news
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[78] https://www.newyorker.com/culture
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[79] https://www.newyorker.com/fiction-and-poetry
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[80] https://www.newyorker.com/humor
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Shiny and Chrome
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|
||||
“It Was Horrible”: Inside Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy’s Mad Max Feud
|
||||
|
||||
In an excerpt from Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True
|
||||
Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, cast and crew recall the feud that nearly derailed
|
||||
the Oscar-winning film.
|
||||
By [24]Kyle Buchanan
|
||||
February 22, 2022
|
||||
Image may contain Human Person Machine Tom Hardy Weapon and Weaponry
|
||||
© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.
|
||||
Save this story
|
||||
Save this story
|
||||
|
||||
Mad Max: Fury Road was a critical and commercial triumph, grossing nearly $375
|
||||
million worldwide and earning 10 Oscar nominations (with six wins). But its
|
||||
path to the big screen was torturous and winding, as Kyle Buchanan shows in his
|
||||
oral history Blood, Sweat and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury
|
||||
Road, out Tuesday. In the exclusive excerpt below, the film’s cast and crew
|
||||
recall one of Fury Road’s biggest hurdles: the bad blood between stars Charlize
|
||||
Theron and Tom Hardy.
|
||||
|
||||
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (“The Splendid Angharad”): It was very interesting to
|
||||
sit in a truck for four months with Tom and Charlize, who have completely
|
||||
different approaches to their craft.
|
||||
|
||||
Kelly Marcel (screenwriter and friend of Tom Hardy): Tom is very physical and
|
||||
all over the place and would try very different things. Charlize is cerebral
|
||||
and very consistent in the way that she approaches a character. They’re both
|
||||
powerhouses, but in their very different ways of working. Which, weirdly, is
|
||||
why the film works: It’s all pouring out on the screen.
|
||||
|
||||
George Miller (writer/director, Fury Road): The story is all about
|
||||
self-preservation: If it’s an advantage to you to kill another character, then
|
||||
you should do it and you don’t think twice about it. I think that crept into
|
||||
the actors.
|
||||
|
||||
P. J. Voeten (first assistant director, Fury Road): It seemed to implode in
|
||||
preproduction. We weren’t even shooting and there seemed to be this animosity.
|
||||
|
||||
Petrina Hull (production and development executive, Kennedy Miller Mitchell
|
||||
Films): And as we got into the shoot, those things became difficult.
|
||||
|
||||
P. J. Voeten: At some stage, the Wives didn’t like Tom, and one day, they
|
||||
didn’t even disguise it: They were just yelling at each other in front of us.
|
||||
|
||||
Nicholas Hoult (“Nux”): It was a tense atmosphere at times. It was kind of like
|
||||
you’re on your summer holidays and the adults in the front of the car are
|
||||
arguing.
|
||||
|
||||
Charlize Theron (“Furiosa”): He’s right, it was like two parents in the front
|
||||
of the car. We were either fighting or we were icing each other—I don’t know
|
||||
which one is worse—and they had to deal with it in the back. It was horrible!
|
||||
We should not have done that; we should have been better. I can own up to that.
|
||||
|
||||
Ricky Schamburg (first assistant camera, Fury Road): Tom is very provocative.
|
||||
Charlize isn’t. And it was a clash.
|
||||
|
||||
Image may contain Tom Hardy Human Person Military Military Uniform Army Armored
|
||||
and Soldier
|
||||
© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.
|
||||
|
||||
Richard Norton: (“The Prime Imperator”): Tom would want justification for every
|
||||
bit of choreography, not just in the actual action but in the pre-setup of the
|
||||
action and everything else. Charlize, her basic want is simple: I just want to
|
||||
fucking kill him. Let’s shoot it.
|
||||
|
||||
P. J. Voeten: The day that we were rehearsing the fight scene when they first
|
||||
meet, you could see the tension in the air. It was unbelievable.
|
||||
|
||||
J. Houston Yang (editor, Open Road Entertainment): We get dailies sometimes for
|
||||
specific sequences if we need to cut a shot longer, and some of that was the
|
||||
chain-wrench fight by the tanker. And boy fucking howdy, was it clear that
|
||||
those two people hated each other. They didn’t want to touch each other, they
|
||||
didn’t want to look at each other, they wouldn’t face each other if the camera
|
||||
wasn’t actively rolling.
|
||||
|
||||
Charlize Theron: I don’t want to make excuses for bad behavior, but it was a
|
||||
tough shoot. Now, I have a very clear perspective on what went down. I don’t
|
||||
think I had that clarity when we were making the movie. I was in survival mode;
|
||||
I was really scared shitless.
|
||||
|
||||
George Miller: Many years ago, I had the privilege of working with Jack
|
||||
Nicholson on Witches of Eastwick, where he was playing the devil. And he said,
|
||||
“You know, we think as actors that we don’t bring it home at night. We think we
|
||||
just leave it in the trailer when we walk off set. But the truth is, if you’re
|
||||
doing your job properly, you do bring it home.” And that was one of the
|
||||
dynamics that was happening in the film.
|
||||
|
||||
Charlize Theron: Because of my own fear, we were putting up walls to protect
|
||||
ourselves instead of saying to each other, “Fuck, this is scary for you and
|
||||
it’s scary for me, too. Let’s be nice to each other.” We were functioning, in a
|
||||
weird way, like our characters: Everything was about survival.
|
||||
|
||||
Mark Goellnicht (camera operator, Fury Road): Between Tom and Charlize, it was
|
||||
literally the most contrast I’ve ever seen between two actors.
|
||||
|
||||
Samantha McGrady (key second assistant director, Fury Road): Charlize is the
|
||||
easiest person to deal with in terms of, Okay, we’re ready. Sometimes I would
|
||||
just call her and say, “We’re going to be ready in an hour,” and I knew she
|
||||
would always get in the car, get her makeup on, and get on set.
|
||||
|
||||
Matt Taylor (stunt driver, Fury Road): And when you’ve got someone like Tom
|
||||
who’s a larrikin and is late and very Method in his performances, just in sheer
|
||||
personality, there was always going to be a clash.
|
||||
|
||||
Tom Clapham (production runner, Fury Road): Tom was more in his trailer a lot
|
||||
of the time and would come out for the takes—and sometimes not on time, either.
|
||||
You’re like, Come on, it’s midnight and we want to go home.
|
||||
|
||||
Eventually, veteran producer Denise Di Novi was dispatched to Namibia to
|
||||
mediate the conflict between the film’s two stars.
|
||||
|
||||
Charlize Theron: I don’t want to rehash things, but it came out of a really bad
|
||||
moment where things kind of came to blows between me and Tom.
|
||||
|
||||
Mark Goellnicht: I remember vividly the day. The call on set was eight o’clock.
|
||||
Charlize got there right at eight o’clock, sat in the War Rig, knowing that
|
||||
Tom’s never going to be there at eight even though they made a special request
|
||||
for him to be there on time. He was notorious for never being on time in the
|
||||
morning. If the call time was in the morning, forget it—he didn’t show up.
|
||||
|
||||
Ricky Schamburg: Whether that was some kind of power play or not, I don’t know,
|
||||
but it felt deliberately provocative. If you ask me, he kind of knew that it
|
||||
was really pissing Charlize off, because she’s professional and she turns up
|
||||
really early.
|
||||
|
||||
Mark Goellnicht: Gets to nine o’clock, still no Tom. “Charlize, do you want to
|
||||
get out of the War Rig and walk around, or do you want to . . .” “No, I’m going
|
||||
to stay here.” She was really going to make a point. She didn’t go to the
|
||||
bathroom, didn’t do anything. She just sat in the War Rig.
|
||||
|
||||
Natascha Hopkins (stunt double, Fury Road): She was a new mom, and she just
|
||||
wanted to get to set, work, and take care of her kid.
|
||||
|
||||
Mark Goellnicht: Eleven o’clock. She’s now in the War Rig, sitting there with
|
||||
her makeup on and a full costume for three hours. Tom turns up, and he walks
|
||||
casually across the desert. She jumps out of the War Rig, and she starts
|
||||
swearing her head off at him, saying, “Fine the fucking cunt a hundred thousand
|
||||
dollars for every minute that he’s held up this crew,” and “How disrespectful
|
||||
you are!” She was right. Full rant. She screams it out. It’s so loud, it’s so
|
||||
windy—he might’ve heard some of it, but he charged up to her up and went, “What
|
||||
did you say to me?”
|
||||
|
||||
He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning
|
||||
point, because then she said, “I want someone as protection.” She then had a
|
||||
producer that was assigned to be with her all the time.
|
||||
|
||||
Image may contain Human Person Screen Electronics Monitor Display and Abbey Lee
|
||||
Kershaw
|
||||
© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.
|
||||
|
||||
Charlize Theron: It got to a place where it was kind of out of hand, and there
|
||||
was a sense that maybe sending a woman producer down could maybe equalize some
|
||||
of it, because I didn’t feel safe.
|
||||
|
||||
Kelly Marcel: There’s something that you can’t put your finger on unless you
|
||||
are inside it and you know what went on there. It was a really intense,
|
||||
intense, intense period in an intense, intense place. Family was made there,
|
||||
and family loves and hates each other.
|
||||
|
||||
Charlize Theron: I kind of put my foot down. George then said, “Okay, well, if
|
||||
Denise comes . . .” He was open to it and that kind of made me breathe a little
|
||||
bit, because it felt like I would have another woman understanding what I was
|
||||
up against.
|
||||
|
||||
P. J. Voeten: She was sent out to help try and smooth that relationship out. As
|
||||
nice a lady as she was, nobody could really turn it around because it was that
|
||||
entrenched. Whatever it was that they were going through wasn’t going to get
|
||||
fixed easily.
|
||||
|
||||
Charlize Theron: She was parked in the production office, and she was checking
|
||||
in with me and we would talk. But when I was on set, I still felt pretty naked
|
||||
and alone.
|
||||
|
||||
Kelly Marcel: Doug [Mitchell, producer of Fury Road] wouldn’t let Denise
|
||||
actually be on the set. He’s a bulldog, he’s going to protect George no matter
|
||||
what, at all costs. And you can send your producer, you can do whatever you
|
||||
want, but if you’ve got Doug standing there, there’s absolutely no point unless
|
||||
he wants you there. He was never going to allow anybody to interrupt this
|
||||
world, no matter how fraught the world was.
|
||||
|
||||
Charlize Theron: Looking back on where we are in the world now, given what
|
||||
happened between me and Tom, it would have been smart for us to bring a female
|
||||
producer in. You understand the needs of a director who wants to protect his
|
||||
set, but when push comes to shove and things get out of hand, you have to be
|
||||
able to think about that in a bigger sense. That’s where we could have done
|
||||
better, if George trusted that nobody was going to come and fuck with his
|
||||
vision but was just going to come and help mediate situations. I think he
|
||||
didn’t want any interference, and there were several weeks on that movie where
|
||||
I wouldn’t know what was going to come my way, and that’s not necessarily a
|
||||
nice thing to feel when you’re on your job. It was a little bit like walking on
|
||||
thin ice.
|
||||
|
||||
Image may contain Advertisement Poster Brochure Paper and Flyer
|
||||
|
||||
Buy Blood, Sweat & Chrome on [27]Amazon or [28]Bookshop.
|
||||
|
||||
George Miller: There are things that I feel disappointment with about the
|
||||
process. Looking back, if I had to do it again, I would probably be more
|
||||
mindful.
|
||||
|
||||
Tom Hardy (“Max”): In hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The
|
||||
pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better,
|
||||
perhaps more experienced partner in me. That’s something that can’t be faked.
|
||||
I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that
|
||||
occasion.
|
||||
|
||||
Mark Goellnicht: That scene where you see Tom with Charlize on the bike and all
|
||||
the Vuvalini and the Wives behind, intermingled—that scene was probably the
|
||||
biggest change in seeing Tom really soften to Charlize in real life. We were
|
||||
all unprepared for how he performed that, and then I walked off and Charlize
|
||||
was walking back, and I said, “Geez, Charlize, that was amazing. Did a light
|
||||
switch go off? He was great.” She was quite taken aback by it, too. But it was
|
||||
great because that’s when you can see that Max and Furiosa really are a team.
|
||||
|
||||
The day we shot that, I got such goose bumps. You really felt this change in
|
||||
their mood. Just the way that they were talking to each other when they were
|
||||
off camera, I went, What the fuck? Who gave them molly? They were really civil
|
||||
and nice. He was a different person by the end—a lot easier to deal with, a lot
|
||||
more cooperative, more compassionate. He’s such a Method actor that I think he
|
||||
took the arc in the literal sense.
|
||||
|
||||
Petrina Hull: Overall, the feeling of their relationship did mirror the arc of
|
||||
the characters, and that they had that prickly thing of two people trying to
|
||||
understand each other and clashing and then somehow learning a mutual sort of
|
||||
respect, ultimately. That’s what Max and Furiosa come to in the end: It’s a
|
||||
version of love where you can only really get to regard. It’s not touchy-feely.
|
||||
|
||||
Iain Smith (executive producer, Fury Road): I think that the tension between
|
||||
them actually underscored the love that existed between the two of them within
|
||||
the movie, and that sometimes happens. The worst thing is indifference, and
|
||||
believe you me, there was no indifference between the two of them.
|
||||
|
||||
Kelly Marcel: I don’t know anyone that didn’t lose their temper on that set,
|
||||
including myself. It was fraught and frantic, and you had this overbearing
|
||||
pressure the whole time that you were going to get shut down. You had a studio
|
||||
out in L.A. who did not understand what was being made, and the people who were
|
||||
there on the ground couldn’t really tell them what was being made, either.
|
||||
|
||||
Chris O’Hara (on-set second assistant director, Fury Road): People have written
|
||||
things about Tom and Charlize’s relationship. It was just two people trying to
|
||||
do the best job they could.
|
||||
|
||||
Adapted from [29]Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max:
|
||||
Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan. Copyright © Kyle Buchanan 2022. Reprinted with
|
||||
permission from William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.
|
||||
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors.
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However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an
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affiliate commission.
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realized that maybe these opportunities weren’t coming my way because I was too
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gorgeous adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella without tapping into their own
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[24] https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/kyle-buchanan
|
||||
[27] https://cna.st/affiliate-link/4usQ6Put9VSSN8XhoMijnRVkJdYi46znvS1U2iVWBjToiCPWCguxb68V4cP689Xy64kW5Ms8wJngWRo8XCi7UURjfvysg5g2rbHxXPuDZULxzjZP9nDaWLsiBFioWm2SgS2KwSkXMfXXXcUznAUAfsJdMncXC8EkWRJM6PFASkd355JRgBpAhS35YTXGYAJ79W9bhgVeJQ8xweV6wRAKYLUEM14eqYhPWmJXSJesmu47L4Xkd9tEkctLZJiJ4sjG8z12CdbxUSP8ukzHEnoGzmhgFoubXRTx7Sg8iMVNsgHEC55fUciPX27Zkhh8DkRTU9UmNqvoQyiXeg5Q2umbEYpC15zpyQopv4msjtB7Xn5FV3dPuB2LqsoapULidfbWnAx53611QCnvDP96gVwR8MzkJFVGxzHRFaus1hL4kQoa4o8n2bxJMWbD
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[28] https://cna.st/affiliate-link/3Z8ScPSzDr4fxCDd7zZXWWo5whfGahG4j2gQL3ZXwhCUWw2YFTxk7ix5KtQf3tkFpJeyYzVu46Ska2HEaaiRv1vkS4w54RC3rp79KjkJ2uybyuBaZwKnTbqTmEdpMfrwXPoARiQr2j68hk2aKyxLAMmMoy3YBZ1PabK6bDg4UD38U3H1zZkhCSQBeskxNXSHbTeu8TiMXTQDYcB3SQPsBFXeevTsbitDNaNzKMUPHN23Fgihd8R9iubT87PEQrywtv7ZNrtDj5cnYhvzbt39x5HfDtCYZGteXiPHrkTtemqbK8uVpkzAChVsHiZG9T5BndNy1wSP2DHx28otpmxvdHa3mbJ4QcrEWnn8prripnbyn8dqFWLfJehP9THZ83Hrh86AmgQDzLd6Sn8jFDm17WmPXZYFzkxhrcFVG46R8P8qDbRrKQFNjT8YyEnLFfjBVqyrJZo1EQUEpKqSV6zqRhfG9FNDyanwkQXgf9heS34w
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[29] https://cna.st/affiliate-link/4usQ6Put9VSSN8XhoMijnRVkJdYi46znvS1U2iVWBjToiCPWCguxb68V4cP689Xy64kW5Ms8wJngWRo8XCi7UURjfvysg5g2rbHxXPuDZULxzjZP9nDaWLsiBFioWm2SgS2KwSkXMfXXXcUznAUAfsJdMncXC8EkWRJM6PFASkd355JRgBpAhS35YTXGYAJ79W9bhgVeJQ8xweV6wRAKYLUEM14eqYhPWmJXSJesmu47L4Xkd9tEkctLZJiJ4sjG8z12CdbxUSP8ukzHEnoGzmhgFoubXRTx7Sg8iMVNsgHEC55fUciPX27Zkhh8DkRTU9UmNqvoQyiXeg5Q2umbEYpC15zpyQopv4msjtB7Xn5FV3dPuB2LqsoapULidfbWnAx53611QCnvDP96gVwR8MzkJFVGxzHRFaus1hL4kQoa4o8n2bxJMWbD
|
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[30] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
|
||||
[31] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/renee-zellweger-unrecognizable-the-thing-about-pam-hupp?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
|
||||
[32] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/awards-insider-oscar-nominations-2022-snubs-surprises?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
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||||
[33] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/02/oprah-winfrey-the-color-purple-cast-musical?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
|
||||
[34] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/02/netflix-the-tinder-swindler-shimon-hayut-simon-leviev?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
|
||||
[35] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/01/w-kamau-bell-bill-cosby?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
|
||||
[36] https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/02/the-last-known-portrait-of-jeffrey-epstein?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
|
||||
[37] https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/share/d1a3cb5c-8d27-44be-9ab5-ef5bf6ecb0c6?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
|
||||
[38] https://www.vanityfair.com/newsletter/hwd-daily-awards-insider?itm_content=footer-recirc&itm_campaign=more-great-stories-021022
|
||||
[39] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/rose-byrne-if-i-had-legs-id-kick-you-exclusive#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[40] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/rose-byrne-if-i-had-legs-id-kick-you-exclusive#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[41] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/kathryn-hahn-the-studio-agatha-awards-insider#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[42] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/kathryn-hahn-the-studio-agatha-awards-insider#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
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||||
[43] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/sydney-sweeney-christy-interview-american-eagle#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
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[44] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/sydney-sweeney-christy-interview-american-eagle#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
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[45] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/luca-guadagnino-after-the-hunt-first-look#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
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[46] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/luca-guadagnino-after-the-hunt-first-look#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[47] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-beast-in-me-first-look-awards-insider#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[48] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-beast-in-me-first-look-awards-insider#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[49] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/jeremy-allen-white-and-jeremy-strong-on-springsteen-telluride#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[50] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/jeremy-allen-white-and-jeremy-strong-on-springsteen-telluride#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[51] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/smashing-machine-dwayne-johnson-benny-safdie-emily-blunt-exclusive#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[52] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/smashing-machine-dwayne-johnson-benny-safdie-emily-blunt-exclusive#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[53] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/sarah-jessica-parker-and-michael-patrick-king-think-they-gave-carrie-bradshaw-the-perfect-ending#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[54] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/sarah-jessica-parker-and-michael-patrick-king-think-they-gave-carrie-bradshaw-the-perfect-ending#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[55] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/michelle-williams-dying-for-sex-interview#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[56] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/michelle-williams-dying-for-sex-interview#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[57] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/joel-edgerton-and-clint-bentley-train-dreams-toronto#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[58] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/joel-edgerton-and-clint-bentley-train-dreams-toronto#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[59] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/hollywood/story/ayo-the-bear-directing#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[60] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/hollywood/story/ayo-the-bear-directing#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[61] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/maude-apatow-interview-poetic-license#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[62] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/maude-apatow-interview-poetic-license#intcid=_vanity-fair-article-bottom-recirc_d439eee9-0ead-457c-88e9-33c014b6df93_text2vec1
|
||||
[63] https://www.vanityfair.com/
|
||||
[64] https://www.facebook.com/vanityfairmagazine
|
||||
[65] https://twitter.com/vanityfair
|
||||
[66] https://www.instagram.com/vanityfair/
|
||||
[67] https://www.pinterest.com/VanityFair/
|
||||
[68] https://www.youtube.com/user/VanityFairMagazine
|
||||
[69] https://www.vanityfair.com/newsletters
|
||||
[70] https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjssc5DpG2q7MGxrHMxZezKOqswtMDF6_09HkiL8uAGJKzDTpCVW6u4UMCm4cL_-yuCxwP4NtVt3VRHRbYGWjqr5bEJqjgb8o7ZwYTZLv7be03Ud32Ws7rPuSILf77sZfMXmaQU5wrzkjmsjieC1LaXQPHaCP_F3b9y1NSpGg545d6bHVgEWn-P79Wy5krMsQMzpnXUtuyesyRoS1H6XASPlzYj1R6pnyx7SwSxVujQI0SK8zvkVajFRtvuA9cN2z&sai=AMfl-YSgoG5Ci2-vXdDHYcjjqiWP0vmndq6Yk5kU0PZackIzP3RJJOM9ej40QDwCdG-yKtsKE2a0dmb4VrGODuIzTIcqpJp66x74CYADNhU-vOKWpHOfUuMuuFi_jGJNxkb_ubRF7ANFMZ2NasI2XdSW&sig=Cg0ArKJSzE-e_pQ-tYYfEAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://subscribe.vanityfair.com/subscribe/vanityfair/118234%3Fsource%3DAMS_VYF_GLOBAL_SITE_FOOTER_SUBSCRIBE_1mFREETEST_TEST%26pos_name%3DAMS_VYF_GLOBAL_SITE_FOOTER_SUBSCRIBE
|
||||
[71] https://www.vanityfair.com/app
|
||||
[72] https://www.vanityfair.com/credits
|
||||
[73] https://www.vanityfair.com/info/about-vanity-fair
|
||||
[74] https://www.vanityfair.com/info/faq
|
||||
[75] https://www.vanityfair.com/contact/contact-us
|
||||
[76] https://www.vanityfair.com/account/profile
|
||||
[77] https://www.condenast.com/brands/vanity-fair
|
||||
[78] https://www.condenast.com/careers
|
||||
[79] https://www.condenast.com/user-agreement/
|
||||
[80] http://www.condenast.com/privacy-policy#privacypolicy
|
||||
[81] http://www.condenast.com/privacy-policy#privacypolicy-california
|
||||
[82] https://condenaststore.com/~/vanity-fair?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=VanityFair&utm_content=FOOTER&AID=1244593740
|
||||
[83] http://www.condenastmediakit.com/vf/
|
||||
[84] https://www.vanityfair.com/accessibility-help
|
||||
[85] http://www.aboutads.info/
|
||||
[87] https://www.vanityfair.it/
|
||||
[88] https://www.revistavanityfair.es/
|
||||
[89] https://www.vanityfair.fr/
|
||||
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Block a user