Pro-AI sentiment seems to anchor on productivity hacks that remove humanity, such as “Claude code just KILLED therapists” or “3 Claude skills to replace talking to your children”. Anti-AI sentiment, while I understand where it’s coming from and agree in many cases, is usually anchored in a fundamental misunderstanding of how deeply embedded AI is in our current world and how it works, resulting in a “dig your head in the sand” vibe.

Neither of those cut it for creating real world impact. It is now nearly impossible to decouple conversations about AI policy and ethics from understanding the technical mechanics of AI, and therefore it is critical to give yourself the vocabulary to have these conversations to effectively express your stance. As examples, here’s some controversial ethics/politics/cultural topics and the technicals behind them:

US vs. China tech rivalry → open-source vs. open-weight vs. close-source models, data localization

Income taxes if AI takes over white collar work → ai models vs agents, server geography

The physical destruction of books for AI training → training vs inference, model collapse

You could have conversations about these topics without understanding the technicals, but at scale that opens up the opportunity for super ai-pilled people to take over the conversation over our future AI policy and guardrails.

So here’s some resources that will equip you with enough vocabulary and understanding to have have conversations about AI:

1. the full lifecycle of an AI query, including data centers and training vs. inference

   1. MIT technology review (they have a whole series on AI’s environmental impact that I love too): link

   2. the different types of data centers (esp hyperscalers for ai): link

2. open-source vs. open-weight vs. closed-source models

   1. ACLU explainer (I did not think that the ACLU would do a deep dive on open vs. closed models but here we are, and it is excellent): link

   2. NPR’s overview of why open does not necessarily mean good: link

3. what’s an ai agent, really?

   1. Langchain’s (slightly deep cut) of the anatomy of an agent harness: link

Let me know if there’s any resources you’ve liked that I should read, and thanks for being here and joining me on my mini manifestos <3

All the best,

Carol

pause for time to feel shock

I was blown away by this, not necessarily because I disagreed with him in the moment, but because I have never thought about reading as a way to communicate facts. The beauty of reading, in my opinion, comes from expanding your capacity for perspectives, your attention span, and capacity for friction, which then leads to a much stronger intuition about a whole bunch of things and stronger ability to articulate yourself. And then I thought about Love Island, a show I recently started watching, and the participants’ insane lack of ability to properly articulate themselves and their perspectives.

This then led me to a deep rabbit hole learning about how we currently have a literacy crisis in the United States propped up by a dependence on short form media and AI, so here’s the list of resources I marinated in:

• [article] The Great Cognitive Divide by Sinead Bovell (link)

• [research] Anthropic’s research on how AI assistance impacts coding skills (link)

• [article] The End of Reading is Here by Rose Horowitch (link)

• [research] IES’s research on the lack of interpretation abilities by U.S. adults (link)

• [conversation] UChicago interview and article about reading in the age of AI (link)

Here’s my instagram post about all of this, with some expansions of my thoughts above:

morning brew newsletter (general news, markets): link

retail brew newsletter (consumer trends): link

roko’s basilisk (ai): link

essayists, blogs, podcasts:

nadia.xyz (a set of mini-dissertations by a researcher/engineer that cover life+technical experiments): link

naval ravikant (an industrial philosopher of sorts): link

reddit’s tech blog (obviously its own subreddit, r/RedditEng): link

80000 hours podcast (deep cuts on ai and the future): link

books:

exhalation by ted chiang (speculative fiction, some philosophy, short stories): link

welcome to the monkey house by kurt vonnegut (sci-fi+tech through satire, short stories): link

let the great world spin by colum mccann (historical fiction, nyc) (this is actually my favorite book ever): link