Cam Jones

You don’t need a roadmap, you need caffeine and unreasonable optimism

Spotify’s current incentives indicate that they’ll continue moving away from promoting human-made (and thus independently owned) music and toward anonymous first-party (and, inevitably, AI-generated) background music. As the most widely used music streaming platform gradually transforms into an AI white noise company, where does that leave recorded... See more

The thing about being a radical centrist is that you get into twice as many fights as everyone else.

I argue with creatives who insist that AIs are just plagiarism machines. They're not. It's true that these tools enable humans to plagiarize more easily—yes, that's a legitimate concern. But the AIs themselves don't memorize copyrighted works like... See more

When young people don't date or marry or start families, that's the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.

And when, because people don't pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that's the last squeeze, the tightest part of

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This is where Cowen’s self-identification as an “idiot” acquires weight. He does not mean to glorify ignorance. He means to valorize receptivity. To be the idiot in the age of AI is to stand at the edge of one’s own knowledge and resist the impulse to retreat. It is not a capitulation; it is a discipline.

When Cowen turns to geopolitics, his tone tightens. Small countries, he warns, will not build their own AI systems. They will choose, American or Chinese. The implications are not just technological but cultural, epistemic, and moral. The new colonialism will be quiet. It will arrive through licensing agreements and user interfaces. It will... See more