Whoever controls AI infrastructure — compute, models, data and cloud — will shape the economic and political order of the 21st century. The U.S. and China understand this and are mobilizing every instrument of statecraft to secure supremacy. Europe must understand it too.
The more the world fills with slop, the more human gestures stand out and reverberate with new meaning. Accessing glib simulations of information will have become commoditized, but someone actually telling you something, anything, will seem more important than ever.
I asked Deresiewicz if he felt anything had changed in the 13 years since he wrote the piece. Back then, he says, “I was still in that mindset of ‘selling out is evil.’” When he began research on his next book, however, “I realized that was kind of an outdated, privileged, and intensely unrealistic attitude,” he says. “Now, you don’t have a choice,... See more
In its most popular use, worldbuilding refers to a practice derived from fantasy or science fiction, where systems, characters, and mechanics assemble to satisfy the expectation that a fictional world should be convincing and complete. More broadly, it should be stated, worldbuilding is simply part of writing fiction: Sally Rooney does... See more