Severin Matusek

But cognitive atrophy - that can happen instantly. Someone can start reflexively outsourcing their thinking today, and the degradation begins immediately. No approval process required. No implementation timeline. No procurement cycle. Just a quiet erosion of capability, person by person, decision by decision. And it compounds. Every month of... See more

So is it possible to build AI tools that can help us all, rather than simply bolstering the dizzying wealth of a small number of tech companies? Is it possible to create an AI that democratises more than just financial insecurity for the majority of people—simply shifting a greater percentage of people below the wealth disparity gap rather than... See more

Spawning is different. Instead of lifting fragments, you train a model on an artist’s entire body of work and generate new material in their style. Clear lineage, but fuzzy origins. Sampling dealt in citation. Spawning touches the DNA. This distinction matters because spawning raises the stakes in ways that sampling never did. When your work trains... See more

A number of recent studies, while small in scale, have suggested that we grieve the loss of friction that comes from skipping over time-intensive or frustrating tasks, particularly in creative scenarios.

To me, it’s very important to think about speculative fiction and worldmaking as two approaches for better orienting ourselves to the present, rather than conjuring escapist utopian futures that will never arrive.

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.

Writing, more visibly and unquestionably today than ever, is inherently networked. It begins and remains connected to its subject, and to everything else, becoming part of it. It acts. It does work. It lives. When we write, we reconfigure the world.