July 2026 AI links
(continues June 2026 AI links)

Cory Doctorow:

...AI's pitch to bosses is that they can fire most of their workers in order to terrorize the remainder into tolerating a working life wherein they are made to mark the AI's homework, at superhuman speed, and to assume the blame when it goes wrong. This is obviously a terrible way to write code

...the capital was raised for AI requires that it produce as many reverse centaurs as possible, because the only way to recoup the farcical sums associated with AI production is to fire millions of workers and replace them with defective chatbots backstopped by the jobspocalypse's terrorized survivors, who can be made to endlessly toil away at marking the AI's homework because there are so many other workers who'll take their jobs if they refuse

County with 37 data centers tells schools to turn off lights to save electricity (Henrico VA)

4vii26

AI Is Waiting for Its Wharton Moment Mihailo Zoin at Medium

...Peter Cappelli, a Wharton management professor, says something that should worry us more than it currently does: the battle being fought today over artificial intelligence — who controls the reorganization of work, whether management imposes change from the top or employees retain autonomy — is the same battle that was fought over scientific management more than a century ago. Frederick Taylor systematized work on factory floors. Today AI systematizes work in offices. The tool changed. The conflict didn't.

...So we have three waves. The factory decentralized production. The computer decentralized execution. The internet decentralized distribution. Each time, the same scenario repeated: technology raced ahead, institutions lagged behind, and the gap between those who understood the new system and those who didn't grew wider before anyone managed to close it.

...Previous waves decentralized access to a tool. The personal computer gave you the power to run a calculation. The internet gave you the power to publish and distribute. In both cases, you were still the one doing the reasoning — the machine simply executed what you told it, and you judged whether the result was correct. Artificial intelligence does something fundamentally different. It doesn't just decentralize execution — it decentralizes judgment itself. The system doesn't just give you a tool to compute something; it hands you a finished conclusion, delivered in a confident, authoritative tone, regardless of whether that conclusion is actually correct. This is a third, deeper layer of democratization, and it carries a risk the earlier waves didn't carry to the same degree: the risk of accepting a conclusion because it sounds convincing, not because we verified it.

5vii26

Alien v. Predator or MAGA meets AI - a "crossover" monument to the USA at 250 Adam Tooze

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Thank you for your support of the Chartbook project. If you would like to share this post with a friend, click here. Share Chartbook Chartbook 456 Alien v. Predator or MAGA meets AI - a "crossover" monument to the USA at 250. Adam Tooze

We live in a world of divergent, incongruent but overlapping shocks. In recent years, I've been trying to capture this agglomeration of heterogeneous historical forces with the notion of the polycrisis. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the USA it seems as though we may need a more graphic image.

In pop culture there is a genre known as "crossover", where the main protagonists of different fictional universes — often monsters — are brought together in one narrative space.

...From the point of view of anyone trying to narrate our current reality, such crossovers may serve as a fertile image: Not one nightmare, not one drama, not one cast of "bad guys" v. "good guys", but distinct, overlapping dystopias, in a giant melange.

In 2026 we have the China shock discourse — the global division of labour being upended by China's gigantic growth model -—some sort of East Asian mechatronic giant, more or less effectively corralled by the CPC on a mission of historic national rejuvenation.

Then we have the war-mongering "middle powers" — the likes of Russia, Israel, UAE unleashing regional mayhem.

And we have the US, still straddling the world with its military and financial infrastructure, but caught internally by the dynamics of MAGA and AI.

...Does "America" have a program? Does it form anything resembling a single coherent power, whether for better or worse? At this point, surely, it would be embarrassing to claim so. Better surely to concede that elite coherence has collapsed and that the US as it enters its second quarter millennium, is best thought of not as a single coherent agent, but as an incubator, a petri dish, a "zone" from which things emerge that defy summation in a single graphic image.

...it was, in fact, from the midst of that process of transformation, in the 1930s and 1940s, that the comic book imagination of the US emerged. So if we grant that the US has always been a "zone" as much as a single coherent state, let us concede that Jefferson or suburban imagery is candy coated. In the current moment, the environment that comes to mind is not a slave-based idyll like Jefferson's Monticello, but Batman's Gotham city — a mythical, corrupt and depraved urban sprawl, located somewhere in New Jersey.

...On the national anniversary, the USA as "zone" is presided over by a president who is shamelessly engaged in haphazard and fly-by-night self-enrichment to the tune of a few billion dollars or so, mainly through crypto scams. Meanwhile, the broligarchs — the real lords of Gotham city — play for the serious money, with rockets, chips, AI models, a hundred billion, a trillion at a time.

For birthday entertainment, the White House hosts cage fights.

The Pentagon is a war-fighting machine that has command-chain issues and unleashes mayhem with global implications in coalitions with other powers, for which it lacks any obvious national rationale.

Dotted across this landscape there are, of course, much private prosperity, livable communities, comfortable suburbs and highly potent centers of innovation. In those centers engineers from all over the world work to generate new technologies of finance, fossil energy and tech. If we are looking for powerful, world-changing monsters in Gotham city, right now, AI is where it is at.