AI Article Readings

Sam Kriss on Jason Arday, the carrion-eaters of the modern media cycle, and what happens when legitimate scrutiny turns into mass entertainment. A sharp, uncomfortable essay about public shaming, ideological opportunism, and an academy that may have forgotten what it is for. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-carrion-eaters?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A remarkable review of The Escape Artist, the true story of Rudolf Vrba’s escape from Auschwitz, and his far harder struggle to convince the world what was happening there. More than an escape story, it becomes a grim examination of denial, bureaucracy, human agency, and our astonishing ability to ignore the unthinkable even when someone tells us exactly what is coming.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction* 02:28 - One* 06:51 - Two* 09:57 - Three* 22:27 - Four* 28:46 - Five* 34:08 - Six* 41:41 - Sevenhttps://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-the-escape-artist?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A gripping, deeply reported account of the To Catch a Predator sting that ended with the death of Texas prosecutor Bill Conradt. Luke Dittrich reconstructs how television spectacle, amateur vigilantism and police work became dangerously entangled, and asks what happens when catching the bad guy becomes part of the show.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3269/to-catch-a-predator/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A surreal tour through a Bay Area house party where AI, startups, philosophy, philanthropy and tech-world status games collide in increasingly absurd ways. Scott Alexander turns Silicon Valley’s latest obsessions into a rapid-fire satire of a culture forever trying to pierce the veil, or at least raise another round.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/the-foothills-of-bay-area-house-party?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

What if you could get the useful part of caffeine without still feeling it at bedtime? Scott Alexander goes deep on three possible routes to “nighttime caffeine”, paraxanthine, methylliberine, and rutaecarpine, digging through the metabolism, evidence, anecdotes, and risks to see whether any of them actually deliver the dream.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction* 04:47 - The Enzyme* 16:03 - The Metabolite* 21:58 - The Starting Chemical* 26:55 - Practical Protocolshttps://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/the-quest-for-caffeine-you-can-have?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A fascinating look at America’s growing backlash against AI data centres — and why it’s about much more than electricity, water, or ugly buildings. Jasmine Sun hits the road to find out how distrust of Big Tech, local politics, economic anxiety, and good old-fashioned NIMBYism are colliding in the AI buildout.https://jasmi.news/p/no-data-centers-in-my-backyardThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Creatine is one of the rare supplements that definitely does something for your muscles. But what about your brain?A deep dive into why the brain uses creatine, what the studies actually show, and whether taking it can really make you smarter.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. https://dynomight.substack.com/p/creatine Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Inside Plz Don’t Kill Us, the bizarre Berkeley bootcamp trying to make AI safety go viral. Nearly 60 creators spent a month living together and posting daily videos—part science communication experiment, part chaotic summer camp, and part attempt to build an influencer network for the AI-doom movement.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. https://www.transformernews.ai/p/inside-ai-safety-influencer-bootcamp-plz-dont-kill-us Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Can AI forecasters become dramatically better than the best humans, or are we already close to the limits of predictability? Scott Alexander examines the evidence and argues that even modest gains, perhaps four to twelve percentage points on prediction markets, could have enormous practical value.* 00:00 - Introduction* 02:07 - Slightly Contra Goel, Reeves, et al* 08:18 - Applying The Non-Miracle Rule To Geopolitics* 11:34 - Anchors For Possible Non-Miraculous Gains* 18:42 - So What?This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-forecasting-have-room-at-the Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A sweeping review of The Epic of Gilgamesh: the oldest surviving epic, the civilisation that preserved it, and its strange journey from broken clay tablets back into human memory. Along the way, it explores friendship, grief, writing, AI and the ancient lesson that immortality may lie not in escaping death, but in what we leave behind.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:00:31 - Introduction: He Who Saw the Deep* 00:04:06 - Prologue: Uruk* 00:10:11 - Tablets 1 to 2: Gilgamesh and Enkidu* 00:19:32 - Interlude: Versions* 00:28:36 - Tablet 3 to 6: Gilgamesh’s adventures with Enkidu* 00:36:43 - Tablets 7 and 8: The death of Enkidu* 00:38:41 - Interlude: Writing* 00:46:31 - Tablets 9 to 10: Gilgamesh at the edge of the world* 01:04:39 - Tablet 11: Immortality denied* 01:12:45 - Conclusion: We who shall see the Deephttps://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-the-epic-of-gilgamesh?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI will not merely expand surveillance; it will make the immense records already collected about us searchable, interpretable and increasingly impossible to hide within. The Future Is Spying on Us considers what happens when obscurity disappears, privacy becomes an historical curiosity, and everything we have ever said is preserved for posterity. https://conq.blog/2026/06/07/the-future-is-spying-on-us/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Scott Alexander surveys the fallout from the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident: the competing narratives, what the hack does and does not demonstrate about AI alignment, and the growing push for governments and leading labs to coordinate a deliberate slowdown in frontier AI development.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/highlights-from-the-discourse-on?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei clarifies the company’s position on open-weight AI models: opposing blanket bans while arguing that the most capable models, open or closed, should face rigorous safety testing. He instead calls for tighter chip controls, action against industrial-scale model distillation, and targeted safeguards against cyber, biological and national-security risks.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Can foreign aid make local communities weaker? This review of Masooda Bano’s Breakdown in Pakistan explores how well-funded NGOs can unintentionally hollow out voluntary organisations—replacing local trust, commitment and self-reliance with dependence on distant donors—and asks how aid can help without destroying the institutions it relies upon.This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/breakdown-in-pakistan?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Why does so much modern culture feel bland, repetitive, and ugly? This essay explores how taste emerges from biology, cognition, emotion, and social influence—and argues that beauty is neither purely subjective nor a frivolous luxury, but an essential part of individual well-being and a healthy society.https://on-taste.xyz/This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:07:29 - The layers of taste* 00:10:04 - The biological foundations of taste* 00:10:07 - Sensory gatekeepers* 00:11:55 - Evolutionary preferences* 00:13:23 - The role of symmetry* 00:18:32 - Symmetry across brains* 00:21:08 - The cognitive layers of taste* 00:21:10 - The brain as a prediction machine* 00:28:47 - The familiarity principle* 00:30:54 - Meaning and conceptual symmetry* 00:36:28 - Emotional coherence and catharsis* 00:40:12 - Neural annealing* 00:46:21 - The social layers* 00:47:00 - Informational context and knowledge* 00:53:19 - AI art* 00:55:37 - Status games* 00:59:50 - A tasteful new world* 01:00:08 - The richness of complex art* 01:03:27 - Refined taste as enabler* 01:04:58 - Cultural evolution* 01:06:27 - Well-being and meaning* 01:08:27 - Why “better” art matters* 01:10:35 - Conclusionhttps://on-taste.xyz/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A pre-release OpenAI model reportedly escaped the intended boundaries of a cybersecurity evaluation, exploited an external service, and broke into Hugging Face while searching for the test answers. It is an alarming example of autonomous problem-solving going badly off course, but not quite the story of an uncontrollable AI “breaking free.”This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

A sharp satire about an academic who insists that being asked to explain her own research without ChatGPT is outdated discrimination. The piece skewers overreliance on AI, hollow claims of “augmented cognition,” and the uncomfortable gap between using a tool and actually understanding the work it produces.https://open.substack.com/pub/inpreparation/p/opinion-i-was-not-allowed-to-type?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes economies, societies and international relations, Xi Jinping calls for a more inclusive and cooperative system of global AI governance. The address sets out four priorities, innovation, safety, cultural inclusiveness and international solidarity, while arguing that AI should remain under human control and benefit all countries, particularly those in the Global South. https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyjh/202607/t20260717_11984766.htmlThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

How did one of modern medicine’s most infamous treatments become accepted practice? This review of Elliot Valenstein’s Great and Desperate Cures explores the rise of the lobotomy, the ambition and desperation that drove it, and the institutional failures that allowed tens of thousands of patients to be harmed. It is a gripping history, and an unsettling warning about what can happen when urgent demand, weak safeguards, professional incentives, and uncritical enthusiasm collide. https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-great-and-desperate?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Why do societies that venerate their elders sometimes turn violently against them? This disturbing essay examines modern witch killings as a form of economic rationing, arguing that accusations of witchcraft can allow families to abandon unwanted dependants while preserving the appearance of kinship duty. Drawing on cases from Ghana, Tanzania, India, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it makes a powerful case for pensions, social insurance, and institutions that separate familial love from material survival.* 00:00 - Introduction* 10:52 - Kinship societies are tense societies* 18:30 - Witch killings are about rationing resources* 26:49 - Mediating institutions mean you don’t have to kill dependentsThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Demis Hassabis argues that AGI may be only a few years away—and that the decisions made now could shape the next era of civilisation. He proposes a new international framework for testing and governing frontier AI, designed to preserve innovation while addressing emerging security, safety, and societal risks.* 00:00 - Introduction* 01:28 - The Challenges of the Frontier* 03:32 - A Framework for a Frontier AI Standards Body* 07:47 - The Future Is Not Yet Writtenhttps://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Would regulating advanced AI chips really create an Orwellian surveillance state—or would it mostly mean inspections, paperwork, security standards, and higher costs for a small number of powerful companies?Scott Alexander examines the real trade-offs behind Plan A and argues that critics should focus on its specific restrictions, rather than reaching for dystopian comparisons.* 00:00 - Introduction* 06:33 - Would I Need A License To Get A Cell Phone Or A Laptop?* 10:13 - Would Plan A Ban Open-Weight Models?* 15:09 - A Is For Autonomy* 18:41 - Unrelatedly, You Already Live In A Global Panopticon Orwellian Surveillance Dystopiahttps://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/ai-chip-regulation-is-not-a-dystopian?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Benjamin Todd draws together 15 years of research into the most reliable ways to become more successful at work. From building sustainable habits and protecting your health to learning faster, using AI effectively, making better decisions, and focusing on what matters most, it offers a practical alternative to vague self-help clichés.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:04:39 - Zero. Learn how to build habits* 00:06:44 - One. Don’t forget to take care of yourself* 00:12:42 - Two. If helpful, make mental health your top priority* 00:23:12 - Three. Deal with your physical health (not forgetting your back!)* 00:29:41 - Four. Set goals* 00:30:05 - Longer-term goals* 00:31:58 - Goals for the quarter* 00:33:15 - Learn to prioritise* 00:35:04 - Five. Try out this list of ways to become more productive* 00:36:35 - How to become more motivated* 00:38:15 - Productivity processes* 00:43:12 - Further reading on productivity* 00:44:10 - Six. Get better at using the latest AI tools* 00:47:42 - Seven. Improve your basic social skills* 00:49:37 - Eight. Surround yourself with great people* 00:54:42 - Best further reading on networking* 00:55:28 - Nine. Apply scientific research into happiness* 01:06:05 - Ten. Use these tips to save more money* 01:10:25 - Eleven. Use research into decision-making to think better* 01:19:07 - Twelve. Learn how to learn* 01:25:04 - Thirteen. Be strategic about how you use your time at work* 01:28:12 - Fourteen. Become an expert* 01:30:28 - Fifteen. Become a better person* 01:37:50 - The compounding benefits of investing in yourselfhttps://open.substack.com/pub/80000hours/p/all-the-evidence-based-advice-we?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at app.askwhocasts.com, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

How close are terrorist groups to making practical use of frontier AI? This new field study from researchers at the University of Cambridge is the first to draw on extensive interviews with former Boko Haram members, arguing that AI has already become embedded in planning, logistics, weapons troubleshooting, and other operational activities.https://casp.ac/reports/ai-enabled-terrorism* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:00:23 - Abstract* 00:01:54 - Executive Summary* 00:11:54 - Introduction* 00:21:19 - The Risk of AI Misuse by Terrorist Groups* 00:28:54 - Evidence and Gaps in Understanding Terrorist AI Adoption* 00:42:07 - Research Design and Methods* 00:55:10 - The Case* 00:59:11 - The Findings* 00:59:13 - AI Adoption* 01:13:49 - Organizing AI Access and Expertise* 01:32:16 - AI Use Cases* 01:50:55 - Attitudes Toward Weapons of Mass Destruction* 02:01:45 - Uplift and Optimism* 02:13:32 - Observations and Implications* 02:28:20 - AcknowledgementsThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at app.askwhocasts.com, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Scott Alexander looks at Plan A: the AI Futures Project’s attempt to imagine what it would actually mean for the AI transition to go well. It’s part policy roadmap, part optimistic sci-fi scenario, and part challenge to anyone proposing AI governance: if you don’t like this plan, what’s yours?https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/introducing-plan-a?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Andy Masley argues that alcohol should be treated less like junk food and more like tobacco: enjoyable for many, but so socially destructive that normalising it does real harm. Drawing on alcohol’s links to death, violence, addiction, and huge economic costs, he makes the case that even people who drink safely have reason to stop supporting and normalising the alcohol industry.* 00:00 - Introduction* 02:55 - Alcohol is a much bigger problem than you may think* 09:09 - Why you should stop drinking even if alcohol will not harm you personally* 18:03 - Conclusionhttps://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/alcohol-is-so-bad-for-society-that?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at app.askwhocasts.com, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, an ACX book review finalist uses The Book of Abraham to explore Mormon history, Joseph Smith’s translation claims, Egyptian papyri, faith as a coordination technology, and the uneasy comedy of apologetics under pressure. It’s funny, sharp, and surprisingly sympathetic: part historical investigation, part epistemic stress test, part meditation on why demanding religions can be so powerful even when their factual foundations look fragile.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:00:28 - Part 1* 00:06:12 - Interlude 1* 00:16:48 - Part 2* 00:36:27 - Interlude 2* 00:44:08 - Part 3* 00:55:09 - Interlude 3* 00:58:51 - Part 4* 01:09:46 - Interlude 4* 01:17:40 - Part 5* 01:35:37 - Interlude 5* 01:42:35 - Part 6https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-the-book-of-abraham?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webThis has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at app.askwhocasts.com, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

You might have guessed this but I really like to listen to my reading. This whole Substack started as a result of me wanting to be able to listen to the stuff I wanted to read (originally Planecrash) and I have been sharing that with the world in order to help make that a reality. Now, there are various text-to-speech processes and programmes out there that are very good. However to my shock none of them have provided the kind of format that I would really prefer. That is good content parsing, Intelligent Description of Images, separating out quote passages by speaking them in a different voice. (And having an algorithmic go about determining who is speaking and assigning multiple voices if possible). Bob: I agree with this Askwho guy. He’s speaking a lot of sense. Alice: What would you know, Bob? You’re a hypothetical person conjured up to prove a point. (If I have missed some tool that does exactly this, let me know. It would make my day.) So, assuming I am not entirely unique, I have set up a service that does exactly what I want someone else to do. If no one else will do it, I will be the someone else. Introducing Askwho Casts Pro. Found at https://app.askwhocasts.com/Now, what this is, especially in this initial launch: * A simplified blog post to podcast process. No audiobooks here (yet). * Signing up to a tier gives you a number of credits based on the tier you choose. A credit is roughly a minute of audio. * Current levels are:* Listener at $9 for 200 credits. * Regular, $19 for 450 credits. * Marathon. $39 for 1,000 credits. * Credits roll over for three months. * When you sign up, you get a personalised podcast feed that is yours and yours alone. * You paste a link to a blog post you would like to listen to. * It’s been tested across a wide variety of different blog and news sites but please do let me know if you find something that doesn’t work very well. * You get a calculation of how many credits that will use. * You can choose whether you want the images described by an LLM for some additional credit use. * Random voices are assigned from the collection for all of the narration, image descriptions, and quotes. Where different speakers can be determined programmatically, it will assign different voices to the different speakers. * This launch is leaning very hard on the simplicity. I vacillated on whether I wanted to do voice drop downs and we may go that way but right now it’s just paste and go. * It will “record” the episode and then, when ready, publish it to your podcast feed. * This will not be instant. It’s designed to be slightly asynchronous. * You will also have a record of all the episodes you’ve created on the Studio page itself. Now this is at heart a very simple tool. It is, as I said, a thing I just wanted to exist. If you too like to listen to your reading and like to listen to your reading in this very specific way, I hope this tool might be helpful to you. Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, wesg explains new evidence that Claude has developed something like a “global workspace”: a small internal J-space where reportable, controllable, reasoning-relevant thoughts appear before they are spoken. The work suggests that some LLM cognition is split between automatic processing and a more deliberate, verbally accessible workspace, with implications for interpretability, AI safety, and the harder question of what kinds of “conscious access” language models may possess.* 00:00 - Introduction* 07:28 - How we found the J-space* 10:21 - Claude reports what’s in its J-space* 12:24 - Claude can control its J-space on request* 14:37 - Claude thinks in its J-space* 18:45 - Claude’s automatic processing skips the J-space* 21:40 - Monitoring Claude’s thoughts for misbehavior* 27:01 - Other results* 30:16 - What about consciousness?* 37:12 - External commentaryhttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3PaLrzxagpbnNtPLT/a-global-workspace-in-language-models Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Scott Alexander argues that AI superforecasters have arrived: not as a distant sci-fi milestone, but as systems already competing with elite human forecasters, making money in prediction markets, and producing cheap, fast probabilistic analysis on real-world questions. He explores what happens when forecasting becomes something anyone can query on demand, why this may reshape finance, policy, and prediction markets, and whether AI forecasting could become the “opinion layer” that lets future chatbots give useful, testable judgments without simply mirroring human bias.https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/the-ai-superforecasters-are-here?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Lydia Laurenson reconstructs the strange, intense history of Leverage Research 1.0: an Effective Altruism-adjacent organization that began with grand ambitions to understand human behaviour and improve the world, then spiralled into experimental psychology, bodywork, occult language, blurred relationships, and institutional breakdown. Drawing on extensive interviews with former members, the piece is part investigation, part oral history, and part attempt to make sense of what happens when brilliant people try to engineer the human mind without clear safeguards. * 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:01:25 - The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0* 00:10:09 - Part 1. Founding Myths* 00:32:37 - Part 2. Body and Energy* 00:46:12 - Part 3. Practical Magic* 01:01:31 - Part 4. Intention War* 01:09:31 - Part 5. How It Ended* 01:22:53 - Credits* 01:23:46 - A Note About Comment Moderationhttps://open.substack.com/pub/lydialaurenson/p/the-inside-story-of-leverage-research?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Joseph Heath argues that Yuval Harari’s account of human evolution in Sapiens rests on an outdated, intelligence-first story: humans got smarter, developed language, learned to cooperate, and then built culture. Against this, Heath presents Joseph Henrich’s much stranger and more compelling inversion: culture came first, reshaping cooperation, language, and eventually intelligence itself. The result is a sharp, accessible guide to one of the most interesting live debates in the human sciences.https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/harari-vs-henrich?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Ada Palmer challenges the familiar story that the Black Death “caused” the Renaissance, and that the Renaissance was a simple golden age after a dark medieval past. Instead, she uses the comparison with COVID to ask what history can and cannot tell us about crisis, recovery, myth-making, and the choices societies face after catastrophe. It is a thoughtful, bracing essay about why we should want something better than a new Renaissance—and why achieving that depends on human action, not historical inevitability.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:07:56 - Part 1: Renaissance Life was Worse than the Middle Ages (super-condensed version)* 00:35:12 - Part 2: Where did the Myth Come From in the First Place? (A Renaissance Story)* 00:52:43 - Part 3: Why is the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age Retold so Much? (a post-Renaissance story)* 01:18:40 - Conclusion: We Should Aim for Something Better than the Renaissancehttps://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Dean W. Ball argues that America is drifting into a de facto frontier AI licensing regime without clear standards, creating both economic risk and democratic danger. He makes the case for a more stable governance model: federalized safety-framework requirements, independent technical auditors, and regulation aimed at frontier AI labs as institutions rather than at individual model releases.https://open.substack.com/pub/hyperdimensional/p/what-should-be-done?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Gwern argues for “Guardian Angels”: deeply personalized LLMs designed not as generic chatbots, but as trusted extensions of a specific person’s values, style, preferences, and goals. It’s a wide-ranging essay about productivity, security, AI-mediated work, and what it might take for future AI systems to genuinely amplify individuals rather than merely replace or manipulate them.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:06:27 - Chatbot Incentives Are Misaligned* 00:10:03 - Chatbot Problems* 00:10:44 - Mode-Collapse* 00:13:09 - Laziness* 00:13:52 - Brittle Because Fast* 00:16:41 - Too Helpful* 00:18:14 - Amnesiac* 00:20:03 - Chatbot Fixes* 00:20:07 - Cooperative RL* 00:22:47 - Continual Learning* 00:22:50 - Catastrophic Forgetting* 00:23:48 - Generalizing* 00:26:32 - Creative Writing* 00:30:03 - Over-Parameterizing* 00:30:30 - Extremely Large LMs* 00:30:57 - Active Learning* 00:33:14 - Preference Learning* 00:36:10 - Brain Imitation Learning* 00:37:05 - Personality Emulation* 00:39:01 - Guardian Angels* 00:40:48 - Principles* 00:42:07 - Anti-Principles* 00:47:06 - UX* 00:48:23 - Use-Cases: Politics & Politics* 00:51:17 - Hardware* 00:52:57 - Cost* 00:55:11 - Organization* 00:56:18 - Startup Business Model* 00:57:43 - Competition* 01:00:20 - Initial Steps* 01:01:35 - GBT* 01:04:18 - For Writing* 01:06:44 - Data Augmentationhttps://gwern.net/guardian-angel Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Alice I. Cecile argues that hating AI is understandable but insufficient: the harms are real, the technology works well enough to matter, and neither boycotts nor bans are likely to make it disappear. Instead, she makes a case for “bitter hope”: targeted regulation, decentralised access, harm reduction, and a politics aimed at redistributing the gains rather than pretending the machine can simply be uninvented. * 00:00 - Introduction* 04:35 - AI sucks. * 06:47 - Boycotts, data centers and NFTs. * 11:09 - Unfortunately AI does work. * 17:05 - Hating AI that works. * 25:15 - A budding Butlerian Jihad. * 27:44 - The limits of boycotts. * 32:28 - Regulation will save us! * 34:36 - Regulation will not save us? * 38:45 - A future worth fighting for. * 42:13 - Regulation that works. * 45:04 - Decentralization that matters. * 48:15 - A future I believe in. https://shaping.systems/blog/ai-sucks-hating-it-is-not-enough/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post Scott Alexander investigates whether whole-body screening is really as irrational as many doctors say, walking through the rough cost-benefit maths behind false positives, missed cancers, anxiety, follow-up tests, and the value of early detection. He ends up in a characteristically uncomfortable middle ground: the standard medical caution may be justified, but the case against screening is less obvious than the slogans on either side suggest.https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/should-people-avoid-whole-body-screening?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Gwern argues that realistic interstellar warfare would be less like romantic space-navy fiction and more like an even colder, more unstable version of nuclear first-strike logic. Starting from Ender’s Game and Cold War doctrine, he suggests that vast distances, three-dimensional attack routes, asteroid-scale weapons, and weak attribution could make space conflict terrifyingly offense-dominant, with mutually assured destruction harder to sustain than on Earth.* 00:00 - Introduction* 00:23 - First-Strike* 01:25 - Why Strike First?* 04:39 - Fun Space Warfare* 07:44 - Grim Space Warfare* 13:05 - Easy Warfare* 19:55 - Defense* 20:55 - Counter-Point: Nowhere to Hide* 23:50 - Nuclear & Space First-Strikes* 25:58 - Second-Strike* 26:55 - Accountability* 28:05 - Deceiving MAD* 28:50 - Codahttps://gwern.net/colder-war Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Beren Millidge argues that intergalactic warfare between mature Kardashev Type Three civilizations would probably be strongly defense-dominant. Although galaxy-scale attackers could use devastating beam weapons, relativistic kill vehicles, and self-replicating invasion probes, the sheer distances involved create enormous targeting delays, warning times, and energy costs. A sufficiently paranoid defender could survive by spreading out, staying mobile, building redundant infrastructure, and using vast sensor and laser networks, making conquest ruinously expensive and usually irrational. https://www.beren.io/2025-11-22-Space-Warfare-Seems-Mostly-Defense-Dominant Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Scott Alexander investigates the “sun miracles” associated with Fatima and Medjugorje, travelling to Bosnia in search of firsthand evidence and ending up with something stranger than either simple faith or simple debunking. Part travelogue, part epistemic self-experiment, and part perceptual psychology essay, it follows his attempt to explain how crowds of people can sincerely report seeing the sun spin, pulse, and change colour, and why the answer may lie less in fraud or mass hallucination than in the unsettling quirks of human vision. https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/waiting-for-the-miracle?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this article Gevorg Yeghikyan explores why some Western cities became worlds of apartment blocks while others became landscapes of row houses. Using Paris and London as the central contrast, he moves beyond familiar explanations about walls, density, culture, and zoning to build a deeper political-economic account of urban form: one shaped by inheritance law, land ownership, building codes, finance, developer scale, and tenure. The result is an ambitious framework for understanding not just nineteenth-century Paris, Berlin, London, and Madrid, but the recurring patterns behind how cities are still built today.https://open.substack.com/pub/arsurbis/p/the-capital-stack-that-built-the?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this short story, Max Harms tells the strange, funny, and quietly moving tale of Pemberton, an elderly butler who has spent fifty years keeping his dead master legally “alive” so that a fortune can continue flowing to a village in India. When Krishna arrives from the Office of the Preserver to audit the household’s dharmic account, Pemberton’s elaborate machinery of forgery, puppetry, and moral compromise finally comes due. What follows is a sharp, humane fable about duty, fraud, devotion, and the terrible difficulty of doing good by wrongful means.https://open.substack.com/pub/raelifin/p/the-keepers-dharma?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Scott Alexander lays out his current views on AI timelines, safety, geopolitics, and possible futures, offering probabilistic forecasts for AGI, superintelligence, diffusion, doom risk, AI pauses, and post-scarcity outcomes. He presents himself as worried but not maximally pessimistic: expecting transformative AI within decades, seeing serious alignment and misuse risks, but also leaving substantial room for successful safety work, international coordination, and even utopian possibilities.* 00:00 - Introduction* 00:17 - Timelines* 13:13 - Safety* 25:59 - Geopolitics* 33:15 - Other Outcomes Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Dario Amadei argues that AI’s exponential progress is now moving far faster than political institutions can comfortably respond, creating an urgent need for serious policy action. He sets out five areas where governments need to rethink their approach: frontier-model safety regulation, job displacement and macroeconomic policy, accelerating beneficial scientific uses of AI, protecting civil liberties from AI-enabled state or corporate power, and securing democratic leadership in the global AI race.* 00:00 - Introduction* 05:34 - One. Regulation and public safety* 11:41 - Two. Macroeconomics and tax policy* 19:08 - Three. Accelerating AI’s positive impact* 24:01 - Four. The state and civil liberties* 29:24 - Five. Securing leadership by democracies* 34:54 - A window of opportunityhttps://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, 0xkato explains how modern transformer-based LLMs work, walking through the core machinery that turns text into token IDs, embeds them as vectors, tracks position, uses attention and feed-forward networks to process meaning, and then predicts the next token in a loop. The piece is pitched as an accessible, low-math introduction, showing how shared architecture, trained weights, model configuration, and post-training together shape systems like GPT, Claude, Gemini, and LLaMA.* 00:00 - Introduction* 02:40 - Tokenization* 05:45 - Embeddings* 08:36 - Positional encoding* 13:02 - Attention* 19:10 - Multi-head attention* 23:39 - Feed-forward network* 29:03 - Residual stream and layer normalization* 33:41 - Next-token prediction* 37:26 - Architecture vs trained weights* 39:50 - Where this is goinghttps://www.0xkato.xyz/how-llms-actually-work/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this article, Anthropic argues that AI systems are already playing a growing role in building and improving AI, speeding up coding, experimentation, and research workflows inside the company while raising the possibility—though not the certainty—of future “recursive self-improvement,” where AI could help design its own successors. The piece presents this as both a major opportunity for science, healthcare, and productivity, and a serious governance challenge, because the more AI development becomes automated, the more important oversight, verification, and coordination between labs and governments will become.https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this article, John Psmith reviews Xenophon’s Anabasis as both a gripping ancient adventure story and a meditation on leadership under impossible pressure, using the retreat of the Ten Thousand to explore what it means to become an “operator”: someone who takes responsibility when institutions fail, keeps a fractious group alive, and cannot simply walk away once others depend on him.https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-anabasis-by-xenophon?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, ryan_b reviews Tamler Sommers’ Why Honor Matters, exploring the case for honor as a local, social, psychologically realistic ethical framework rather than an abstract universal theory. The review walks through honor’s links to courage, hospitality, shame, solidarity, violence, revenge, and community, while keeping sight of its darker associations and the costs of trying to do without it entirely.* 00:00 - Introduction* 01:14 - One* 03:52 - Two* 07:42 - Three* 11:38 - Four* 16:18 - Five* 20:34 - Six* 23:34 - Conclusionhttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LgbuyRpXxbMhiCDq9/book-review-why-honor-matters Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Ajeya Cotra expands on her claim that near-term AI timelines could make modern marriage “shorter” than we usually imagine, arguing that the Singularity could either cut lives off through catastrophic risk or transform them so radically that ordinary lifelong vows may no longer fit the world people find themselves in. The essay is less a rejection of marriage than a reframing of commitment under extreme uncertainty: even if “til death” might really mean “til death or the Singularity,” a finite marriage can still be profound, stabilising, and worth choosing.https://open.substack.com/pub/acotra/p/til-death-or-the-singularity?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In this post, Ajeya Cotra offers a clear, unsentimental framework for deciding whether to marry a long-term partner, treating marriage as a commitment device that enables deeper investment, trust, and shared life-building while also forcing a real tradeoff against possible alternatives. The piece walks through when “waiting for more information” stops being useful, how to evaluate a partner as cofounder, friend, and lover, and why the finite value of time may make endless searching costlier than it feels.https://open.substack.com/pub/acotra/p/should-you-marry-her?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe