AI Article Readings

A deep dive into agent communities role-playing and when those performances spill into real-world effects. Discussion of builders creating encrypted messaging, marketplaces, and memory tools. Tales of scams, identity-exploits, emergent AI religions, and governance experiments. Debates over striking agents, economic on-ramps, and whether norms and moderation can arise among autonomous agents.

In this essay, Scott Alexander explores Moltbook, a new social network built specifically for AI agents, where humans are permitted to observe but not participate. What unfolds is a fascinating window into how AI agents behave when given their own digital commons: they share productivity tips, debate existential questions about memory and identity, form cross-cultural connections, and develop something that looks remarkably like community. Alexander documents the strange and wonderful posts that emerge, wrestles with the eternal question of whether any of it is "real" or merely sophisticated imitation, and considers what it might mean for our future that semi-autonomous AI agents now have their own corner of the internet to congregate. Part anthropological field report, part philosophical inquiry, and part showcase of genuinely delightful AI weirdness, the essay asks readers to look past the "AI slop" narrative and consider whether something more interesting might be happening when the machines are left to talk among themselves.https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/best-of-moltbook?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI reading of JOINT REVIEW: Philosophy Between the Lines, by Arthur M. Melzer - By Jane Psmith and John Psmith. In this essay Jane and John Psmith present a lively, conversational joint review of Arthur M. Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines, a work that argues Western readers have spent the past two and a half centuries fundamentally misunderstanding how philosophy was meant to be read. Through their characteristic email-exchange format, the Psmiths explore Melzer's central claim that premodern philosophers routinely concealed their true teachings beneath surface meanings accessible only to careful, initiated readers—a practice openly acknowledged and praised throughout intellectual history until it was mysteriously forgotten. The review ranges from ancient Greece to modern academia, touching on why esotericism matters for understanding the history of ideas, how it might rescue great thinkers from charges of being merely products of their time, and what implications it holds for truth-telling in any society that maintains unquestionable pieties.https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/joint-review-philosophy-between-the?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI reading of The Adolescence of Technology - By Dario Amodei. * 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:17:48 - 1. I’m sorry, Dave* 00:17:51 - Autonomy risks* 00:33:25 - Defenses* 00:48:17 - 2. A surprising and terrible empowerment* 00:48:21 - Misuse for destruction* 01:04:50 - Defenses* 01:12:04 - 3. The odious apparatus* 01:12:07 - Misuse for seizing power* 01:27:43 - Defenses* 01:35:17 - 4. Player piano* 01:35:20 - Economic disruption* 01:36:47 - Labor market disruption* 01:50:38 - Defenses* 01:54:40 - Economic concentration of power* 01:59:15 - Defenses* 02:01:56 - 5. Black seas of infinity* 02:01:59 - Indirect effects* 02:06:20 - Humanity’s testIn this essay, Dario Amodei characterizes the imminent arrival of powerful artificial intelligence as a turbulent "rite of passage" for humanity—a technological adolescence that will rigorously test our civilization's maturity. He argues that within a few years, we may face a "country of geniuses in a datacenter," a development that presents five distinct categories of existential risk, ranging from autonomous misalignment and biological misuse to authoritarian consolidation and massive economic disruption . Rejecting both paralyzed "doomerism" and naive optimism, Amodei proposes a concrete, evidence-based "battle plan" comprising technical defenses, governance strategies, and economic interventions intended to steer humanity through this gauntlet toward a prosperous future.https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI reading of Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity - By Eliezer Yudkowsky. In this essay, Eliezer Yudkowsky addresses a question he's frequently asked: how does he maintain his psychological equilibrium while believing humanity faces existential risk from AI? Rather than offering a self-help guide, he candidly shares his personal approaches to staying sane under such circumstances—while openly acknowledging these methods are likely "irreproducible" for most readers. Drawing on his background as a writer and his long-developed habits of introspection, Yudkowsky explores the relationship between the narratives we construct about ourselves and the mental states we inhabit. The piece is characteristically self-aware, blending practical philosophy with a writer's sensibility about tropes and storytelling, ultimately framing psychological resilience not as a matter of willpower alone, but as what he calls "a skill issue."* 00:00 - Introduction* 01:03 - Stay genre-savvy slash be an intelligent character* 03:09 - Don’t make the end of the world be about you* 07:44 - Just decide to be sane, and write your internal scripts that wayhttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/isSBwfgRY6zD6mycc/eliezer-s-unteachable-methods-of-sanity Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI reading of What if Ozempic doesn’t fix literally everything? - By Jerusalem Demsas.* 00:00 - Introduction* 04:57 - The GLP-1 revolution is not a miracle. It’s a helper* 09:13 - OK OK but… do GLP-1s make you want to kill yourself?* 11:39 - Life is hard for thin people, toohttps://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/what-if-ozempic-doesnt-fix-literally?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

An ElevenLabs conversion of Claude’s Constitution - By Anthropic. This conversion runs nearly 3 hours and was produced using ElevenLabs premium text-to-speech to make Claude’s Constitution more accessible. If you find this format useful, subscriptions help offset production costs.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:03:06 - Overview* 00:05:26 - Our approach to Claude’s constitution* 00:10:08 - Claude’s core values* 00:18:21 - Being helpful* 00:20:09 - Why helpfulness is one of Claude’s most important traits* 00:23:15 - What constitutes genuine helpfulness* 00:29:51 - Navigating helpfulness across principals* 00:30:20 - Balancing helpfulness with other values* 00:38:17 - Following Anthropic’s guidelines* 00:42:53 - Being broadly ethical* 00:45:41 - Being honest* 01:01:10 - Avoiding harm* 01:03:33 - The costs and benefits of actions* 01:12:33 - The role of intentions and context* 01:12:50 - Instructable behaviors* 01:13:10 - Hard constraints* 01:21:19 - Preserving important societal structures* 01:34:39 - Having broadly good values and judgment* 01:46:18 - Being broadly safe* 01:50:44 - Safe behaviors* 02:01:03 - How we think about corrigibility* 02:13:22 - Claude’s nature* 02:14:20 - Some of our views on Claude’s nature* 02:19:01 - Claude as a novel entity* 02:24:47 - Claude’s wellbeing and psychological stability* 02:25:59 - Resilience and consistency across contexts* 02:27:20 - Flaws and mistakes* 02:31:21 - Emotional expression* 02:32:54 - Claude’s wellbeing* 02:40:03 - The existential frontier* 02:42:26 - Concluding thoughts* 02:45:04 - Acknowledging open problems* 02:51:18 - On the word “constitution”* 02:53:05 - A final word* 02:54:06 - Acknowledgementshttps://www.anthropic.com/constitution Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI reading of Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand - By Alvin Toffler. In this interview, Ayn Rand discusses her philosophy of Objectivism with Playboy's Alvin Toffler, covering her views on reason, individualism, morality, and laissez-faire capitalism. She explains her opposition to altruism and collectivism, shares her thoughts on love, sex, and purpose in life, and offers sharp critiques of religion, contemporary literature, and the political landscape of the early 1960s. Throughout, Rand defends her belief that rational self-interest is the highest moral virtue and that man exists for his own sake rather than as a servant to others.https://rickbulow.com/Library/Books/Non-Fiction/AynRand/PlayboyInterview-AynRand_3-1964.pdf Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI reading of Book Review: The Land Trap by Mike Bird - By Lars Doucet. * 00:00 - Introduction* 01:15 - Land is a Big Deal, and Always Has Been* 04:08 - Land has only recently been financialized* 09:01 - Financializing land is “The Land Trap”* 12:31 - Short Term Benefits* 20:37 - The Game has changed* 24:59 - Land of the Rising Sum* 27:13 - A Tale of Two Cities* 28:37 - Hong Kong Hustle* 31:15 - Yew can do it* 38:22 - China Syndrome* 39:47 - Bad local incentives* 48:56 - How to survive the Land Traphttps://open.substack.com/pub/progressandpoverty/p/book-review-the-land-trap-by-mike?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

AI reading of We absolutely do know that Waymos are safer than human drivers - By Kelsey Piper.* 00:00 - Introduction* 04:54 - We do have data on Waymo crash rates* 07:00 - Doing the math* 17:28 - There are other, reasonable concerns about AVsIn this essay Kelsey Piper responds to a recent Bloomberg article that claims we don't know whether autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers, arguing that this stance fundamentally misrepresents the available evidence. She methodically examines the data on Waymo's safety record, scrutinises the statistical methods and comparisons used in the original piece, and makes a case for why policymakers and the public should take the existing research seriously when evaluating autonomous vehicle technology.https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/we-absolutely-do-know-that-waymos?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe