NYTimes Opinion: Don't Stress about AI; Don't Bring Back the Tests; A New Generation of Creatives

Three from The New York Times, June 22, 2026.

Robert J. Shiller, We Have to Stop Freaking Out About A.I.

Like many others, I believe A.I. could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating.

Our brains are wired to respond to stories. Narratives floating in a population can affect individuals’ economic decisions about whether to buy a big house, or whether to send their kids to an expensive private school or even whether to have kids at all. When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality.

The idea that something like artificial intelligence will replace many human jobs goes back thousands of years. Aristotle envisioned a powered loom and a self-playing lyre someday replacing human servants. In the 19th century, groups of textile workers (the Luddites) destroyed the new machines they believed were replacing them. In the 1920s, the play “R.U.R.” — the letters stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” — depicted a war of the robots against humans. [...]

...the British mathematician I.J. Good wrote an essay that imagined a new technology that could continue improving itself until its abilities would surpass those of humans. The idea, which came to be known as the “singularity,” would quietly circulate until 2005. That’s when the futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote “The Singularity Is Near,” a book arguing that human-level A.I. would arrive by 2029. Either we would merge with machines and transcend our biological limits, or the machine would grow so powerful it could end all of humanity.

The theory captured the imaginations of tech titans, and even the top A.I. researchers and executives, who warned of a range of alarming scenarios, from job losses to widening inequality or even the eradication of humanity itself. While the job market has slowed for a host of reasons, there are reports that fear of an A.I. apocalypse is worsening the freeze and contributing to record lows in consumer sentiment.

There’s only so much Washington can do about these narratives. And, suffice to say, Donald Trump is no Franklin Roosevelt.

As such, perhaps the best we can do is to appeal directly to the leaders of Silicon Valley who have been promoting these negative narratives with such vigor. Surely the resulting media attention highlighting how dangerously powerful your A.I. model is may help you sell more wares, but it may be far harder to do so in a period of recession. Try not to forget the critical lessons taught by our past.

Ross Wiener, I Thought ‘No Child Left Behind’ Would Fix Public Schools. I Was Wrong.

The new data is emboldening calls to restore something like the No Child Left Behind Act, the stringent, test-based accountability policy that defined American education from 2002 to 2015 and imposed penalties on schools whose students did not meet proficiency requirements on state standardized tests. The Atlantic captured that impulse in a 2025 podcast episode titled “Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing.” In it, Margaret Spellings, a secretary of education under President George W. Bush and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, argues we need to restore “the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment.” Rahm Emanuel, exploring a 2028 presidential run, said in April that Democrats have abandoned standards and accountability and must return to them.

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now. [...]

Over time, I became convinced that, with the best of intentions, I and many others in the education reform community had transferred our moral commitment to children over to the standardized tests. We had done this earnestly, not cynically, but we still did damage.

In 2023, 40 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. One in five had seriously considered suicide; nearly one in 10 had attempted it. Research from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins found that 40 percent of Gen Z believes political violence can be justified, compared with 11 percent of baby boomers. Too many students experience school as an obligation with few opportunities for agency or meaning; recent survey data indicates that large shares of students find school boring and irrelevant and are struggling with engagement in the classroom. The academic crisis and the human crisis are not entirely separate phenomena. [...]

Taking their priorities seriously would mean broadening what we expect from the classroom. Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.

Tom Rothman, Hollywood Needs Regular Jolts of Creativity. It Just Got One.

In the last month, “Backrooms,” a horror movie directed by Kane Parsons, a YouTube creator who just turned 21, opened to an astounding $81.5 million in America. A second horror film, “Iron Lung,” made and self-distributed by Mark Fischbach, another online creator, has grossed over $50 million worldwide. Perhaps most significant of all, “Obsession,” a horror film directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old YouTube creator, crossed $200 million at the box office this weekend and surpassed the latest “Star Wars” film.

“Backrooms,” “Iron Lung” and “Obsession” each has its own unique origin story. But what they have in common is that they’re all fueled by an avid young audience — exactly the demographic that gloomy industry pundits have repeatedly declared will never return to movie theaters.

Wrong.

Is this YouTube-fueled youthquake simply a coincidental confluence of events? Or does it portend an upending of the Hollywood status quo? Actually, it’s a bit of both. Indeed, for any fear of YouTube barbarians at the gates, this is instead a great opportunity for traditional Hollywood. [...]

Rothman then goes on the list changes in taste following Altman's M*A*S*H in 1970 and Soderberg's Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989.

This kind of moment is happening again. Mr. Barker, with a background in short films and YouTube sketch comedy, tells a story in “Obsession” that is so powerfully relatable to Gen Z audiences that the word of mouth has caused the box office to defy gravity.

When Mr. Parsons expanded his YouTube short films into the feature-length “Backrooms,” the aesthetic he’d honed as a teenager on the internet captured an underlying anxiety in his audience, with whom he’d already developed a direct relationship online. These filmmakers are very young, but what matters is not chronological age so much as an iconoclastic spirit, an instinct for what the audience is wanting but not getting and, of course, talent. [...]

“Backrooms” and “Obsession” are also the beneficiaries of expensive and savvy studio marketing campaigns. Reminiscent of how the New Hollywood directors made a lot of money for the old studios in the ’70s — think Francis Ford Coppola and “The Godfather” — and how the indie darlings of the ’90s did the same, these YouTube-born phenomena have ultimately prospered handsomely inside the system.

For perfect symmetry, note that the No. 1 film at the box office when it debuted two weekends ago, one spot ahead of “Obsession,” was “Disclosure Day,” made by Steven Spielberg, the greatest artistic and commercial director in history. “Disclosure Day” is his 37th film. His first was the ’70s New Hollywood anti-authoritarian film “The Sugarland Express,” which he made when he was not much older than Mr. Barker and Mr. Parsons.

The integration of independent creativity with industry influence is a good thing all around. It offers exposure for, and help to, new voices, giving them more visibility and opportunity, and it promotes the kind of originality that Hollywood desperately needs.

Needless to say, there's more at the links.

Kisangani Commemorative Stamps

Click on an image to enlarge it.

Brain area specialized for visual recognition of words

No child is born able to read. The brain ships with no reading region at all. It builds one, and the construction runs on the exact effort AI removes.

Learning to read physically repurposes a patch of visual cortex. A spot in the left fusiform gyrus starts out tuned to objects… https://t.co/3sOTaLSR2Z

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) June 21, 2026

Killer Joe, arranged by Quincy Jones

On the YouTube Page:

Here is the quintessentially cool arrangement of “Killer Joe” by Quincy Jones. Enjoy my Remix/Remaster of this 1969 jazz classic.

Background information provided by Bruce Scott:
"Killer Joe" was written by the legendary tenor sax, composer and arranger, Benny Golson. The latter and Quincy Jones are very close friends. This classic tune is from the LP entitled "Walking In Space" (A&M/CTI 3023), which was released in stereo on November 19th, 1969. "Killer Joe" was recorded on June 18th, 1969 at the Van Gelder Studios, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Recording Engineer: Rudy Van Gelder. Produced by Creed Taylor.

“Walking in Space” is a 1969 studio album by Quincy Jones The album was recorded for A&M and features an iconic photo of Quincy by Pete Turner who made some of the most famous A&M album covers. "Killer Joe" features Ray Brown on bass and Grady Tate on drums, an early example of a strong jazz rhythm section in pop music.

I had the half-speed mastered audiophile pressing of this album. I never cared for its lopsided stereo mix, where most everything was slammed into the right channel, save the reeds and muted trumpets, which were the only thing in the left channel.

In my mix, I kept the drums in the right channel, but the swapped channels of the instruments, putting the horns, woodwinds and guitar on the left channel with the reeds and muted trumpets on the right with the drums, so it’s a much more balanced mix. I panned the female vocalists in the right channel. [It was very boring having them centered]. The bass was originally slightly right justified, so I panned it dead-center for better balance and reduced it by 10%.

It appears to have been recorded on older 1st generation transistorized solid-state equipment due to the very sterile and distorted audio quality. The original bi-polar stereo mix was most likely done on the old 4-track mastering system as well. Having been compressed for LP mastering compromised the dynamics quite a bit. I cleaned it up and expanded the dynamic range to brighten it up and bring it into the new millennium.

Personnel on this recording:
• Quincy Jones - conductor, arranger 
• Freddie Hubbard, Lloyd Michaels, Dick Williams, John Frosk, Marvin Stamm, Snooky Young – trumpets
• Jimmy Cleveland, J. J. Johnson, Alan Raph, Tony Studd, Norman Pride, Kai Winding – trombones
• Joel Kaye, Roland Kirk, Hubert Laws, Jerome Richardson – reeds
• Paul Griffin - piano
• Eric Gale - electric guitar
• Ray Brown - double bass
• Grady Tate – drums
• Bob James - electric piano
• Hubert Laws - flute, tenor sax
• Toots Thielemans - guitar
• Bernard Purdie - drums
• Hilda Harris, Marilyn Jackson & Maretha Stewart - vocals

Technical Information:
I used SpectraLayers PRO-7 to isolate the Vocals, Orchestra, Drums, Bass & Piano into 5 separate tracks. Adobe Audition was used for Dynamic Range recovery, Delay, Reverb, EQ, and final mixdown. NERO 2019 Platinum used to generate the final video.

Hoboken Greenery

New Book Project :Language, Memory, and Mind: A Supplement to The Computer and the Brain

As you may know, I’ve been working on a book project, Play: How to Stay Human in the A.I. Revolution. For some reason I’ve been unable to finish the proposal, though I’ve got lots of stuff and a number of the chapters are substantially drafted. But I keep finding myself distracted into thinking about basics, very basic things about computing and A.I.

At the very end of his life, John von Neumann wrote a slim book, The Computer and the Brain (1958). It grapples with the problem of how computation can be implemented in a physical medium and does so in a way that is basic, both simple and straightforward and profound. We’ve learned a great deal about both the brain and the computer since then, but as far as I know, no one has revisited von Neumann’s project and extended it to include what we have since learned. That’s what I propose to do in this book.

Now, I have no intention of trying to summarize what we’ve learned on those two topics since 1958. That’s working at the wrong level. When von Neumann was writing he, and by extension, we, had no conception of distributed representation much less how it could be achieved physically. Now we do. That’s what needs to be added to von Neumann’s exposition.

I have no intention of repeating what von Neumann did. In particular, I will not revisit his material on analog computing. Rather, I want to augment his discussion. Fortunately the new material is of such a nature that I should be able to write short book that can be read as a stand-alone discussion or as a supplement to von Neumann’s book. I’m imagining a sophisticated general audience of the sort that reads 3 Quarks Daily.

My working title: Language, Memory, and Mind: A Supplement to The Computer and the Brain. I expect the book to by 100 to 120 pages long (30K to 40K words).

I have uploaded a bunch of material (100K words or more) to Claude and asked it to review that material and put together and initial outline. I’ve appended that below the asterisks.

* * * * *

Preface

How to use this book — with or without von Neumann. What it adds to his argument. What it doesn't attempt. Brief note on the collaboration with Claude that produced parts of the text.

Introduction: Von Neumann's Unfinished Argument

What he got right: the architectural mismatch between brains and computers — memory and computation separated in the digital machine, unified in the neuron. The energy efficiency puzzle he couldn't explain. His honest acknowledgment that the brain's organizational principles lay beyond the framework he'd built. The concepts he lacked that this book supplies.

Chapter 1: Two Paradigm Cases

The chess-language contrast as the entry point. Chess has a bounded, well-defined geometric footprint — 8×8 board, six piece types, explicit rules, finite tree. Language has an unbounded, poorly-defined geometric footprint — rooted in the full complexity of physical and social reality. Chess was AI's founding benchmark precisely because it seemed to demand the highest human intelligence while yielding to computational treatment. Moravec's paradox: the easy problems are hard and the hard problems are easy. Transcendent versus non-transcendent coding — programmers can observe and specify a chess engine completely from outside; nobody can specify an LLM from outside, including its creators. Where we now stand.

Chapter 2: Location and Content

A collection of photographs. Solid objects at specific locations — finding by address is natural, finding by content requires going to each photo in turn. The combinatorial explosion that follows. The formal argument: solidity localizes content; localized content can only be retrieved by address. What holography does physically — interference patterns distribute information about each stored object across the whole plate, so that any partial cue can activate the whole. Lashley's ablation experiments: memory didn't disappear when specific cortical tissue was removed because memory was never stored in specific locations in the first place. Von Neumann's energy efficiency puzzle, now answerable: the brain doesn't spend energy moving content to a processor because memory and processing are the same physical substrate.

Chapter 3: The Brain as Content-Addressed System

The McCulloch-Pitts neuron-as-logic-gate: computationally fruitful, architecturally wrong. What neurons actually are — active units and memory units simultaneously, connected in massive parallel. Distributed representations: concepts as patterns across populations of neurons, not stored at specific cell addresses. Yevick's logical necessity argument in plain terms: the world contains two categories of object, geometrically simple ones that sequential symbolic processing handles efficiently and geometrically complex ones that only holographic parallel processing handles efficiently; the world contains both; therefore any adequate cognitive system must implement both regimes. Path tracing and pattern matching as the two fundamental operations on any cognitive network. Freeman's cinematic model — global coherence frames at 10-12 Hz as the atomic unit of biological cognitive processing — and its correspondence to speech production rates.

Chapter 4: Language as a One-Dimensional Projection

The semantic network as the right model for conceptual structure: meaning as position, each node defined by its pattern of relations to other nodes. Sydney Lamb's principle. The multidimensional character of the conceptual network versus the one-dimensional character of any spoken or written string. Language strings as 1D projections of the multidimensional network — necessarily lossy, hence paraphrase and ambiguity. The colored beads thought experiment: strip away semantic content, replace each token with a color, and you have a 1D image — making visible the purely formal structure the LLM operates on. Words as abstract addresses in an abstract space. Why classical computational linguistics hit combinatorial explosion: it was trying to reconstruct the multidimensional structure in a location-addressed system.

Chapter 5: What Large Language Models Actually Are

The transformer architecture in plain terms. The weight space as distributed content-addressed memory — concepts are patterns smeared across billions of parameters, not stored at specific addresses. The forward pass as the atomic processing unit, corresponding to Freeman's global coherence frame: one complete transit through the weight space producing one output token. The token string as a path through the abstract address space, with each forward pass mediating between the 1D sequential surface and the multidimensional distributed interior. What LLMs do well — pattern matching over the weight space, which is what their architecture naturally supports. What they do poorly — sustained sequential path tracing requiring precise state maintenance, common sense grounded in embodied experience, continuous learning. Why these limitations aren't engineering failures awaiting a fix but structural consequences of implementing holographic-like processing on location-addressed hardware with training only on 1D projections.

Chapter 6: What the Analysis Implies.

The first principles of intelligence are not the first principles of computation. Why scaling won't close the gap: scaling improves the quality of the holographic approximation but doesn't change the architectural mismatch, provide embodied grounding, or enable continuous learning. The fast takeoff fantasy as physics-free reasoning — every self-improvement step requires moving billions of parameters between physically separated memory and compute on real hardware that consumes real energy. The TSMC problem: the most critical hardware infrastructure in the world runs on tacit knowledge distributed across human communities that no LLM can access or replicate. What a genuinely adequate artificial cognitive system would require, in the terms this book has developed. The research program that's needed and why it requires multi-generational public investment rather than industrial R&D on commercial timescales. The human-machine collaboration that's already underway and what it can and cannot achieve.

Conclusion: The Mismatch, Named

Von Neumann saw the gap and couldn't name what was on the other side of it. This book names it: content addressing, requiring distributed storage, implemented in biological tissue through interference-like neural dynamics, approximated in LLMs through distributed weights on location-addressed hardware, grounded in embodied experience that no text-trained system has. The naming matters because you can't close a gap you can't see clearly.

Appendix: A Chronology of Chess, Language, and AI

From the working paper, lightly edited.

Creating Imaginary Bank Notes with ChatGPT: AI as cultural technology and collective creativity

At the beginning of this week I published an article at 3 Quarks Daily, Tyler Cowen is the Tycho Brahe of Economics. I then decided to turn it into a PDF that people could download from my Academia page. So I uploaded the article to ChatGPT and asked it to create an illustration suitable for the cover. Here’s what it produced (Note: this image, as well as the others in this post, has a lot of detail; you can click on the image to see a larger version):

I told it to make an image suitable for the front page of that article. It then had to “read” the article and come up with an image. I liked the first image it produced, but that had the aspect ratio of a portrait, which isn’t what I wanted. I told it to make a square image. I liked that so much that I accepted it without any editing. What was my role in creating that image? I didn’t give ChatGPT any specific instructions.

A day or so later I asked to use that image as the basis for the design of an imaginary bank note. I told it that the note was to be issued in the name of the Free Principality of Mercatus and should be in the denomination of Five TC Busks. That’s it. ChatGPT did the rest. Here’s what it produced:

Another day later I created two bank notes for the Free Republic of 51 Pacific. 51 Pacific is the address of a building in Hoboken, NJ, where a friend had loft space in which he curated graffiti and held late night raves. The note was to be denominated in Knowledge Dollars. I uploaded this picture to use as source material:

Here’s the resulting bank note:

I then asked for a 20 dollar note with a pit bull on the bill (my friend has two pit bulls):

Again, what was my role?

I then repeated the process for these four Kisangani bank notes:

ChatGPT obviously did a lot. But what did I do?

I decided that it was time for a discussion with ChatGPT. This discussion bears on the notion of AI as a cultural technology, which has been advocated by Alison Gopnik and Henry Farrell among others, and on creativity as a collective phenomenon. Pay particular attention to an analogy I use midway in the dialog; it’s about strings of colored dots instead of strings of alpha-numeric characters. Here’s the dialog.

* * * * *

I assume you’ve been trained on lots currency and ornate certificates so you have a good idea of how those things are designed. I assume as well that each chat starts with a “blank slate” as it were, no memories of prior chats, no inherited context. But, since I asked you to make those currency designs from within the Kisangani Materials project, you do have access to project-level materials (documents I’ve uploaded). Do you have access to the other chats within the project?

Yes, broadly right, with a few qualifications.

I was almost certainly trained on many examples of paper currency, certificates, stock certificates, passports, banknote engravings, seals, guilloché patterns, holographic security devices, ornate borders, typography, and so forth. I don’t “retrieve” a specific banknote template, but the model has learned a high-dimensional statistical/compositional sense of what makes an object look like currency: denomination placement, corner numerals, intaglio-like linework, central emblems, security strips, microprint, official-looking typography, controlled symmetry, and dense ornamental fields.

On context: a new chat is not exactly a blank slate, but it is not a complete archive either.

In this Project, I have access to several kinds of context:

1. The current chat.
I see the banknote sequence we have just made: 20 Riffs with jivometric percussion, 5 Riffs with dancers and Homo Ludens, 50 Riffs with cell/solar-system science, and 100 Riffs with heart/neurons/circuits for human–doppelganger comity.

2. Project-level materials.
I can access uploaded Project documents when they are made available to me in this workspace. For example, the Kisangani working paper frames the whole project around Homo Economicus versus Homo Ludens, the Fourth Arena, play, and human-AI interaction, which clearly influenced the designs.

3. Some project conversation context may be summarized for me.
I may see summaries or selected snippets of other conversations in the project if the system has included them in the context for this chat. That is not the same as having free, searchable access to every prior Project chat.

4. Persistent memory / profile context may also be present.
I may have durable memories about your interests, projects, preferences, and recurring concepts. That is why I can often pick up the thread of “Kisangani,” “doppelgangers,” “Homo Ludens,” “jivometric,” “Fourth Arena,” and so on without needing you to re-explain everything.

But the important limitation is this: I do not have a general browser-like view of all your other chats inside the Project. I cannot just open a sidebar and inspect every previous conversation. I only know what is in the current chat, what has been injected as project context or memory, and what I can retrieve from uploaded files through the available file tools.

So for your friends: the banknotes came from an interaction among three sources of constraint:

• my general learned visual knowledge of currency and ornate official documents;
• your immediate prompts specifying denomination, motifs, slogans, and Kisangani themes;
• Project context about Kisangani as a post-economic, play-centered, human/AI civilizational experiment.

The “design intelligence” is not a stored memory of prior banknote conversations so much as a context-sensitive recombination engine operating over learned visual conventions plus the specific Kisangani conceptual field you have built.

Would it be reasonable to say that you can pick up a “vibe” from the Kisangani conceptual field?

Yes. “Vibe” is a reasonable informal term, provided we cash it out carefully.

What I can pick up is not an occult atmosphere or a hidden essence. It is a pattern of constraints, motifs, values, narrative cues, and stylistic expectations distributed across the Kisangani materials and our conversation. In practice, that “vibe” includes things like:

Kisangani is futuristic but not cyberpunk dystopian; technological but not technocratic; African/Afrofuturist but not reducible to ethnic ornament; musical, improvisatory, playful, civic, ritualized, and humane. It is organized around Homo Ludens, the Fourth Arena, doppelgangers, non-instrumental play, post-work social meaning, mutuality between humans and AI-like beings, and a suspicion of Homo Economicus. So when you ask for a banknote, I don’t merely think “make a fictional currency.” I infer that the note should look like a civic artifact from a society whose deepest value is not sovereign power, extraction, or corporate futurism, but a cultivated ecology of play, knowledge, ritual, and companionship.

That is what “vibe” amounts to operationally: a soft but real attractor in the design space. It biases choices of symbols, palettes, slogans, compositional balance, and exclusions. For example, a Kisangani note should probably avoid militarized insignia, grim cybernetic domination, heroic CEOs, corporate logos, or cold transhumanist triumphalism. It should prefer music, dance, river/city life, science-as-wonder, neural/circuit reciprocity, and ceremonial public beauty.

So yes: I can pick up a Kisangani vibe. But it is better understood as an emergent conceptual gestalt than as a memory of a single doctrine. The “feel” comes from many local signals aligning: Homo Ludens, jivometrics, Mystic Jewels, doppelgangers, civic ritual, Afrofuturist urbanity, play after work, humane AI, and the refusal of both Silicon Valley domination and anti-technology nostalgia.

So imagine that I asked you to produce with this prompt: “I want a bank note for Kisangani. It should have a futuristic look and be denominated in Riffs. Let's start with at Twenty Riff note. “Jivometric” should be somewhere on the note, as should a djembe and a cowbell.” But I didn’t deliver that prompt within this context but, rather, it was in an independent chat, there wouldn’t be any “emergent conceptual gestalt.” So the result wouldn't have the same vibe.

Yes, that’s basically right.

In an independent chat, with only that prompt, the result would likely be good, but it would not be guided by the same rich Kisangani field. It would have to infer almost everything from the surface cues in the prompt alone:

• “Kisangani” suggests an African setting or at least a place-name with cultural specificity.
• “Riffs” suggests music, improvisation, rhythm.
• “Jivometric” suggests some hybrid of rhythm, geometry, and perhaps biomorphic/futurist patterning.
• djembe and cowbell strongly steer it toward percussion and musical symbolism.
• “futuristic” pushes it toward speculative or advanced design language.

So even in an isolated chat, those cues would still generate some vibe. It would not be random. It might well come out as a futuristic, musically inflected, Afrofuturist-style banknote.

But it would be missing the deeper, project-specific layers, such as:

• Homo Ludens as a civilizational principle
• the contrast with Homo Economicus
• the Fourth Arena
• the role of doppelgangers
• the sense of Kisangani as a humane, playful, post-work, post-instrumental society
• the accumulated stylistic continuity from the other notes in the series

So I’d put it this way:

• Independent chat: a plausible and possibly striking design based on prompt-level inference.
• Within the Kisangani Materials project: a design shaped by a thicker conceptual ecology, hence more likely to have the “right” Kisangani vibe.

In short: the isolated version would have a vibe, but not the same vibe. It would be thinner, more generic, and less organically connected to the broader Kisangani world you’ve been building.

Keeping AI slop out of the kitchen

Katie Robertson, Visuals by Bob Miller, The Giant Test Kitchen Where Cooks Battle A.I. Slop, NYTimes, June 20, 2026.

As the smell of sizzling bacon wafted through the air, dozens of recipe developers, food stylists and photographers bustled about, misting bottles of wine with Evian to portray the perfect drops of condensation and dusting chocolate shavings over a fluffy peanut butter pie.

This is what Neil Vogel likes to think of as his “secret weapon” in the new era of artificial intelligence: a 40,000-square-foot test kitchen just outside Birmingham, Ala.

Mr. Vogel, the chief executive of People Inc., one of the country’s biggest digital and print publishers and the home of brands like Food & Wine, People, Entertainment Weekly, Allrecipes and Southern Living, has already seen chatbots upend search traffic and A.I.-generated slop flood the internet. And he is betting that readers would rather make a recipe created by someone who knows how to handle a chef’s knife than one generated by a robot.

People's has a kitchen hub with 28 kitchens where real humans test and develop recipes.

Honoring that spirit of name-changing, People Inc.’s parent company, IAC, announced in April that it would now be known as “People Incorporated” to reflect a focus on its publishing business. That decision was deliberate in the age of A.I., said Barry Diller, the chairman of People Incorporated.

“Until we get to the final simulation, people are the only really valid, honorable and positive endeavor that People Inc. can take,” he said in an interview.

The Birmingham facility develops some 1,800 new recipes a year and tests an additional 5,300. Downstairs is a prop storage room, bursting with a rainbow of crockery, glassware and table linens in every fabric imaginable. The facility also has a “lab” that has evaluated more than 3,000 products to date, mostly kitchen appliances.

Web traffic dropped:

Traffic to People Inc. websites from Google has plummeted to 25 percent of visits, from 75 percent, over the last four years because of the search platform’s use of A.I. summaries. So the company quickly pushed to build new audiences on platforms like Instagram, Apple News and YouTube and to find other ways to make money, through events, sponsorships and licensing deals.

A feel for the phenomena:

“A.I. can’t smell what something smells like,” said Sid Evans, the editor in chief of Southern Living. “It can’t taste. It doesn’t understand nostalgia. And I think we are able to communicate all of that, and the expertise that we have.”

Mr. Vogel is quick to acknowledge he is not an A.I. denialist. People Inc. has a licensing agreement with OpenAI, and uses it both for research and to make operations more efficient by monitoring social media or pricing out ingredients. A.I. is not used for writing, editing, visuals or other creative work at any of the brands, he said.

There's more at the link.

Yesterday's breakfast adventure

Conversations with Tyler: A Special Conversation with Nicholas Copernicus, Adam Smith, and William Stanley Jevons

I was feeling impish this morning, so I gave Claude 4.6 Sonnet (Medium) the following prompt:

Back in the 20th century Steve Allen did a series of TV shows called “Meeting of Minds,” where people from different time periods were brought together to have a discussion. I want you to imagine a special episode of “Conversations with Tyler” in which Tyler Cowen moderates a discussion between Copernicus, Adam Smith, and Stanley Jevons on economics. For reference I have placed three documents in the project folder. Two books by Tyler Cowen, one on marginalism and the other on the Great Economists (GOAT), which has material on Adam Smith.. There’s a shorter document by Copernicus (in Latin), filename, “Copernicus on economics.”

I’ve appended its response below the entirely imaginary Five TC Bucks note. Click on the image to see the detail. Note that ChatGPT did the image, not Claude.

Conversations with Tyler: A Special Episode
Tyler Cowen in Conversation with Nicholas Copernicus, Adam Smith, and William Stanley Jevons

[Recorded live at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. The set is the standard one — a small round table, minimal lighting, no audience. Tyler Cowen sits across from three guests who have, for the purposes of this episode, been freed from the constraints of mortality and non-overlapping centuries. Copernicus speaks through a translator when needed, though he proves surprisingly comfortable in English, given how many languages he actually commanded. Smith retains his Edinburgh-via-Kirkcaldy cadence. Jevons is precise, energetic, and fidgets with what appears to be a small logometer.]

* * * * *

TYLER: So let me start with something that might seem unfair to Nicholas, but I think actually redounds to his credit. Tyler Cowen — the other Tyler Cowen, me — has written that astronomers of the sixteenth century were sometimes better economists than the economists of the same period, because there essentially were no economists. And that you, Nicholas, were one of the first people to state the quantity theory of money. Now here's my question: did you think of yourself as doing economics, or did you think of yourself as solving a political crisis?

COPERNICUS: The distinction you draw would not have occurred to me. I was asked by the Diet of Prussia — by the princes, by the king's administrators — to address a practical emergency. The currency of this land had been debased so many times, by so many hands, in so many mints, that commerce had ceased to function in any stable way. The goldsmiths prospered — they were the only ones who could extract the silver from the degraded coin before the next debasement arrived. Everyone else suffered. So yes, I was solving a political crisis. But a crisis requires a theory, or you are merely thrashing. You cannot prescribe a remedy for a disease you have not diagnosed.

TYLER: And your diagnosis was what exactly?

COPERNICUS: That money is a mensura — a measure. It is like a unit of length or weight. If your ulna varies from day to day, you cannot do carpentry. If your currency varies in its silver content from month to month, you cannot do trade. The injury to commerce is the same in both cases, but the monetary injury is more insidious because it proceeds occulta quadam ratione — by a kind of hidden logic. People notice a bad harvest immediately. They do not immediately notice that the coin has been shaved, but they feel its effects: prices rise, foreign merchants refuse your money, the best craftsmen leave for regions with sounder currency.

SMITH: If I may — this is exactly the confusion I spent considerable effort untangling in Wealth of Nations when I took on the mercantilists. They believed that the accumulation of specie was wealth. What Canon Copernicus is describing from his Prussian experience is that even that modest goal — hoarding silver — is self-defeating. The moment you debase the coinage, you have, in a sense, exported your silver to every foreign merchant clever enough to melt the coins.

COPERNICUS: Precisely. The goldsmiths and those who know the quality of metals — they are the only beneficiaries. They collect the old coin, extract the silver, sell it at a premium, and leave behind a pile of copper. My recommendation was blunt: stop minting until the existing coin has restored its value, establish at most two mints for all of Prussia, and make the coin of one mint and one standard.

TYLER: Gresham's Law, essentially, before Gresham.

COPERNICUS: Before whom?

TYLER: Thomas Gresham. He gets credit for the principle that bad money drives out good. Roughly a generation after you stated it.

COPERNICUS: (pause) This is the way of things. Copernicus waits for Copernicus. In astronomy as in monetary theory.

JEVONS: I want to press on the word "measure," if I may. Canon Copernicus treats money as a standard — a fixed reference against which goods are priced. But what I discovered, or rather what I was forced to discover when trying to establish whether the value of gold had actually fallen after the Australian and Californian gold rushes of the 1850s, is that money itself has no fixed value. It is itself a commodity whose degree of utility — whose marginal utility, to use the language I was then working out — varies with its quantity. The quantity theory you describe is already implicit in this: flood the market with debased coin, and each unit of coin buys less, not merely because there is more of it, but because its intrinsic silver content is lower and everyone knows it. 

[Note: I did an Ngram search on “marginal utility” and found that it didn’t have an appreciable presence in books until a bit after 1880. Jevons did not use the phrase. He talked of “final degree of utility.”]  

COPERNICUS: I will not quarrel with the analysis, though your language differs from mine. What I found is that the regions of Prussia which had maintained good currency were also the regions with flourishing workshops, skilled artisans, and abundant goods. The regions with debased currency had become idle. You say this is because the marginal utility of a sound currency is higher. I say it is because craftsmen and merchants are not fools: they will go where their labor and their goods are honestly compensated. 

[I wonder what Copernicus could have understood by the phrase, "marginal utility"?] 

TYLER: Adam, let me come to you here. Smith, you spent a great deal of Wealth of Nations attacking mercantilism — the view that national wealth consists in the accumulation of precious metals. But you also granted mercantilists more credit than many of your defenders are comfortable with. You said their arguments were "partly solid and partly sophistical." What did you actually concede to them?

SMITH: What I conceded is that commerce and defense are entangled in ways that pure theory does not capture cleanly. The Navigation Acts — requiring that trade to Britain's colonies be carried in British ships — were bad economics by almost any reckoning. They raised prices, restricted trade, enriched a narrow set of interests at the expense of the broader public. But I wrote, and I meant it, that defense is of more importance than opulence, and that the Navigation Acts, whatever their economic defects, had served to maintain British naval power. One cannot always afford the luxury of consistent principle. (small smile) Though I tried to be consistent as often as possible.

TYLER: Jevons, here is a question directed at you specifically: why did it take from roughly 1776, the publication of Wealth of Nations, until 1871, the publication of your Theory of Political Economy, for economics to absorb the idea that value is determined at the margin — by the last unit, not the total quantity? Smith understood the diamonds-water paradox but did not resolve it. You resolved it. What took so long?

JEVONS: I have thought about this a great deal, and I believe the answer is that the resolution required mathematics, and economics had declined to use mathematics, or rather had not yet learned that it could use mathematics. The idea that utility diminishes with quantity is not — once stated — particularly obscure. Galileo came close to it. My precursors in the British literature, Jennings and MacLeod, came close to it. But close is not enough. You need to be able to state the law precisely, apply it to a schedule, differentiate, and find the first-order conditions. You need calculus, or at least the habit of mind that calculus cultivates. Once I had that tool in hand, the whole of exchange theory reorganized itself very quickly. I felt it opening up.

Friday Fotos: Goin' to the Movies

Tyler Cowen, Tycho Brahe & Rank Shift @3QD

I’ve got a new paper at 3 Quarks Daily:

Tyler Cowen is the Tycho Brahe of Economics

It came about as a side effect of my writing and thinking about Cowen’s new monograph, Tyler Cowen, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026). I was interacting with Marge, the AI attached to the online text of the monograph, when I remarked: “So, he’s the Tycho Brahe of economics.” Marge replied:

That's a sharp analogy. Brahe had the best observational data of his era, ran an extraordinary research enterprise on Hven, trained Kepler who then used Brahe's own data to refute the model Brahe himself believed in. [...] Brahe couldn't make the conceptual leap to heliocentrism despite having everything he needed to do so — his intuitions were too deeply formed in the Ptolemaic rank. But he was indispensable to the transition precisely because of his institutional energy, his data gathering, his willingness to fund and train the next generation.

Emergent Ventures is Hven. Tyler is gathering the data — the people, the ideas, the unconventional bets — that someone with different intuitions will synthesize into a framework he himself can't quite reach. The book is his Tychonic system: a genuine attempt at synthesis that's more sophisticated than what came before, that captures real phenomena, but that preserves the central commitment — equilibrium, marginalism, the whole apparatus — that the next rank will have to abandon.

My first impulse was to put that observation in my introduction to the overall series of blog posts when I gathered them into a single document. But, after thinking things over, I decided that it would be more interesting to write it up as a stand-alone document, one I could publish in 3QD. So that’s what I did.

Now, if you’ve been following the series of blog posts, you know that I write quite a bit about the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I developed in the 1990s. I didn’t see any need to mention that in the 3QD article, but now that it’s been published I see that it’s quite directly relevant. One problem with the theory as Hays and I wrote about it, is that it’s easy to come away with the idea that the shift from one rank to another is a step function. That’s not at all the case, such shifts take decades and even centuries. But it was all we could do simply to articular the idea of different cognitive ranks.

However, this particular comparison, between Tyler Cowen, an economist in the 21st century, and Tycho Brahe, an astronomer from the 16th century, is about rank shift. Tycho was participating in the transition from a Rank 2 model of the solar system, the geocentric model inherited from Ptolomy, and the Rank 3 model, initiated by Copernicus. Cowen is participating in the shift from Rank 4 economics, which is the focus of his monograph, to a possible Rank 5 economics, which doesn’t quite exist yet. But, who knows what the future will bring?

* * * * * *

You can download a PDF:

• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/168873753/Tyler_Cowen_is_the_Tycho_Brahe_of_Economics
• ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/407286640_Tyler_Cowen_is_the_Tycho_Brahe_of_Economics

LLMs are not enough [LeCun]

1. Je n'ai jamais dit que les LLMs étaient inutiles ou n'avaient pas de valeur commerciale.
2. Mais beaucoup de technologies sont utiles et à haute valeur sans être particulièrement "intelligentes"
3. Les LLMs sont essentiellement inutiles et sans grande valeur pour ce qui est…

— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) June 18, 2026

English translation is available at the link. 

Orange, yellow, yellow, orange, red

The world's first trillionaire racist [Musk]

Toby Buckle, Greg Sargent, Elon Musk’s Race War Just Took Darker Turn—Time for a Global Response, The New Republic, June 17, 2026.

If you were on the verge of becoming the first trillionaire in human history, with the press breathlessly reporting on your every move, that would probably be your focus. Yet in the days before SpaceX’s initial public offering vaulted Musk into the 13-digit wealth club, the tech mogul’s mind was elsewhere—a white man in Belfast had been viciously stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant, and it provided Musk an opening.

In numerous social media postings, Musk highlighted the crime in starkly racist terms. Several nights of violent anti-immigrant pogroms orchestrated by fascist mobs followed. It was a telling confluence of events: Musk’s extraordinary wealth is fueled by investors’ bedazzlement at his techno-utopian schemes. But the Belfast conflagration revealed the other side of his future vision: his belief that the white populations of the world must violently subjugate the nonwhite enemy in what he sees as a multicontinental, Armageddon-like Total War for global racial supremacy.

As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbing—resulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrants—Musk egged it on. Using X—the platform he acquired precisely for moments like these—he posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who “placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied: “This is the way.” [...]

In a very real sense, the fires in Belfast illuminate the emerging outlines of that coming struggle. Musk’s involvement in British politics has tracked with his growing fantasies about global race war.

Back at home:

In the United States, Musk had already been experimenting with a consistent trope in fascist rhetoric: seizing on a crime committed by an individual member of a minority group and claiming that it shows the innate murderous tendencies of the group as a whole. The real claim here is that these isolated horrific acts “reveal” the whole minority group’s disguised genocidal intent toward white peoples—and suggest that this is why the group has deviously infiltrated white countries and communities.

Western civilization is under attack:

By endorsing Reconquista, Musk is amplifying one of the clarion calls of the European far right and, increasingly, the American right, as well: “remigration.” This is the idea that saving Western civilization (as Musk imagines it) requires the forced expulsion of huge numbers of immigrants, especially Muslims, and even untold numbers of their descendants. In response to a missive about white people potentially becoming a minority in New Zealand, Musk posted recently: “The doom of Western Civilization must be averted!”

A robot-AI utopia:

But the real intent behind Musk’s indictment of “suicidal empathy” appears to be future-focused too. In an interview, Tarnoff points out that Musk’s imagined future of humanoid robots and AI can be squared with his hatred of mass migration. “You reduce your reliance on immigration as a labor source if you automate more labor,” Tarnoff tells us, noting that in this scenario, AI and robots might then be pressed into service to “restrict immigration.”

In this context, we believe it’s not an accident that Musk explicitly denigrated “civilizational suicidal empathy” while his Department of Government Efficiency decimated the budget of USAID, which helped produce hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. That was a test run: If Musk’s robot-and-AI utopia fails to produce mass abundance for the global poor, and global warming spurs more suffering and more migrations, saving human “civilization” will require dispensing with the empathy gene: It will give us the fortitude to cut loose all that third-world civilizational dead weight.

A national security threat:

Then there’s what a future Democratic Congress can do. The Musk problem will have to be on its agenda in a serious and meaningful way. Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, points out a core problem here: His many government contracts, and his access to privileged information, pose a “national security threat,” even as Space X itself is in many ways a “national security asset.” We need to know a lot more about what Musk’s contracts actually translate into in terms of his personal influence inside the government.

There's much more at the link.