Thursday, March 12, 2026
AI as coder, reports from the trenches
Clive Thompson, Coders Coded Their Job Away. Why Are So Many of Them Happy About It? NYTimes, Mar. 12, 2026.
He and Brennan-Burke, who is 32, are still software developers, but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code. Instead, they spend their days talking to the A.I., describing in plain English what they want from it and responding to the A.I.’s “plan” for what it will do. Then they turn the agents loose.
A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire. Sometimes when Claude misbehaves and fails to test the code, Ebert scolds the agent: Claude, you really do have to run all the tests.
To avoid repeating these sorts of errors, Ebert has added some stern warnings to his prompt file, the list of instructions — a stern Ten Commandments — that his agents must follow before they do anything. When you behold the prompt file of a coder using A.I., you are viewing a record of the developer’s attempts to restrain the agents’ generally competent, but unpredictably deviant, actions.
A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker.
I looked at Ebert’s prompt file. It included a prompt telling the agents that any new code had to pass every single test before it got pushed into Hyperspell’s real-world product. One such test for Python code, called a pytest, had its own specific prompt that caught my eye: “Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing.”
Embarrassing? Did that actually help, I wondered, telling the A.I. not to “embarrass” you? Ebert grinned sheepishly. He couldn’t prove it, but prompts like that seem to have slightly improved Claude’s performance. [...]
Computer programming has been through many changes in its 80-year history. But this may be the strangest one yet: It is now becoming a conversation, a back-and-forth talk fest between software developers and their bots.
This vertiginous shift threatens to stir up some huge economic consequences. For decades, coding was considered such wizardry that if you were halfway competent you could expect to enjoy lifetime employment. If you were exceptional at it (and lucky), you got rich. Silicon Valley panjandrums spent the 2010s lecturing American workers in dying industries that they needed to “learn to code.”
Now coding itself is being automated. To outsiders, what programmers are facing can seem richly deserved, and even funny: American white-collar workers have long fretted that Silicon Valley might one day use A.I. to automate their jobs, but look who got hit first! Indeed, coding is perhaps the first form of very expensive industrialized human labor that A.I. can actually replace.
Why programmers like their AI coders:
The enthusiasm of software developers for generative A.I. stands in stark contrast to how other Americans feel about the impact of large language models. Polls show a majority are neutral or skeptical; creatives are often enraged. But if coders are more upbeat, it’s because their encounters with A.I. are diametrically opposite to what’s happening in many other occupations, says Anil Dash, a friend of mine who is a longtime programmer and tech executive. “The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”
There's much more at the link.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Maybe the AI industry is waking up, at long last
Two Turing-class AI researchers just raised $2B in three weeks to bet against every LLM company on the planet.
— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) March 11, 2026
Fei-Fei Li closed $1B for World Labs on February 18. LeCun closed $1.03B for AMI Labs today. Both building world models. Both arguing that the entire generative AI… https://t.co/pFHuVaY0XL
From the tweet:
This tells you everything about how the smart money is actually modeling AI’s future. They’re not pricing AMI on a revenue multiple. They’re pricing it on the probability that LLMs hit a ceiling. And if you look at the investor list, Nvidia, Samsung, Toyota Ventures, Dassault, Sea, these are companies that need AI to understand physics, geometry, and force dynamics.
Why Trump's corruption is the single most disturbing thing about his presidency [+ Yazoo!]
A friend recently asked me for critiques of Trump’s performance. The first thing that came to mind was his corruption and, though I went on to say some other things, I kept thinking, “corruption, corruption, corruption.” Why? Can’t we just set the corruption aside as an unfortunate personal attribute and focus on the results of his policies? I thought about it and decided that, “no, we can’t.” Why? Because his corruption undermines the basis of modern institutional structures. It undermines democracy itself.
The following conversation with Claude 5.4 explains. Also, there’s a bonus at the end, The Yazoo Land Fraud. It’s a whopper.
* * * * *
First, I want you to review the paper, The Evolution of Cognition, in the project area. Now, here’s a passage from a book [David] Hays wrote about the evolution of technology:
Let me begin, this time, closest to home, with New York. The most basic principle of organization here and now is that an officer of government must separate the rights and obligations of his office from those of his or her person. If the officer is given a budget of $10,000,000, the person must not take $1 of that--as numerous officers have learned only by going to prison. Giving special help to friends and relations is also forbidden. Nor may the officer look to daddy's college roommate, who now occupies a much higher office, for special help in solving a hard problem. This principle belongs to rank 3; violation is now said to be corrupt, but in rank 2 "corruption" is the way of life.
Now, that sense of corruption is consonant with the one you’ve been advancing in this conversation. But now it’s been placed in the larger context of the ranks account of cultural evolution. The separation of one’s own interests from the duties and obligations of one’s organizational role is central to modern society. Without it, it seems to me, modern society would be very difficult, but perhaps not impossible.
But it does seem to me that such separation is central to democracy. Without that separation, those at the top of the social order will feel and be free to maintain their position of advantage and those at the bottom would have no access to advancement.
Having now reviewed the paper, I can see how neatly the Hays passage places our entire conversation within the ranks framework — and it sharpens everything considerably. The key move Hays makes is identifying the separation of role from person as specifically a Rank 3 achievement. It's not just a moral or political norm — it's a cognitive-organizational one. Rank 3 is the rank of algorithms, of systematic procedure, of the impersonal rule applied consistently regardless of who is asking. The very idea that an officer's budget is not the officer's money requires a level of abstraction — the office as a distinct entity from the person occupying it — that Rank 2 organization simply doesn't sustain. In Rank 2, the person is the role, which is why what we call corruption was then simply the normal logic of how things worked. Daddy's college roommate in the higher office is not a bug in Rank 2, it's the system.
Your point about democracy is the crucial extension though, and I think it goes even deeper than access to advancement, important as that is. Democracy requires that losing be tolerable — that the party that loses an election accepts the result and peacefully transfers power. That is only possible if the institutional role of "president" or "minister" is clearly separable from the person occupying it. If power is personal rather than institutional, losing it is existential, not merely political. You can't peacefully hand over something that is felt to be constitutive of your identity and social existence. Which is why the collapse back into Rank 2 personal-relationship logic is so specifically lethal to democratic governance — it makes the normal mechanics of democracy feel like annihilation to those who lose.
And of course the peaceful transfer of power is a central problem of political organization. It was central to Shakespeare’s history plays, and is one reason for adopting a democratic form of government.
Yes, and it's one of those cases where the historical and the literary illuminate each other directly. Shakespeare's history plays are obsessed with exactly this problem — how does power move from one holder to the next without destroying the social order in the process? And the answer that medieval and early modern England kept reaching for was dynastic legitimacy: the king's body natural dies but the king's body politic — the office, the crown — persists and passes by hereditary right. Ernst Kantorowicz's great book The King's Two Bodies traces exactly this legal-theological construction, and it's directly relevant to Richard II and the Henriad.
But the dynastic solution is enormously fragile, as Shakespeare shows again and again. It depends on there being an unambiguous legitimate heir, on that heir being competent, on powerful barons accepting the arrangement, on the Church's sanction — any one of these can fail and the whole mechanism breaks down into civil war. The Wars of the Roses, which shadow the entire sequence of history plays, are essentially what happens when dynastic legitimacy becomes contested. And contested legitimacy means that power can only be settled by force, which is catastrophically expensive in lives and social order.
Democracy solves this — at its best — by separating the question of who holds power from the question of legitimate succession entirely. The procedure is the legitimacy. You don't need the right bloodline or divine sanction; you need a credible count of votes and an institutional framework that everyone accepts as binding. The office passes not through the body of the king but through the mechanism of the election.
Which is why attacks on the integrity of elections are so specifically dangerous — they don't just dispute a particular outcome, they corrode the procedural legitimacy that makes peaceful transfer possible at all. You're pulling out the load-bearing member, to return to your earlier metaphor.
And this connects back to the ranks framework in an interesting way. The democratic solution is a Rank 3 achievement — it requires the abstraction of legitimate procedure from personal authority. But it's perpetually vulnerable to Rank 2 pressures — the loyalty to persons over institutions, the feeling that my man losing means I have lost something existential. The democratic form sits on top of a substrate of human social psychology that was shaped long before Rank 3 cognition existed, and that substrate never goes away.
* * * * *
The Yazoo Land Fraud
My friend Michael Liss told me about what may be the singled biggest act of corruption in America's political history. It's from the old days, The Yazoo Land Fraud. Here's what Claude had to say about it:
The Yazoo Land Fraud is a fascinating and somewhat underappreciated episode in early American history, touching on corruption, populist backlash, constitutional law, and the politics of the new republic all at once.
The rush to money and IP theft in the AI world
This level of desperation perfectly encapsulates the "monetization crisis" of the current AI paradigm. We’ve seen staggering capital injection, yet the path to a sustainable business loop remains so elusive that even "ethically bankrupt" shortcuts are now being legitimized in…
— David Wall (@DavidWall9987) March 11, 2026
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
AI and the American Millennial Imagination
This morning I had a long conversation with ChatGPT 5.2 Auto. We started with the varied role of the Messiah in Jewish thought, then zeroed in on Chabad. From there we went to America as a particularly fertile ground for millennial movements and ended up talking about the Technological Singularity and AI Doom. I asked ChatGPT 5.2 to write a blog essay on the last half of the conversation. Here's the text it wrote.
The current discourse about artificial intelligence is saturated with ideas that look strikingly familiar to historians of religion. On the one hand we hear predictions of a coming technological singularity—an intelligence explosion that will transform civilization so radically that the future becomes literally unimaginable. On the other hand we encounter warnings that a superintelligent AI could destroy humanity. Optimistic or catastrophic, both visions share a common structure: they anticipate a decisive rupture in history.
What is remarkable is not simply that such narratives exist. Millennial thinking has appeared many times before. What is remarkable is where it has appeared: at the center of one of the most powerful technological industries in the world. To understand this phenomenon, it helps to place contemporary AI discourse within the much longer history of American millenarian movements.
The American Millennial Tradition
From the beginning, the United States has been unusually fertile ground for millennial expectation. The roots lie partly in the worldview of the Puritan settlers of New England. Many of them interpreted their migration in providential terms, imagining the new colonies as a “city upon a hill” with a special role in sacred history. Biblical prophecy—especially the apocalyptic imagery of the Book of Revelation—was deeply embedded in their intellectual world.
The expectation of historical transformation did not disappear with the decline of Puritanism. Instead it evolved into new forms during the nineteenth century, when the young republic developed what sociologists call a “religious free market.” With no established church and relatively weak religious authority, charismatic leaders could easily found new movements. The result was an extraordinary proliferation of sects, many of them millennial.
The Millerite movement of the 1840s predicted the imminent return of Christ, culminating in the famous “Great Disappointment” of 1844. The aftermath gave rise to several enduring denominations, including Seventh-day Adventism. The same religious environment produced other innovative movements such as Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The pattern was clear: Americans repeatedly generated groups that believed they were living at the threshold of world transformation.
Several structural features of American society encouraged this dynamic. Religious freedom allowed new sects to form easily. Frontier conditions weakened institutional authority and encouraged experimentation. High levels of biblical literacy encouraged direct interpretation of prophetic texts. And the ideology of American exceptionalism fostered the belief that the nation itself might play a central role in world-historical events.
Millennial imagination became, in effect, a recurring feature of American culture.
Counterculture and Technological Transformation
The next major transformation of millennial expectation occurred during the counterculture of the 1960s. The language changed, but the underlying structure remained.
Instead of the Second Coming, the counterculture anticipated an impending transformation of consciousness. The popular phrase “Age of Aquarius” expressed the hope that humanity was entering a new spiritual epoch. Psychedelic experience, Eastern spirituality, and communal experimentation were widely interpreted as signs that a new form of human existence might be emerging.
The San Francisco Bay Area became the epicenter of this cultural ferment. What is less widely recognized is how closely this environment overlapped with the emerging world of computing. Figures such as Douglas Engelbart were already imagining computers as tools for augmenting human intellect. Publications like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog promoted a synthesis of ecological awareness, communal experimentation, and personal technology.
Out of this hybrid culture—part psychedelic, part technological—emerged a new kind of futurism. Instead of mystical awakening alone, technological systems were now imagined as instruments of human transformation.
The Singularity Narrative
The modern idea of the technological singularity crystallized in the early 1990s with the work of the science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. Vinge argued that once machines became more intelligent than humans, they would design even more powerful machines, producing an “intelligence explosion.” Beyond that point, the course of history would become fundamentally unpredictable.
Ray Kurzweil later popularized this idea, embedding it in a broader narrative of exponential technological growth. In Kurzweil’s vision, advances in computation, biotechnology, and nanotechnology converge to produce radical life extension, human–machine integration, and eventually a post-biological civilization.
Structurally, the singularity narrative resembles earlier millennial expectations. In religious movements, a divine intervention transforms the world and inaugurates a new age. In the singularity narrative, a technological breakthrough performs the same role. Salvation becomes technological transcendence.
The narrative retains the familiar elements of eschatology: a decisive threshold, a transformed humanity, and a future that lies beyond ordinary comprehension.
The Rise of AI Doom
Alongside the optimistic singularity narrative, a darker version has emerged in recent decades. Philosophers and researchers concerned with existential risk have argued that a superintelligent AI might pursue goals incompatible with human survival. The philosopher Nick Bostrom articulated this concern in systematic form, analyzing the “control problem” posed by potentially superintelligent systems. More dramatic warnings have emerged from the rationalist community associated with the website LessWrong, where the possibility of human extinction from misaligned AI is often treated as a central moral concern.
Despite their differences, the optimistic and catastrophic narratives share a common structure. Both assume that technological progress is approaching a critical threshold that will fundamentally alter the course of human history. The singularity promises transcendence; AI doom predicts annihilation. In both cases, the present is interpreted as the final moment before a world-transforming event.
This structure is instantly recognizable to historians of millennial movements.
A New Historical Situation
Yet there is one crucial difference between AI millennialism and earlier movements. Traditional millenarian groups predicted world transformation but did not control the mechanisms that might produce it. The Millerites could only await the Second Coming. Apocalyptic sects interpreted history but did not make it.
In the case of artificial intelligence, the situation is different. The people articulating the transformative narrative are often the same people building the technology. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind operate with enormous financial resources while simultaneously discussing existential risks associated with their own research.
In this sense, the prophetic discourse and the technological apparatus are intertwined. Concerns about alignment and safety are not merely philosophical speculation; they shape the research agendas of organizations backed by billions of dollars in investment. No previous millennial movement has possessed such material power.
A Persistent Cultural Pattern
Seen in historical perspective, the emergence of AI millenarian thinking is less surprising than it first appears. American culture has repeatedly produced narratives of imminent transformation, whether religious, political, or technological. The agents of change have varied—divine intervention, revolutionary politics, expanded consciousness, or superintelligent machines—but the expectation of a decisive turning point in history has remained remarkably stable.
Artificial intelligence represents the latest chapter in that tradition. The language is technological rather than theological, but the structure of expectation remains familiar: humanity stands at the edge of a new epoch, and the choices made in the present may determine the fate of the species.
Whether the transformation proves revolutionary or merely evolutionary remains to be seen. But the cultural imagination surrounding AI clearly belongs to a long American lineage of millennial thinking—one that stretches from Puritan prophecy to Silicon Valley futurism.
Monday, March 9, 2026
Sunday, March 8, 2026
The world mostly gets changed through collective effort.
David Marchese, Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here, NYTimes, Mar. 8, 2026.
From the intro:
As the old saw goes, the only constant is change. But change doesn’t always feel as overwhelming as it does right now. We are living in an era of widespread democratic backsliding, sweeping technological disruption and the slow-motion disaster of the climate crisis, to name just a few of the most troubling societal upheavals. But what if, despite all that, there’s a different and more hopeful story to tell about change?
That’s the question at the heart of “The Beginning Comes After the End,” the new book by the prolific and critically acclaimed progressive writer Rebecca Solnit. A thematic sequel to her classic “Hope in the Dark,” the book shines a light on the vibrant world often hidden within our own seemingly gloomier one — a world that has embraced ideas of interconnection, ecological care and political equality.
From the conversation:
Whether it has to do with environmental degradation or degradation of our politics or of people, it seems as if the public is hungry for an individual to be a counterweight to Trump and Trumpism. I don’t know whether that person is Zohran Mamdani or Gavin Newsom, who is clearly trying to position himself that way. But for whatever reason, that person has yet to be identified. Why do you think that is? One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war. I denigrate politicians I don’t respect as windsocks. I just want us to understand that most of the important change is collective.
There's more at the link.
Living Human Brain Cells Play DOOM on a CL1
Andrew Paul, Computer run on human brain cells learned to play ‘Doom’, Popular Science, Mar. 2, 2026.
A biocomputer powered by lab-grown human brain cells has leveled up from Pong to Doom. While nowhere ready to handle the video game shooter’s most challenging levels, researchers at Cortical Labs in Australia believe their neuronal chip is well on its way to powering a new generation of hybrid organic technologies.
“This was a major milestone, because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time goal directed learning,” Brett Kagan, Cortical Labs Chief Scientific and Chief Operations Officer, said in a recent video announcement.
It’s taken years to cross the Doom benchmark. In 2021, Cortical Labs debuted DishBrain—an early biocomputer utilizing around 800,000 human nerve cells. These neurons were connected to a small processing chip capable of interpreting and directing electrical activity similar to a standard silicon-powered device.
To showcase DishBrain’s potential, engineers successfully trained their biocomputer to play Pong. The classic, 2D game is often a test case for computational neuroscientists because it requires their system to navigate a dynamic information landscape in real time.
It took Cortical Labs more than 18 months using its original hardware and software to accomplish their Pong goal. DishBrain was eventually supplanted by CL1, which the company bills as the “world’s first code deployable biological computer.”
There's more at the link.
Saturday, March 7, 2026
A Confluence of Crazies: The Pentagon and the Tech Bros
Robert Wright, Iran and the immortality of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Nonzero Newsletter, Mar. 6, 2026.
I'm not going to try to summarize the first three-quarters of this article, which is about how the irrational projective tendencies (my formulation [1], but not quite Wright's) of US foreign policy lead the country into senseless war after senseless war. Here's where he ends up:
All of this helps explain why the US has devoted so much time and energy to enterprises that kill or immiserate millions and millions of people—not just the military interventions we stage, but the profuse supplying of weapons (for Israel’s war on Gaza, for example), and the economic strangulation of nations like Cuba and Venezuela and Iran. All of these endeavors had the support of intensely motivated special interest groups. By and large, the deployment of US troops and arms and sanctions—our big, blunt, coercive instruments—have nothing to do with serving America’s actual interests, much less the interests of the world. And they repeatedly—as now in Iran—cover us in moral disgrace.
This is one reason I harp, however ineffectually, on the importance of respecting international law. The machinery for making US foreign policy is so out of control—so wildly misaligned with American interests, the global interest, and morality—that it urgently needs to be constrained by some clear and coherent set of rules. And so long as it’s not constrained by such a thing, we shouldn’t kid ourselves: The US military (and I say this as an Army brat who grew up with a genuine affection for the military and genuine pride in my father’s service during World War II and after) is now mainly an instrument of mayhem and is increasingly a source of global instability.
All of which brings us back to Anthropic, whose Claude large language model is integrated into Maven, software that’s operated by Palantir and used by the Pentagon to identify targets. The Washington Post reports that “as planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance.” Given that the Iranian elementary school was hit on the first day of the war, it seems fairly likely that Claude played a role in the selection of that target and thus in the death of more than 100 young girls—many times more kids than were killed in the worst American school shooting.
This might seem to vindicate Dario Amodei’s refusal to give the Pentagon carte blanche to use Claude in “fully autonomous” weapons systems. But before we give him the Nobel Peace Prize, note two things: (1) This kind of contractual carveout almost certainly wouldn’t have made a difference in this case even if honored. No doubt there was a “human in the kill chain”—someone who, at a minimum, scanned the list of targets generated by Maven and said, “Yep, looks like a list of targets. Let’s do it!” (2) Even if Amodei’s scruples had somehow magically prevented the bombing of that school, Claude would still be an accomplice to mass murder. More than 1,000 Iranian civilians have already been killed in this war—a war that flagrantly violates international law and continues to lack a coherently articulated rationale. Anyone who makes money by aiding endeavors like this has a lot to answer for.
Last week Amodei, in explaining Anthropic’s position on Pentagon contracts, emphasized the company’s overall commitment to national security. He wrote, “I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” If Amodei genuinely believes that the US military is devoted to addressing actual “existential” threats to the US, he’s too naive to be entrusted with anything as important as running a big AI company.
Obviously, this indictment applies about equally to OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who gladly swooped in and snatched the Pentagon largesse that Amodei will now be denied) and to Google’s Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis and to xAI’s Elon Musk. All the big AI companies are putting their tools at the disposal of the Pentagon to use as it sees fit.[2]
Notes
[1] This paragraph, from my post, TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche, will give you some idea of my thinking about the projective dynamic of America's urges to war:
As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.
[2] Between the Trump administration in Washington and the Big Tech Billionaires in Silicon Valley, this country is currently dominated by a confluence of crazies, perhaps the largest in American history.
How humanitarian concern became perverted into a justification for war [Trump in Iran]
Amanda Taub, How Good Intentions Helped Pave Trump’s Road to Iran, NYTimes, March 7, 20226.
If Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social in January as protesters flooded the streets of Iran in the largest anti-government demonstrations in the country’s history. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
As it turned out, Iran did kill thousands of protesters. But the United States was not as ready as it claimed. It was not until Feb. 28 that the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran’s government.
That's how Taub begins her article. She then goes on to list Trump's shifting justifications for the war before circling back to humanitarian concern:
Few believe that Mr. Trump is driven by a concern for human rights. He has also made clear his lack of interest in international law. And the war has already been catastrophic for many Iranian civilians, including dozens killed at an elementary school in an apparent U.S. missile strike on a nearby naval base. Yet the invocation of humanitarianism to help justify the war taps into — whether the president intends it or not — a powerful argument that has reshaped the global order since the end of the Cold War.
Under international law, force is permitted only in self-defense against an armed attack, or with authorization from the U.N. Security Council. There is no right to invade another country to protect civilians, even if their own government is the one harming them. That can often lead to governments or armed militias getting away with massacring protesters, torturing prisoners, committing ethnic cleansing or other atrocities. These rules of international law and the institutions that apply them have long been a source of anger.
The doctrine known as the “Responsibility to Protect,” often abbreviated as R2P by foreign-policy wonks, sought to change that. It emerged out of an era of liberal triumphalism, when the United States, its allies and some international institutions started to believe that sometimes, might could be a force for right — perhaps even if that meant violating international law.
But the effort to carve out a humanitarian exception, experts say, has left a weak spot in legal norms around the use of force — one that can now be exploited by leaders seeking to justify invasions of other sovereign states.
Nor is Trump the only leader to invoke "humanitarian logic" to justify war. Putin did so for Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“It’s more effective to pick up a tool that already exists than to create a new one,” said Kate Cronin-Furman, a professor at University College London and the author of “Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities.”
“There’s an academic conception of zombie norms, which are norms of international law that get sort of hollowed out, but still hang around with rhetorical relevance, even though they don’t seem to really constrain anyone’s behavior,” Professor Cronin-Furman said.
The fact that Responsibility to Protect once had considerable legitimacy, she said, means that Mr. Trump, or Mr. Putin, can still draw on it now.
The rest of the article goes on to discuss the origins of the Responsibility to Protect and how Putin and Trump have been able to exploit it for their own somewhat different ends and further harm is likely to follow.
International law is a funny thing. With no real means of enforcement, it’s essentially a set of reciprocal expectations. It only works if states believe others will follow the rules, too. Anything that departs from those expectations weakens that system. [...]
Another tragedy of the current situation is that civilians remain in urgent need of protection from mass violence — and solutions to that problem seem more remote than ever.
There's more at the link.
Friday, March 6, 2026
Machining World First Transparent Hydraulic Press Tools
YouTube:
Welcome to another exciting episode of Beyond the Press, where we take you behind the scenes of creating our unique transparent tools for our 150 ton hydraulic press seen on hydraulic press channel.
In this episode, we dive deep into the process of designing, machining, polishing, and testing our latest creation - transparent tools made from high-quality acrylic. We've invested 3000€ into these plastics to ensure we're working with the best materials possible.
Watch as we transform these raw materials into fully functional, transparent tools through a meticulous process of design and machining. Our workshop is buzzing with the sounds of lathes, milling machines, and polishers, all working in harmony to bring our vision to life.
We'll guide you through every step of the process, from the initial design sketches to the final polishing touches. You'll see firsthand how we maintain the transparency of the acrylic while ensuring the tools are robust and functional.
But we're not just about the process - we're also about the results. That's why we put our transparent tools to the test, demonstrating their effectiveness and durability.
This video is a must-watch for anyone interested in machining, workshop processes, tool creation, or simply enjoys watching a satisfying transformation from raw materials to finished product.
Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to Beyond the Press for more behind-the-scenes looks at our workshop and the fascinating world of tool creation.
Note that I did not watch the whole thing. I started at the beginning, sampled four or five sections and then zipped to the end for the first test at about 30:17. Wonderful!
And here you can see the new tools in action:
Government surveillance and AI (the Pentagon vs. Anthropic)
Ezra Klein, Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic, NYTimes, Mar. 6, 2026.
My guest today is Dean Ball. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and author of the newsletter Hyperdimensional. He was also a senior policy adviser on A.I. and emerging tech for the Trump White House, and the primary staff drafter of America’s A.I. Action Plan. But he’s been furious at what they’re doing here.
Somewhat into the conversation:
Klein: Didn’t Pete Hegseth have posters around the Department of War saying: “I want you to use A.I.”?
Ball: [Laughs.] They are very enthusiastic about A.I. adoption.
Here’s how I would think about what these systems can do in a national security context.
First of all, there’s a longstanding issue that the intelligence community collects more data than it can possibly analyze. I remember seeing something from, I forget which intelligence agency, but one of them, that essentially said that it collects so much data every year that it would need eight million intelligence analysts to properly process all of it.
That’s just one agency, and that’s far more employees than the federal government has as a whole.
What can A.I. do? Well, you can automate a lot of that analysis — transcribing text and then analyzing that text, signals intelligence processing, things like that. That’s one area. Sometimes that needs to be done in real time for an ongoing military operation, so that might be a good example.
Then, another area is that these models have gotten quite good at software engineering. So there are cyberdefense and cyberoffense operations where they can deliver tremendous utility.
Klein: Let’s talk about mass surveillance here, because my understanding from talking to people on both sides of this — and it has now been fairly widely reported — is that this contract fell apart over mass surveillance at the final, critical moment.
Emil Michael goes to Dario Amodei and says: We will agree to this contract, but you need to delete the clause that is prohibiting us from using Claude to analyze bulk-collected commercial data.
Ball: Yes.
Klein: Why don’t you explain what’s going on there?
Ball: The first thing I want to say is that national security law is filled with gotchas.
It’s filled with legal terms of art, terms that we use colloquially quite a bit, where the actual statutory definition of that term is quite different from what you would infer from the colloquial use of the term. [...]
... this incident is in the training data for future models. Future models are going to observe what happened here, and that will affect how they think of themselves and how they relate to other people.
“Surveillance” is the collection or acquisition of private information, but that doesn’t include commercially available information. So if you buy something, if you buy a data set of some kind and then you analyze it, that’s not necessarily surveillance under the law.
Klein: So if they hack my computer or my phone to see what I’m doing on the internet, that’s surveillance.
Ball: That would be surveillance. If they put cameras everywhere, that would be surveillance.
But if there are cameras everywhere, and they buy the data from the cameras, and then they analyze that data, that might not necessarily be surveillance.
Klein: Or if they buy information about everything I’m doing online, which is very available to advertisers, and then use it to create a picture of me — that’s not necessarily surveillance.
Ball: Or where you physically are in the world. Yes.
I’ll step back for a second and just say that there’s a lot of data out there, there’s a lot of information that the world gives off — your Google search results, your smartphone location data, all these things.
The reason that no one really analyzes it in the government is not so much that they can’t acquire it and do so. It’s because they don’t have the personnel. They don’t have millions and millions of people to figure out what the average person is up to.
The problem with A.I. is that A.I. gives them that infinitely scalable work force. Thus, every law can be enforced to the letter with perfect surveillance over everything. And that’s a scary future.
Klein: We think of the space between us and certain forms of tyranny, or the feared panopticon, as a space inhabited by legal protection. But one thing that seems to be at the core of a lot of fear is that it’s, in fact, not just legal protection. It’s actually the government’s inability to have the absorption of that level of information about the public and then do anything with it.
Ball: Yes.
Klein: And if all of a sudden you radically change the government’s ability without changing any laws, you have changed what is possible within those laws.
Hiring of software engineers is UP
Citadel Securities published this graph showing a strange phenomenon.
— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) March 5, 2026
Job postings for software engineers are actually seeing a massive spike.
Classic example of the Jevons paradox. When AI makes coding cheaper, companies actually may need a lot more software engineers, not… pic.twitter.com/Ov4xmotDfc
Thursday, March 5, 2026
The Discipline of Literary Criticism: A Quixotic Essay about Thinkers, Methods and Authority
New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6352618
Abstract: This working paper examines the intellectual status of literary criticism as an academic discipline in the United States. Beginning from a playful prompt inspired by Tyler Cowen’s book GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter?, the essay initially sets out to identify the “greatest” literary critics. Very quickly, however, the exercise reveals a deeper problem: unlike economics, the population of figures who count as literary critics is difficult to define, and the criteria by which they might be evaluated are far from clear. The project therefore shifts from ranking critics to examining the boundaries, origins, and intellectual ambitions of the discipline itself.
The essay traces the emergence of contemporary academic literary criticism to the mid-twentieth century, using Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry as a marker of the New Criticism’s institutional consolidation within American universities. From there it examines the crisis that arose in the 1960s when disagreements about interpretation raised doubts about whether literary criticism could claim the status of cumulative knowledge. The 1966 Johns Hopkins structuralism conference serves as a pivotal moment, bringing figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida into the orbit of literary studies and helping to catalyze the rise of “Theory”—a broad set of interpretive approaches drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and other disciplines.
Through discussions of figures such as Coleridge, Frye, Girard, Derrida, and Harold Bloom, the essay explores competing conceptions of literary criticism: as pedagogy, as cultural guardianship, as theoretical inquiry, and as personal commentary on great works. Bloom’s eventual retreat from academic criticism toward a more public and personal mode of literary judgment is treated as emblematic of the discipline’s ongoing uncertainty about its intellectual foundations.
Contents
Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline 3
1. The search for GOAT Literary Critics 6
2. A discipline is founded: Brooks & Warren, Northrop Frye, and S. T. Coleridge 23
3. Structuralism and its aftermath: Girard, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida 32
Character in the Age of Adam Smith [GOAT economist], an interlude 56
4. What’s up with the Bard? [Bloom, Cowen, and Girard] 59
Harold Bloom and Hillis Miller on the Demise of Literary Studies 71
5. Harold Bloom, the one and only 73
Appendix 1: The Chatbots Comment on this Essay 94
Appendix 2: Commentary on the Profession 98
Appendix 3: Open Letters about Literary Criticism 100
Appendix 4: Naturalist Literary Criticism 101
Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline
I started this project on a whim, as I often do. Tyler Cowen had just announced his book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter, and I thought: Why don’t I do the greatest literary critics? And that’s what I set out to do.
But I had no plan, just a vague intention. When I began this project I had no idea, for example, that I would end it with a discussion of Harold Bloom, giving him more attention than any other critic or that I would deposit a longish piece about Susan Sontag in the middle of my Bloom discussion. No, I didn’t plan that, I hadn’t even anticipating discussing Bloom at all.
Once I got started, however, whole thing evolved more or less organically and is something of an opportunistic hodge-podge of various kinds of intellectual materials, prose that I’ve written (the biggest single chunk of material), lists from Wikipedia, queries to ChatGPT, charts from Google Ngrams, and topic model charts. Why don’t we agree that its form is an exercise in avant-garde criticism intended to mime the jagged and fuzzy state of the discipline?
This diagram depicts the argument that has emerged during this exercise. Read it as moving from the past, at the left, on through the present to the future, at the right:
I locate the beginning of the contemporary academic discipline of literary criticism in the mid-20th century pedagogical anthology, Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warran, which I discuss in some detail later in this essay. Commentary on literature shades off into the past back through Samuel Johnson in the modern world and through Aristotle in the ancient world, and both classical and vernacular literature was studied in the nineteenth-century German universities that provided the model on which American universities were established, but the contemporary academic study of literature is based on interpretive methods and ideas that crystalized in the middle of the 20th century. Brooks & Warren are a convenient marker of that activity. It was known as the New Criticism, a term still in use for a certain body of work.
By the 1960s, however, that interpretive activity had become problematic. Some critics became bothered by the fact that different critics arrived at different interpretive conclusions about the same texts. “How,” they came to wonder, “how can we count this as knowledge if we can’t agree on meanings?” And so, some scholars at Johns Hopkins invited a group of Continental thinkers, mostly French, but not entirely, to a symposium in the Fall of 1966. The symposium was organized around structuralism, an interdisciplinary movement of the human sciences that emerged in Europe at the middle of the century. A French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss was the nominal head of the movement. He was invited to the symposium, but couldn’t make it. As it turned out, however, the star of the conference was a young philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who skewered Lévi-Strauss with his contribution, thus sowing the first seeds of poststructuralism. Note that neither of them is a literary critic, but they have had as much if note more influence on literary criticism than anyone who was and is primarily a literary critic.
And so I have indicated them at the middle of the diagram, with one of them pointed toward the future and the other pointing toward the past. The direction of those arrows reflects my judgment, but it should by no means be considered as reflective of the discipline. The discipline would come to reject Lévi-Strauss, but an increasingly large portion of it would come to at least accept, if not embrace, the insights of Derrida. I have a great deal to say about that later in the essay. And I want to say a bit about my own position in this – I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the French landed – just a bit later in this introduction.
Derrida’s method, deconstruction (a word he coined), opened the floodgates to a variety of interpretive methods that came to be collectively known as “Theory,” with a capital “T.” Theory is the application of some approach to the study of the human mind and/or society that is used as a vehicle for interpreting literary (and other) texts. Psychoanalysis and Marxism were the first through the door followed by feminism, African-American studies and so on and so forth.
Understandably many (older) critics resisted these new dispensations, none more forcefully than Harold Bloom. While he spent a few years trying to go along with the program, during the 1980s he broke ranks and not only abandoned poststructuralism but he pretty much abandoned academic literary criticism in favor of addressing himself to the general educated public in through edited collections and a variety of books, including one on American religion (which I’ve read), and big fat books on The Western Canon and Shakespeare. I’ve given over the last 20 pages of this essay (excluding the appendices) to Bloom, with a diversion into Susan Sontag, though it becomes 35 pages if you include the immediately preceding remarks on Shakespeare’s position in the canon, a reasonable inclusion given that Bloom is Bardolator in Chief.
That accounts for the position of Bloom on the chart, right of center at the apex of a triangle trailing off into the past. He abandoned the modes of thought ushered in by Brooks & Warren and retreated into a more personalistic mode of criticism, one that allowed him to luxuriate in his own opinions as amplified through his tremendous, but ultimately narrow, erudition. Bloom became an empire unto himself.
As for me, as I said, I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the structuralism conference took place. I didn’t attend it, didn’t even know it was happening, but I was introduced to structuralism and semiotics by Dr. Richard Macksey, a book-collecting polymath who did much of the organizational groundwork for the conference. Without going into detail, I decided that the natural progression from Lévi-Strauss was into cognitive science and computational semantics, which I pursued with David Hays in linguistics while getting a Ph.D. in English at The State University of New York at Buffalo. And that effectively took me well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism.
While I have continued my interest in literature and have written both practical commentary and theoretical and methodological studies, I have also pursued other intellectual interests – cultural evolution, cognitive science, music, film, graffiti, this and that. The upshot is that I am not as widely and deeply read in literary criticism as I would have been had I decided to mind my Ps and Qs for the last 40 years.
That’s an obvious disqualification for writing a longish essay intended to do for literary critics what Tyler Cowen did for economists, identify the GOATs (Greatest of All Time). But that, as you will quickly see, that’s not what I ended up doing. Rather, I used that objective as a vehicle for examining the origins and boundaries of the academic discipline of literary criticism, which I have depicted in that diagram. And that, I would argue, is a task for which my outsider status suits me well. I can see what’s going on in a way that those in the middle of it cannot.
You be the judge.
Have at it.
* * * * *
Note: I’ve included appendices listing various articles I’ve written about the profession. The last one is about the opportunities opened up by computing, both as a conceptual model and a practical tool.
Market Volatility in Asia Swings on Energy and AI
Meaghan Tobin, What the Extraordinary Market Volatility in Asia Says About Energy and A.I. NYTimes, Mar. 5, 2026.
Stocks across most of Asia rallied on Thursday, a day after tumbling over fears around the region’s heavy reliance on imported oil and gas.
The turnaround illustrates the hair-trigger reactions of investors around the world who are trying to assess the immediate and possible long-term effects of the strikes on Iran by the United States and Israel and the repercussions around the Persian Gulf, where much of the world’s oil and gas is produced. [...]
Over the past year, intense optimism about artificial intelligence has led investors to pour money into tech stocks in Taiwan and South Korea. The two places make most of the equipment like computer chips and servers that power the world’s A.I. systems. They also depend on imports for virtually all of their energy.
The stock market seesaw served as a reminder not only of the central role that these two East Asian democracies play in the global economy, but how bullish investors remain about A.I.
There's more at the link.
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche
Once again I"m bumping this to the top of the queue. And for obvious reasons. Once again a foolhardy President has taken the country into a war with no obvious end in sight, just a squandering of human live and productive resources.
* * * * *
As part of a special WAR EDITION of New Savanna I'm reproducing a set of notes I wrote up during the 2000 Presidential Election. I first published them on NS back in November of 2011 and I'm republishing them now in recognition of yet another turn in the long-spinning wheel of American mythology. Yet another bump to the top, as I'm thinking of this stuff, this time in connection with the relationship between war and nationalism.
Everything is connected to everything else and the causal forces meeting in the historical present stretch back into the past without end. Figuring out where to start is not easy. My sense is that we need to focus our attention on the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. That left the nation without a national scapegoat, thus radically altering the nation’s psycho-cultural landscape. We no longer had Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire to kick around.
As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.
For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.
Thus we have the thesis in Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.
Vietnam was the last major war of the Cold War period. As it receded into the past, a political backlash set in and affirmative action came under attack. That’s the situation we faced when the Soviet Empire collapsed. With the major external threat suddenly collapsed, there was a crisis of aggression - I’m reminded of the phrase “conservation of aggression” coined by Robert Wright. The fall of the Evil Empire deprived a great many people of an object for aggressive impulses. What then, happened to that aggression?
It got directed elsewhere. My sense is that the political rhetoric on a number of issues heated up in the wake of the fall: gun control, abortion, the arts, gays, affirmative action, violence in the media. A number of these issues come under the rubric of the so-called “culture wars”. Each of these issues was already on the political agenda, and had been there for some time.
Sexy music had been inspiring pulpit denunciations and legislative action since the early decades of the 20th century. Movies have been problematic since the beginning and the NAACP put itself on the political map by organizing protests against “Birth of a Nation.” But, it seems to me, that the scope of politicized cultural contest broadened. [If I’m correct, then this could be verified empirically by doing content analysis of periodicals, looking at opinion polls, crime rates, etc.]
Perhaps the most interesting redirection, however, was into the so-called War on Drugs. Political concern about drug use is not, of course, new. It goes back to Prohibition - which, was, of course, intimately linked with that objectionably sexy music - and got redirected by and in reaction to the counter-cultural 60s and 70s. However, it is my impression that the current effort ramped up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.
This war on drugs has had substantial material consequences: increased law enforcement and court activity, a considerable increase in the prison population and, of course, in the prison industry. Our prisons now have a relatively large population of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately black, taken off the voting rolls as felons, and available for labor in various prison-based enterprises. I do not know whether or not the increase in the economic “weight” of the prison sector is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the defense sector. I would, of course, like to know.
Regardless of how those numbers work out, my basic point is simply that the end of the Cold War changed the psycho-cultural system in a major way. Psycho-cultural aggression had to be redirected and much of it was redirected at targets within the country, rather than externally. That redirection is the central political phenomenon of the 90s and is responsible for much of the ugliness and programmatic futility of current politics.
Addendum 2011: Obviously, this internal redirection of aggression continues. It may well have gotten worse – I wonder what ‘sentiment analysis’ would turn up if applied to documents written over the past decade? The problem facing us, of course, is not that of finding suitable targets for this displaced aggression. No, we have to restructure our way of living so as to reduce our need to have such targets. That’s a tough one, and one that will take a generation or three.
Addendum 2014: Obviously the Arab world is a perfect target for this repressed aggression. We've got a long-standing and well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other. I fear we're going to be banging on this nail for a long time.
Addendum 2014: Obviously the Arab world is a perfect target for this repressed aggression. We've got a long-standing and well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other. I fear we're going to be banging on this nail for a long time.
Note 2026: The second post in this series has a clip from the Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, that can be taken as a comment on how Trump arrived at the decision to attack Iran: TO WAR! Part 2: A Marx Brothers Analysis of America's War Craziness.
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