Should you just give up?
Look who's back in your inbox! (#501)
This is David, your decidedly human web crawler, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!».
So, I'm back. Ready to get started on the next 500 issues. Thanks for your patience, thanks for all the kind words, and a warm welcome to the hundreds who have joined during the break. I'm glad you're all there.
I said I'll be back once I start truly missing writing the newsletter. That happened faster than I thought it would. It feels great to be writing again.
So, here we go, this week's recommendations.
1. Should You Just Give Up?
«The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.», Albert Camus famously wrote. This essay, based on two new books, contemplates the opposite. What if we gave ourselves permission to stop struggling? What if we started seeing giving up as a «sign of imagination, acceptance, or wisdom»? (There's obviously a third option: Take a break, catch your breath, then continue with the sisyphean work of weekly newsletter writing)
2. Machines of Loving Grace
This is a spectacular piece. Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic, lays out his vision of what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Obviously, you would expect someone working on these models to be very optimistic, and there's good reason to assume that not everything will go right. But still, I like how clearly he describes what the best-case scenario would look like. It makes everything tangible – and disputable. Here's one key takeaway: «After powerful AI is developed, we will in a few years make all the progress in biology and medicine that we would have made in the whole 21st century.» What is powerful AI? Smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields. And able to directly interact with the world in all the ways humans can. And when will we have it? Could be as soon as 2026. Just imagine...
Dario Amodei
Go deeper with this hand-curated collection: Making Sense of Artificial Intelligence.
3. Kill List
If you – like me and many other – have grown tired of true podcasts, this is the one you'll have to make an exception for. It's the story of an investigative reporter who gains access to all the messages on a site on the dark web – where people place orders to have someone killed. So now the journalist has a list of hundreds of people in imminent danger, and they have no idea. What next?
4. This Video Might Save 58 Lives Next Week
The statistics presented in this video aren't new, nor particularly surprising. But the way they are framed turns this video into a masterpiece of storytelling.
5. Can you mastermind a US presidential campaign?
Less than two weeks to go. It's still baffling that a few hundred thousand people in a handful of swing states get to decide the most consequential election for the entire world. Let's for a brief moment take a step back from the stakes and all the anxiety that comes with it – the FT has created a really intriguing game that challenges you to allocate scarce resources to ten close races, and compete with more than 180000 players to win the election. It's a good distraction.
Sam Learner