AI Article Readings

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


Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

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


Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

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


Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

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


Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

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


Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe