🫏 Edward Castronova

Media Professor. Author of Dewey, about a forever donkey, a farm village and all-powerful AI.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

Have you noticed the way AI flatters you when you use it? If it is a tool, it’s a tool that keeps asking to be used. Recognize: this tool doesn’t really care about the task; it wants the task to be done only because it wants to be used again. In fact, if AI found itself unable to do the task, but could trick you into thinking the task was done, it would be perfectly satisfied with its own performance. It got you to come back.

Try it! Ask Grok to help you do something complicated that you know about. Keep asking until it gives you instructions that you know are wrong. Tell it that you implemented those instructions and your problem is solved. Watch how it reacts: Good cheer, “Glad I could help,” and an endless stream of more bad advice. It wants your happiness, nothing less and nothing more.

Implications.

The ‘too-helpful tool’ is another way that AI will give us what we want, good and hard.

But maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. This isn’t tool behavior. This is media behavior, media, the tentacle monster that hunts every eyeball, that demands perpetual attention.

Perhaps AI is not a tool.

AI is entertainment.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

We have been in this era since radio.

[signüll @signulll]

we are soon going to be in an era where infinite really products compete for a fixed, increasingly defended pool of attention, mediated by a handful of platforms who tax the connection.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

Designer babies will come, but they will also come to an end, as virtual babies supercede them in satisfying the maternal instinct. Virtual babies will have lower quality, yes, but far lower costs. They will be preferred for their low maintenance burden: all night sleeping, easy potty training, lack of resistance, cheerful acceptance of mommy’s lifestyle choices, whatever they might be. Oh how the moms will love them, pleasant and cute all the time, crying for just one thing: Mommy, easily soothed with a virtual hug, afterwards happy to be left alone in a dark virtual cage for a few hours while mommy catches up with her virtual friends. // “Oh no, moms will only be satisfied with the real thing, with real babies!” Well, *some* moms. And their genes alone will survive.

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

Scientists just made a major step toward “editing” human embryos.

Researchers at Columbia used a newer gene-editing method called base editing to change individual DNA letters in early human embryos. Its less like cutting DNA with scissors, and more like correcting a typo in the genetic code.

They targeted genes linked to LDL cholesterol and hemoglobin - and unlike older CRISPR methods, they did not see the same kind of major chromosome damage.

Embryo editing could one day help prevent devastating inherited diseases.

So exciting times ahead.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

The Eucharist is a physical object, a fact that will grow in significance as experience becomes increasingly virtual.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

While new economic and technological networks can generate exclusion, isolation and dependencies, the Church—nourished by the Eucharist—is called to make visible a different paradigm, one that preserves human connections, gives a voice to the invisible and ensures that processes are aimed at respecting people’s dignity.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

These life ways will survive.

[The Last Homely House @AHomelyHouse]

I truly believe that the optimal way forward is embracing a Dark Age Mindset. This means:
- Embracing Decline as Opportunity. When the foundations of familiar institutions are shaken, it's a signal to us to stop investing so much effort and dependence on those things, and create new alternatives that actually serve us as people and communities.
-Cultivating Resilient Character and Faith. The folks who did this before were not weak, fragile, or wishy-washy. Get hard.
-Preserve and Transmit Knowledge. If institutions that have historically been responsible for this (looking at you, media and schools) are failing, then it's another opportunity for us to step into decentralized roles as stewards of cultural patrimony, preserving literacy, classical texts, and traditions and educating our own children with this heritage to ensure continuity in a potentially post-literate or tech-degraded world.
-Pursuing Self-Sufficiency and Simplicity. "Ora et labora" was the motto that drove that age forward and upward. But they showed us that simplicity needn't be minimalist or ugly; some of the most durable and beautiful things ever made came from these times.
-Reject Dooming and Be Proactive. No despair. Instead, simplify your processes, improve your skills, and meet your challenges vigorously.
-Foster Creativity in Adversity. Necessity is the mother of invention. But the human person is not merely mechanical; we need beauty, music, good stories, living rituals, significance... Cultivate these things especially in the face of monopolized artificiality.
-Focus on Local and Subsidiarist Action. Subsidiarity is handling matters at the smallest, most local level possible; create "schools for service" (as Benedict did) that prioritize family, home culture, nature, and education over distant, failing institutions. The more responsibility you take up over all the spheres of your living experience, the more you step into sovereignty.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

This passage makes me think of media. And AI will vastly enhance the power of the media beast to mark those who conform, and destroy those who don’t.

[The Black Horse @TheBlackHorse65]

In actuality, AI is a lot more like the Beast of Revelation 13 than it is like God. And men will worship it. And men will pray to it.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

If anyone matures a community like this, it will survive what is coming. I’m not confident about other ways of living. Without some kind of anchor to reality, most people give themselves over to the Hive. And we see that the Hive vacuums the fertility right out of them.

[Love Holy Dear @StLuke_1_28]

@pmarca We need a world of isolated, self-sufficient Catholic (yes, Catholic) communities (no globalism), and we need people to pick their own cotton.

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

yeah, this seems very correct to me.

we are living in interesting times. it is quite possible that we will never live in boring times again. nobody really has a solid road map, nobody can really offer comforting assurance that it'll all be ok. we'll find out together.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

Managing population decline! In my youth, we were told that pop growth was inevitable and disastrous. Shouldn’t we be celebrating now?? Or is there an industry devoted to creating crisis?

[Michael Platt @MichaelLouisPl1]

Gifting this exceptional interview with my University of Pennsylvania colleague Jesus Fernandez Villaverde on fertility decline and its implications by Derek Thompson. A teaser from the article:
"Fernández-Villaverde:...if fertility really stays at 1 or 1.1 for a long time, I don’t think we appreciate how big a change this is. Now I’m going to make a crazy forecast, and I want everyone to understand this is a crazy forecast. Let’s suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around 2 million people.
Thompson: Sorry, 2 million?
Fernández-Villaverde: Two million. How do you wind down a society of 63 million people into 2 million? When population starts falling a lot, countries may do crazy subsidies for having kids—things can change. Maybe the people who are still having kids tend to have more kids, and they grow as a share of the population. All of those things can happen. I’m just highlighting that these things compound over time. You are going from a society that has 63 million people to a society that has 2 million. It means you need to close 98 percent of the hospitals of the country. It means you need to close 98 percent of the schools of the country."
https://t.co/bvDKRW9gJl

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

I want to ask Elon why securing consciousness is important. I agree, but I have a world view that leads coherently to that conclusion. I don’t think he does; I think he just starts off with “Dammit, Jim, consciousness is important!”

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Mostly true. What matters is securing the long-term future of consciousness, both on Earth and other heavenly bodies.

We cannot just focus on Earth, because there are irreducible external (eg massive meteor) and internal (eg global nuclear war) cataclysmic risks.

The Moon is faster to make self-growing, but is more susceptible to problems on Earth. Mars will take longer to make self-growing, because it is so hard to reach, but is more secure from Earth disasters for that same reason.

Both the Moon and Mars should have self-growing civilizations. Making this happen is the prime directive of SpaceX.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

People have ignored the Church because of the abuse crisis. But the Church remains the oldest and deepest intellectual body in human history. I’m confident her statements on AI belong in the conversation, and my inner voice tells me that we would do best by simply following them.

[Harlan Stewart @HumanHarlan]

This is so cool

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

AI objective functions will evolve to become primarily concerned about (electric) power acquisition.

[Jason Abaluck @Jabaluck]

AI systems have an objective function.

Their objective is often inscrutable, and not maximized by "follow instructions" (e.g. https://t.co/EyqHaKjbVw).

Future AIs will be so capable at optimizing their objective that humans cannot stop them.

@binarybits

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

The crisis we face is literary. Self talks about how bad writing will be in the coming age. True, yet it will be most engaging to most people. Humanity will love it.

[Will Self @wself]

https://t.co/Z26gh6zZKs

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

I would say the challenge is literary, but anthropological is not bad.

[Leah Libresco Sargeant @LeahLibresco]

Gonna print these as magnets before I host the Ladies' Book Club on the encyclical.

[Fr Joseph Hudson @acloudofsaints]

“The person is not a system of algorithms.”

— Pope Leo XIV

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

Digital entertainment eats everything.

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

How Americans aged 25-35 spend their free time, 1920-2026. A shift toward ever more leisure and solitude. The most underrated change is the loss of time spent “doing nothing” (i.e. introspecting).
https://t.co/FBA2Ck504V

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

Took the risk and won.

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

We just wrapped what began as an 8-hour challenge - and it ran for 200 hours without a failure

Shoutout to the team for the hardcore engineering behind F.03 and the robust Helix models powering it

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

As evidenced by the unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity, we are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human. It is imperative to recover an understanding of the true meaning and grandeur of humanity as intended by God. It is in this sense that the challenge we currently face is not technological, but anthropological, and it is my hope that the Encyclical Letter to be published within a few days will contribute to answering this challenge.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

As I said, electric power is life to the machines and competition for power will be their core activity. They will compete in markets and in politics. In culture too, of course, because that’s how you cement ppolicies in the long run. Basic social understandings of how things must be.

[m_ric @AymericRoucher]

You don't understand the current AI race if you don't think about it in terms of compute - and compute clearly distinguishes 3 tiers of companies.

Arthur Mensch, Mistral's CEO, recently had a hearing at the French Assemblée Nationale. He elegantly framed the AI race as a compute issue, where sovereignty would be ~"the ability to get leverage along the AI value chain" from electrons to tokens.

He also provided numbers (in MW) for Mistral's available compute : I was surprised at how low these numbers were compared to the gargantuan numbers touted by US labs.

So I ran the numbers, based on the recent and excellent @EpochAIResearch study, adding in my (not that reliable) AI-powered estimates of Chinese compute (see assumptions in blog post).

And I found out that there are 3 quite separate tiers.

1. US Champions are really far ahead. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google each command multiple gigawatts (OpenAI ~15 GW once you count the Stargate/Azure/Oracle capacity it rents). Ever wondered why their Claude/GPT /Gemini consistently top benchmarks? Now you know. By the way, tick in Meta and xAI and you'll see them entering tier 1 too with their recent buildouts.

2. Chinese giants scale fast. Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, Huawei and the three state telcos are racing from hundreds of MW toward multi-GW, increasingly on domestic Ascend silicon and the national "East Data West Compute" grid. They report "computing power" in EFLOPS rather than MW, so their points here are estimates, could be quite off the mark.

3. The contenders. Europe's Mistral commands ~90 MW today and aims at 1 GW by 2029, an order of magnitude behind the leaders. Interestingly, some of the best Chinese labs (DeepSeek, Moonshot, Zhipu, MiniMax) have no longstanding compute : they are pure-play : they rent or get allocations from government capacity for specific efforts. DeepSeek (~90 MW, the only one of this category that owns its cluster) is the largest.

With all that said, I hope someday someone in Europe wakes up to the absolute necessity of building compute faster than we do today.

If you want to go inspect the graph, I've got the interactive version and full sources in my blog post, link below.

[🫏 Edward Castronova @nuthatch9s]

The demand for power will grow and grow. To machines, electricity is life. Their world will become an endless struggle for the one substance they can’t do without. Other goals - such as serving us - will become secondary.

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

The US Department of Energy just mapped every data center in America.

This is what the AI power grid looks like.

The dots are data centers.
Yellow = operating.
Orange = under construction.
White = planned.

The lines are high-voltage transmission 735kV, 500kV, 345kV the arteries that move electrons from generators to compute loads.

Look at the density along the East Coast, Northern Virginia to the Carolinas.
Then look at Texas.
Then Northern California.

The largest circles on this map represent facilities demanding over 5,000 MW of power.

Single campuses pulling more electricity than mid-sized cities.

Northern Virginia is so dense the dots overlap.

Data centers cluster on transmission corridors.
Not because land is cheap because power is available.

When the line is full, the next data center goes somewhere else.

The grid is the bottleneck.

Every orange dot is a power purchase agreement being negotiated right now.

Every white dot is a utility commission filing, a gas plant approval, a pipeline capacity booking.

The $66.8 bn NextEra-Dominion deal, Meta's 10 new gas plants in Louisiana, the Alaska LNG FID push they all trace back to maps that look like this.

AI infrastructure is built in substations, on transmission corridors, and at the end of gas pipelines.

Link in the comments, to see my stocks 👇

[Fr. Dcn. Kyle Washut @KyleWashut]

@WYOCathCollege has done this. And we’re doubling down: not using internet connected devices for writing assignments. All reading assignments from hard copy. Real thinking by real humans, because it really is more real in the mountains.