Swapping money for expertise

This week on my podcast, I read Swapping money for expertise, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the political economy of “AI” based on theory-free inference. The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply “AI” to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing... <a href="https://craphound.com/podcast/2026/10/11/swapping-money-for-expertise/" class="more-link" title="Read Swapping money for expertise">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read LLMs are real, AI is fake, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the material reality of the Hugging Face hack. Here’s how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: “I’m participating in a hacker capture the flag... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/09/27/llms-are-real-ai-is-fake/" class="more-link" title="Read LLMs are real, AI is fake">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read Technopolitics, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the degree to which AI’s politics are baked in or historically contingent. These sins are baked into this kind of AI production. There is no way to raise trillions in subsidies that allow AI companies to sell computation at a subsidy... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/09/20/technopolitics/" class="more-link" title="Read Technopolitics">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read Why businesses lie about AI, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter that breaks down Nikhil Suresh’s essay describing the total absence of any proof that any business is benefiting from AI deployment. One person who’s had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/08/09/why-businesses-lie-about-ai/" class="more-link" title="Read Why businesses lie about AI">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read Post-political, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter, about the material, irreconcilable differences between leftism and other political beliefs. But when it comes to a “post-politics that is neither right nor left,” the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/07/26/post-political/" class="more-link" title="Read Post-political">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Hell Is Other People, about the solipsistic fantasy underpinning the AI bubble. Sartre was (arguably) an optimist. It’s not that other people are unpleasant: quite the contrary! There’s nothing that makes the day (or, pointedly, the night) sweeter than agree­able human companionship. And... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/07/12/12659/" class="more-link" title="Read Hell Is Other People">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers, about Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign of terror against the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams. More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/07/05/test/" class="more-link" title="Read Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, audio from Sunday’s launch in Menlo Park for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI at Kepler’s Books with Angie Coiro. Catch me next tonight in Toronto at Osler Records, tomorrow in NYC with Jonathan Coulton at The Strand, Thursday in Philly with David Williams and Friday in Chicago... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/06/23/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-launch-at-keplers-books-with-angie-coiro/" class="more-link" title="Read The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI launch at Kepler’s Books with Angie Coiro">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter, “The World Has Moved On,” which analogizes Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to the Enshittification hypothesis. In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/06/14/the-world-has-moved-on/" class="more-link" title="Read The world has moved on">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “The Age of Vapor,” about the role science fiction imaginaires plays in fueling high-tech investment bubbles. It’s one thing to make everything about imaginary technology when you’re writing SF. The point of those imaginative exercises is to illumi­nate: To provoke reflection on our... <a href="https://craphound.com/news/2026/06/07/the-age-of-vapor/" class="more-link" title="Read The age of vapor">more <i class="fa fa-chevron-right"></i></a>