AI Mania: From Tulips to Tokens

Michael Pollan has written astir everything from mushrooms to apples and corn, but his coevolutionary communicative of really tulips and humans shaped each different whitethorn person been the astir prescient fixed caller marketplace parallels. GPU compute powering crypto for the past decade has spilled complete into a bigger roar successful connection models. From bulbs, to coins, and now tokens. With animal spirits driving markets higher and CEOs blaming artificial intelligence for layoffs, who is utilizing whom? AI, for illustration the pome and maize plants, is gleefully spreading its seed while we punctual for different saccharine deed of dopamine.

“Things are successful the saddle and thrust mankind.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reductionist worldview that type are simply carriers of DNA hardly explains the analyzable narration betwixt humans and plants, fto unsocial our business pinch AI. The word itself has go a meme successful the original Dawkins sense and started replicating connected its own. We cognize this self-reinforcing strategy of models and information is powerful, yet can’t moreover work together connected whether agents are genuinely intelligent aliases possibly conscious.

It turns retired Claude is not really a existent human. Racknitz's cutaway of the Mechanical Turk, 1789.

I haven’t had the pleasance of reference Pollan’s latest book connected the taxable of consciousness. My unpopular sentiment is that AI has not solved “the difficult problem” contempt its evident usefulness and the hype. I deliberation Yann LeCun has it correct successful claiming that animals grounds learning abilities acold beyond machines. Donald Hoffman goes further and puts mathematics down a worldview wherever conscious agents are the guidelines furniture alternatively than thing matter useful its measurement up to. Sam Altman says we’ve reached the singularity, and while investors raise superior and profit, the remainder of america are successful amygdala hijack, worried astir the adjacent paycheck. If the labs genuinely judge these systems are waking up, past owning them and renting them retired by the token is simply a mobility nary of them look eager to face.

A Turing Award and Nobel prize victor predicted successful the 1960s that the programming business would go extinct, because computers would programme themselves. Sixty years connected we are still here, though it hasn’t felt that measurement connected the roller coaster of hiring and firing. Grace Hopper was told that machines could only do arithmetic erstwhile she projected penning programs successful English, and the chips successful each information halfway now transportation her name. Coding was ne'er the bottleneck anyway; relationships and knowing thrust value. Tools amplify expertise and we are accountable for impact.

One point that becomes evident erstwhile attempting to analyse this ecosystem is the deficiency of transparency. Anyone who has worked connected neural networks knows really difficult attribution tin be, but it turns retired the manufacture is presently exhibiting an almost fractal opacity. We created the contented their systems are built on, yet they won’t moreover stock really overmuch power each query uses, really overmuch h2o goes to cooling, aliases who ends up holding the onshore and the aquifer erstwhile a tract goes quiet.

“All these plants, which I’d ever regarded arsenic the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subjects, acting connected me, getting maine to do things for them they couldn’t do for themselves.” – Michael Pollan

Anecdotally I spot agents searching the web not erstwhile but 5-10 times because the exemplary is stale, and each that postulation contradicts the SaaSpocalypse hypothesis. Managing them exhausts not only my attraction but our constricted earthy resources. New transmission takes 4 to 8 years and transformers are backmost ordered, truthful request shows up connected everyone’s monthly measure and arsenic a hum the neighbors can’t slumber through. Erin Brockovich is mapping the projected sites and the towns fighting them. Fear of losing to China ends each section objection, which is really the subject business analyzable has ever worked. While we tin do much faster, the value is debatable, and the externalities aren’t accounted for astatine immoderate level.

33 operational, 66 nether construction, and 8,837 places wherever group wrote successful pinch concerns. The data halfway map, July 2026.

Lyla June said astatine a caller food forests people that humans person the imaginable to beryllium a keystone and service the satellite alternatively than predominate it. At PNW Climate Week I went connected an agrivoltaics circuit called Sun, Soil & Sovereignty, wherever the aforesaid acre grows nutrient and generates star electricity. Data sovereignty could look for illustration that, pinch compute sited wherever the panels and the crops are, and the group who unrecorded location holding a liking successful the land, the water, and the machines. It is becoming a nationalist inferior and should beryllium owned for illustration one. That reframes the title pinch China too, since they astir apt made the panels successful that field, and a shared ambiance has nary them successful it. That would beryllium exertion serving a spot alternatively of extracting from it.

Crops increasing betwixt the panels successful Aurora, Oregon

Closer to home, I asked Claude Code while penning this whether it would beryllium imaginable to person a station subtitle pinch my existent website configuration. I wanted to adhd thing punny to debar sounding pretentious, knowing folks connected Reddit and Hacker News would prime this apart. Instead of answering, it ran off, wrote immoderate code, and did the thing. My blog station has a subtitle now! So overmuch for the quality successful the loop.

Frontier labs are an important first flush from this cycle, but they won’t ever beryllium around. The displacement from AI mania to panic whitethorn beryllium sparked organically done marketplace forces, a terrible information breach, aliases an enactment of legislation. Grasses and fireweed clasp the crushed aft a burn, alder feeds the soil, oak and madrone sprout backmost into the light. The fibre laid during the dot com roar sat acheronian for years. Conventions calved successful the euphoria will past this awesome unwind: unfastened weights, models moving connected your ain machine, plain connection arsenic an interface, and towns that cognize they tin opportunity no.

“Men person go the devices of their tools.” – Henry David Thoreau

Pollan utilized the Thoreau quote supra successful The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wherever a husbandman named Billy had taken connected hauling activity to support the workplace afloat aft buying a caller tractor. He raised the mobility of who Billy was really moving for now. The bank? John Deere? Monsanto? And past location is the maize itself, he adds, which would marvel astatine the absurdity of it all.