Three and a half years after the emergence of generative AI as a new technology paradigm, there is broad agreement that AI companies have extracted enorm...
AI Is a Product of Humanity. Humanity Should Own AI.
Big Tech has looted humanity’s creative output to create artificial intelligence. We don’t just deserve a share of AI’s profits — we deserve control over it.
An Elegant Solution to AI Slop: Tax It, and Use the Resulting Billions of Dollars to Fund Cultural Institutions, Artists, and Researchers
A technologist proposes slapping a "slop tax" on companies that use or create generative AI content.
AI costs how much? GitHub Copilot users react to new usage-based pricing system.
Some report burning through their whole monthly "AI credit" allotment in a single day.
A Real Political Economy of Technology - The Ideas Letter
Two technological futures are competing for political and material priority: generative AI and the green transition. Benanav argues that while AI is marketed as a world-reordering breakthrough, its productivity gains…
Why so many game developers don't want to use generative AI
With credits ranging from Dispatch and Marvel Rivals to Uncharted and Dragon Age, over 30 devs share their thoughts on gen AI
Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Developer AI Token Costs Could Exceed Their Salaries in Two Years - Slashdot
"Enterprises may soon be paying as much for their developers' AI token usage as they do for their salaries," writes InfoWorld: According to Gartner, these costs will meet, or even exceed, the typical software engineer's monthly salary within the next two years. This is not only because developers ...
Automate the C-Suite - The Ideas Letter
Weatherby argues that Benanav’s and Morozov’s essays on AI and the left miss a deeper reality: Today’s AI is not a neutral tool operating within capitalism but the materialization of…
What AI coding costs you | Tom Wojcik
What's the effect of the prolonged AI usage among coders and is it tracked correctly, if it all?
The Missing Institution: A Global Dividend System for the Age of Transformative AI — Digitalist Papers
How do we share prosperity in society if work no longer sits at the center of people’s lives? In this essay, Anna Yelizarova explores one provocative possibility: a “global dividend.” If transformative AI shows little respect for national borders, with effects that spill across countries, then we ne
The hidden cost of AI: In conversation with Professor Mark Graham
The hidden cost of AI: Countless humans toil in monotonous, low-paid jobs to power the algorithms behind our tech. Professor Mark Graham exposes this digital sweatshop, calling for accountability and worker rights.
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time...
The AI Industry Has a Major Problem: Most People Aren’t Freaks Who Want an AI Agent Running Their Whole Life
There's a problem for AI agents like Meta's Muse: ordinary people don't seem very interested in what they're offering.
Dark Cloud Gathers as Bill Comes Due for AI Industry
AI companies are finding they can no longer sustain footing the bill of their heavily vibe coding customers.
Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right - Schumacher Center for a New Economics
Barnes defines the commons as "the sum of all we inherit together and must pass on, undiminished and more or less equally, to our heirs." The commons includes watersheds, air, DNA, playgrounds, Main Street, radio waves, political systems, and numerous other natural resources and social innovations. Barnes suggests that the commons should be held in trust for the benefit of current and future generations as a way of countering the power of the market and its search for short-term private profits.
The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
I find this post by David Wilson very relatable. David lists 16+ projects he's spun up with AI tooling, and concludes: I didn't mean to build most of these things. …