Abundance Was the Pitch
China electrifies its cargo fleet, Amazon builds America’s dirtiest data center, and SAP freezes hiring to cover the AI bill.
Dear Friend,
This week I shipped the first of my “Working Theories” – and a huge thank you to everyone who emailed comments and challenged the position. And just as I expected – I already had to post an update. Congress sent a letter to Sam Altman, as well as other AI lab leaders, asking them to testify in front of Congress… As I pointed out in my Working Theory #001, this is all well and good, but it doesn’t change the fact that legally we put the onus on the individual, rather than the AI lab/model.
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
A Tale of Two Countries. While the one global superpower is cutting back on environmental protections, wages a war on wind energy (for whatever reason), and generally loves the idea of carbon-based fuels, the other is investing heavily in renewable energy and the electrification of everything. China’s latest lead in the race to build a green(er) energy future (other than an 800 km/h bullet train – see below) is electrified cargo ships.
By the end of 2024, China had more than 440 electric ships in operation, with ferries accounting for 97% of the total fleet. […] At the same time, vessel sizes have grown significantly, with the maximum deadweight tonnage (DWT) rising from around 3,000 tonnes in 2022 to approximately 14,000 tonnes in 2025.
As with everything in China, this isn’t happening by accident but is rather planned:
The upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026–2030) provides a critical window for China to accelerate the large-scale deployment of electric inland shipping through effective policy design. Momentum is building: national policy discussions around “new energy vessels,” “zero-carbon shipping corridors,” and “zero-carbon ports” are gaining increasing traction, while provinces and cities along major inland waterways – particularly in the Yangtze River Delta and the middle reaches of the Yangtze River city cluster – have become priorities for air quality improvement efforts.
I remember when we talked about cargo ships being electric when Jeffrey and I were at Singularity University – it’s fascinating to see this come to fruition.
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AI Is Here. Work More. A common narrative about our AI-powered future is one of abundance – robots will do most of the laborious manual labor, AI will take over our cognitive work, and we will all end up being poets and painters living happily on universal basic income. And that’s not a joke – there are plenty of people we know who believe that this is exactly the future we will have once AGI is achieved. Some even talk about a new renaissance (let’s forget for a moment that one of the reasons the Renaissance happened was that a third of Europe’s population was dead due to the plague). Well, turns out Meta (one of the companies which aims to get us to AGI – just look at Zuck’s 6,500 word AI manifesto) has different plans for the very people who are at the forefront of all of this:
Should tech workers supercharged by AI be able to take more time off? Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he doesn’t think so. […] “I hope that what we do with our extra time is do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day,” Bosworth said. “We got billions of people using our products every day. I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.”
What We Are Reading
‘If We Don’t Fight Back, We Don’t Have a Future’: The Journalist Taking on the ‘Tech Fascists’ of Silicon Valley The uncomfortable argument is that Silicon Valley’s billionaires don’t just want to disrupt industries – they want to dismantle democracy itself. @Jane
Anthropic Says It Will Watermark Text Generated by Its AI Models Anthropic is now watermarking all Claude-generated text and files to comply with the EU AI Act, with the watermark embedded directly in the text so it persists even when copied and pasted. @Mafe
How to Get Rich in America If you only read one super wide-ranging essay that attempts to synthesize just about everything weird in the US economy (and how that weirdness bleeds into work and culture and the culture of work) this weekend, it should be this one. @Jeffrey
Some Simple Economics of Open Versus Closed AI As models become a commodity, the value migrates to whoever owns the last mile: data, distribution, trust, and ultimately judgment. @Kacee
Why Is Everyone in Tech so Sad? What’s the point – other than work for the sake of work? This somewhat eternal question for any knowledge worker gets amplified by AI – what is the value of work when the very thing you were paid for (intelligence) has become abundant? @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
📊 Agentic AI is undeniably rising – here is a nifty dashboard visualizing the state of affairs in AI agent land.
🦠 I mean – what could possibly go wrong? “Safety fears as scientists make first viruses designed by AI.”
©️ The end of copypasta? Anthropic puts invisible watermarks on Claude text under EU rules. And, as expected, people aren’t happy.
💨 You can now buy ads on ChatGPT, but don’t expect them to perform: Conversion is at a mere 0.21% vs Google’s 3.71%, and visitors spend a paltry 17 seconds on the site vs 41 seconds by Google visitors.
🤑 Tokenmaxxing to the max! Software giant SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI’s soaring cost.
👨💻 It’s wild to think that a) RAM is back to 2007 prices and b) the capacity for all major manufacturers is sold out for all of 2027.
💵 “We overpay and people only work for the money at our place. Quick, let’s hire an event planner for $400,000.” – AI land is weird. “Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money – while hiring an event planner for 6x the going rate.”
😼 Talk about “unintended consequences”: Cats and dogs are missing meals after a popular smart feeder went down.
🧑🌾 Another good example of “AI can make mistakes”: Farmer kills 25 acres of his own crops after taking AI’s advice
🏭 Maybe not the thing to be proud of: “Amazon is investing in a large-scale natural-gas-burning power plant as part of a huge data center in Texas, the company confirmed on Friday, a facility that could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States.”
🚆 Meanwhile, in China, a Maglev bullet train accelerated to 800 km/h in a mere five seconds.
🥳 Stil struggling with writing that perfect LinkedIn post? Here’s the solution - the CringeBot 3000!
🐹 Now, here is finally a good use of all that quantified-self stuff we have been piling up: A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava. It runs surprisingly far every night.
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