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4 days ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson
The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies. - Walt WhitmanHere’s a theme to sit with and embrace now as a way of being that is just….aright thing to do…regardless of where the world winds up. I know many of you here are looking for such salves and ways, especially ones that can cover your Plan As and Plan Bs (and Cs and Ds)…We know efficiency doesn’t work.
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1 week ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson
It’s been exactly 18 months since I last did one of these Sunday collations. (I’ve never promised that I’d be consistent!) It’s actually interesting to witness some of the tech bro stuff I was writing about back then and how mildly alarmed we were by it all. Sunday Reads (revisited): ChatGPT panic, Peter Thiel apocalypse posturing and Taylor-Travis cutenessFunnily, I’m writing this in the same bar that I reference in the post above.
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1 week ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson |Helen Lewis
She’s back!!! , the woman who Jordan Peterson said (all sookily) “hated me on first sight”, has written a new book about geniuses … and how the mythology around the concept has warped our understanding of creativity and value. In this chat we cover how it feeds into the exoneration of the tech bros. Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into our live video. Per the blurb on the book:“You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius.
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1 week ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson
Last week I referenced the viral AI 2027 forecast written by a group of the world’s leading technology researchers and developers. I’ve gone down something of a rabbit hole with the AGI juggernaut the past few weeks, in big part because of this forecast, which envisages a monumental “intelligence explosion” in the next two years. Two years is very very soon.
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2 weeks ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson
Over on X, Sam Altman has confirmed for us a sticky moral point in the AI debate. A few weeks back someone had tweeted (X’d?) about the cost of including “please” and “thank you” in Large Language Model requests. The inferred question, I guess, was whether we should be dropping such niceties to make, you know, savings. The next day, Altman responded to the X enquiry: “Tens of millions of dollars”.
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2 weeks ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson |Jamie Freestone
Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Today, Jamie, author of the Substack The Stark Way, joined me to discuss AI, Big Tech, and existential risk, following the publication of his recent post that sums up some recent writing about how AI could go wrong. I wanted to talk to Jamie after reading the recent forecast written by…
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3 weeks ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson
“[T]here is an Australia of the spirit, submerged and not very articulate … sardonic, idealist, tongue-tied perhaps. It is the Australia of all who truly belong here, and it has something to contribute to the world—not emphatically in the arts as yet, but in action and ideas for the egalitarian democracy that must underpin all civilised societies in the future.” - Vance PalmerI’m leaving again. I’m leaving Australia, back to Paris. I’m writing this in transit at Kuala Lumpur airport. I leave a lot.
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3 weeks ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson
I’ve been in Australia the past month and I’ve spent a good solid bunch of hours explaining and teasing out the thesis I put forward in my new Collapse Book. As all of you who have read it would know, I really do go hard on the idea of redirecting our “efforting” to preserving our humanity, our sense of what is meaningful and worthy about being a human being. Fascism works when we allow our humanity to be eroded. Civilisations go down violently when the humans don’t have sturdy morays to tether to.
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1 month ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson
A wonderful and surprising consequence of committing to the brutal truth of our existential predicament is having one’s limiting, arrogant, “othering” beliefs challenged almost daily. I think such a regular reckoning comes with the simple act of lifting off scabs. I’ve been back in Australia for a few weeks and I had been feeling quite self-conscious about how my latest project - a book about, um, the end of the (old) world - would be received. This is a reader-supported publication.
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1 month ago | 
sarahwilson.substack.com | Sarah Wilson |A C Grayling
, and many others for tuning into my live video with! To join my live videos (every Tuesday) you will need to have the app downloaded. In today’s Live, my dear friend and prolific philosopherand I talk about the subject of his new bookIt’s pretty much a public version of the kind of c…