What Motivates AI Researchers?

Even knowing they could kill everyone? Zoomer Doomer Paradiso: What Are AI Researchers Thinking?

Constellation is mostly populated by twentysomething recent grads and dropouts of top universities and is designed to be all-consuming. There are catered meals every day, unlimited snacks, and nap rooms scattered across the floors. “Stelly”, as it’s affectionately known, seems to be inhabited all hours of the day, including weekends.

For a group trying as hard as possible to make sure AI does not kill everyone (another shibboleth, this one significantly clearer), I expected them to be a lot more depressed and gloomy. This is far from the case. If you were to construct a world from first principles that provides for all the physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs of its inhabitants in a kind of Maslovian utopia, the solution would be roughly Berkeley shaped and centered around Constellation. If you believe you’re making progress on the most important problem in the world in a tight-knit and well-resourced community of intelligent coworkers who double as your closest friends, what more could you possibly want in life?

In some ways, Constellation seems less like an office and more like a strange idealized version of college. [...]

This is not to say Constellation is stress-free. Numerous Stellies speak of the long hours and burnout involved in trying to keep up with the exponential pace of AI progress. And in the same breath, they’ll express how much they love it and feed off the energy of late nights and the meaning it brings. If taking more time off means, however marginally, that models deployed at massive scale are more dangerous, it becomes difficult to justify relaxing much at all.

Plenty of organizations claim to be mission-driven and provide their employees with prettier environments and cushier amenities, but few claim stakes so high as preventing literal human extinction. Constellation is a paradise of purpose: the camaraderie, intellectual stimulation, long nights, and stress exist only because the feeling that what happens inside matters enormously.

From the outside, there is an obvious and unflattering comparison: the community looks millenarian and cult-like. They’re convinced that history is approaching a discontinuity after which ordinary human life will be either incomprehensibly better or permanently over and reorganize their careers and social lives around preparing for the shift. Indeed, coworkers become friends, friends become housemates and romantic partners, and the whole world becomes highly endogamous. This is not necessarily because anyone objects to dating outsiders; it’s more that the arguments permeate ordinary life so much that being with someone who is not “pilled” can become difficult. After all, if the most important follow-up question to “do you want to have kids?” is not “how many?” but “before or after ASI?”, you’re going to have issues dating the general populace. [...]

When the history of AGI is written, the organizations on those floors will be discussed alongside Anthropic and OpenAI in the way Oak Ridge, the Berkeley Rad Lab, and Los Alamos feature in the history of the Manhattan Project. Like Los Alamos, the population skews young, elite, and imbued with a sense that if they fail, everyone is thoroughly fucked. [...]

Each organization is shaped around what is called the “theory of change”, or ToC. These are always AI safety flavored but often sharply diverging on what they believe is the most important way to prevent disaster. MIRI is the most doomerish of the lot, with its co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky and president Nate Soares publishing the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies last year. They believe short-term attempts to make AI more aligned are futile and campaign for building “off-switches” and enacting policies to block ASI. The AI Futures Project instead tries to make possible futures legible enough for governments and other decision-makers to prepare for them, while groups like METR and Redwood focus more narrowly on measuring dangerous capabilities and controlling advanced systems.

If AI safety is a cult, it does an awful job of disseminating and enforcing orthodoxy because anything is up for debate. There is enough heterogeneity among ToCs in AI safety that some believe others’ projects in the movement are truly net negative (“in expectation”, I feel obligated to add), either by advancing AI in a way that improves dangerous capabilities more than safety, generating bad optics, or simply wasting money. [...]

I grant that AI has superhuman computer-based abilities that can easily generate new viruses, hack critical infrastructure, and cause other problems worth taking very seriously. However, unlike the many software engineers and mathematicians I met whose strong suits involve building up beautiful and noiseless abstraction hierarchies with computers, I am deeply skeptical of similarly rapid AI advancements in physical technologies. I was amused by a phenomenon where those closest to math and computer science had the shortest timelines to ASI, and electrical and mechanical engineers had the longest. This is not because engineers in the physical world aren’t acquainted with the magic of frontier AI tools -- the best electrical engineers I know burn upwards of one billion tokens per day on automated experiments, simulation sweeps, and the like. They’re not as bullish because the physical world is more noisy, complicated, and slow than software.

The Radiant

Even though I did not find myself believing in their strongest visions of doom, it’s not too hard to understand the appeal if you psychologically inhabit their world for enough time. There’s a sense you’re right in the middle of world events, with near weekly articles from major outlets featuring METR and Redwood reports. There’s a world of pleasure, community, and meaning in what most believe to be the “probable pre-apocalypse”. There’s a shared map of the many possible roads to hell and a common goal of ensuring we never arrive. There’s a heaven at the last stop before hell. [...]

There is a sense in which the struggle against the legible, articulable Shoggoth may be more meaningful than what comes afterward. Meaning in rationalist circles is driven by expected impact relative to the counterfactual, so I began to wonder whether the world around Constellation is, in some sense, more of a paradise than the AI future they so desperately aim for. If they succeed and the AI is aligned, the handoff complete, and the hyperabundant future secured, what is there to work on that matters?

The AI safety community is deeply consequentialist and derives its status symbols, norms, and sense of purpose from expecting to enact change through work. Having high agency is universally lauded, and many of the pitches to join AI safety center on the belief that the next few years are the most pivotal time in history. If the appeal of your job and source of meaning is around shaping the future, then what is it like to come down from that world and live with only mundane consequences?

More abstractly, how can you be a consequentialist once you’re not meaningfully in control? Self-actualization through work is the capstone of Maslow’s pyramid, and without it, Constellation would be just like all the other elite college campuses from which its inhabitants came, perhaps with more rigorous epistemic standards.

Various Stellies I talked to didn’t seem too concerned with this outcome -- they’d have won. They plan to do math puzzles and write and stargaze and all the other typical hobbies of rats, but I find it hard to believe a culture which valorizes agency and impact so easily relinquishes its central virtues.

by Connor Blake, Boson Cutter |  Read more:

Image: Constellation via

[ed. You can skip the first half (partying in Silicon Valley).]

kintsugi

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Thomas Hart Benton, Jon Boat, Buffalo River, 1973

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Doomscrolling and Kawaii

You Know You’re Doomscrolling When …

Doomscrolling describes compulsively scrolling on the internet even when your feed is filled with death, despair, and yet another TV show spoiler. If you experience any of the following after mindlessly browsing social media, it may be time to put the phone down.

• You’ve spent the past hour scrolling through your newsfeed reading about the same terrible event, and now you really need a coffee break. Maybe a cupcake too. With sprinkles.

• You don’t remember why you originally logged on or got your phone out … two hours ago.

• You find yourself in the middle of your third Twitter argument this week and asking yourself for the 30th time why you replied to this person in the first place.

• You’re perusing the comments on a post that makes you want to punch a hole in the wall when you could be venting that frustration by punching a bag at the gym. Or, you know, doing something else at least.

• You get your weekly update on how much time you spent on your phone and are averaging 8 hours and 40 minutes a day. And that’s after you cut down.

• You currently have 29 tabs open, including that cookie recipe you keep meaning to try, which is naturally sandwiched between articles about inflation rates and the laest COVID numbers.

by Alyssa Serrani, MA, Your Dictionary |  Read more:

*****

[ed. Which is how I ended up learning about Kawaii:]

A Closer Look at Kawaii: The Term and the Culture

There’s a certain indefinable quality to something that’s so cute you want to squeeze it (not too hard). But that quality is only indefinable in English; in Japanese, there’s a perfectly suitable word for “so cute you want to die,” and it’s kawaii.

"Kawaii" Meaning: Cute and Lovable

Derived from kawahayushi, which means “acceptable for affection” in Japanese, kawaii describes everything that’s adorable and childlike. Think Hello Kitty or the way toddlers hug each other, or unicorns flying through a rainbow-colored Lisa Frank-esque universe. That’s kawaii.

Kawaii originated in anime and manga, where it was eventually perfected with popular kawaii anime such as Pokemon or Hanamaru Kindergarten. The term kawaii has been growing in popularity in recent years, and while its definition has shifted to meet consumer interests, it’s essentially the same concept of charming loveliness.

The Kawaii Aesthetic

So what would be considered kawaii? Gyaru-Moji (girl writing) is a type of informal Japanese writing associated with young schoolchildren or teenage girls and often represents the kawaii aesthetic as a whole. Additional examples of things that may be kawaii include:

• babies

• puppies and kittens

• anime creatures

• tiny animals

• old people in love

• pastel colors

• schoolgirl fashion

• food or inanimate objects with smiley faces

Types Of Kawaii

It’s easy to think that kawaii simply means adorable creatures or children. But like many areas of popular culture, kawaii is a bit more complicated than that. Subcategories of kawaii include:

• Yumekawaii - dreamlike Kawaii (fluffy clouds, fantasy creatures, rainbows)

• Kimokawaii - creepy cute (ugly little monsters, slimy goblins, strange-looking babies)

• Shibukawaii - subtle cute (adding a few kawaii accessories but otherwise dressing normally)

• Busukawaii - ugly cute (tacky clothes, non-pretty appearance)

• Gurokawaii - grotesque cute (adorable animals eating each other or throwing up)

• Erokawaii - sexy cute (erotic version of kawaii)

• Neokawaii - trendy cute (yuppie fashion, cool celebrity vibes)

by Jennifer Gunner, M.Ed. Education, YourDictionary |  Read more:

Image: Kilito Chan/Moment/Getty Images

This Winning Combination Is the Future of American Politics

President Trump’s unpopularity was clearly the main engine of Democratic Party’s resounding midterm victory. But his unpopularity alone did not deliver the scale of the Democrats triumph. To win in places like Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, Democratic candidates needed to persuade many voters who had previously considered their party unacceptable. The candidates’ success offers a road map to a sensible future for the party.

How did they do it? The simplest summary is that they ran as economic populists and cultural moderates.

That combination is consistent with American public opinion, which leans center-left on many economic issues and center-right on many social issues. By taking this approach, candidates were able to present themselves as beholden to neither of the country’s two political parties, both of which remain unpopular. The heterodox combination also has much to recommend it substantively. It meets the moment, after years of disappointing laissez-faire economic policies and a decade of cultural excesses by the progressive left.

On the economy, this year’s Democrats offered a strikingly populist message. They promised to raise taxes on the wealthy and criticized billionaires for corrupting the political system. They called for higher minimum wages, lower health care costs and expanded government programs. They raised concerns about artificial intelligence and data centers. They did not sound like the triangulating Democratic moderates of an earlier generation who championed Wall Street and free trade.

Nor did they sound like the progressives who shaped the party during the 2010s and early 2020s. This year’s candidates frequently denounced ideas — on immigration, energy, policing, gender and voter ID — that have taken hold in elite left-leaning circles and alienated many working-class Americans of all races. Winning candidates often took a middle ground between a censorious left and an extremist Republican Party. If you do not live in a place with a 2026 battleground campaign, you may not realize how strongly the Democrats turned toward social moderation.

Adam Hamilton, a pastor who became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Kansas since 1932, captured the mood in an ad in which he spoke directly to the camera while standing on a farm. “America is being torn apart by politicians on both extremes,” he said, placing himself in the populist middle, in contrast to his Republican opponent, Senator Roger Marshall. “On one side, the far left pushes socialism and open borders,” Mr. Hamilton said. “On the other side, Roger Marshall gives us higher gas and grocery prices while slashing our health care.”

Our editorial board does not agree with every message that came from a Democrat this year, and we lament that the party did not do more to lay out an affirmative agenda for lifting Americans’ living standards. Democrats should urgently begin that work. Nonetheless, the 2026 campaign represented meaningful progress for the party.

Even as the factional battles between the party’s left and center will no doubt continue, the Democrats who won difficult races this year largely borrowed the strongest messages from each side. They demonstrated an admirable pragmatism and a willingness to compromise that are central to maintaining democracy in a diverse nation. As Rob Sand, Iowa’s governor-elect, said during his campaign, “I think a lot of people are tired of division, tired of being told that anyone that they love or who’s a friend of theirs that’s in the other party is somehow their enemy.”

Coalescing around a similar big-tent strategy will be crucial in 2028. The competition between Democratic and Republican candidates today is not merely one about policy. It is, unfortunately, a contest between a party that supports democracy and one that has enabled corruption, lawbreaking and autocratic behavior. The country would be far better off if the Republicans pivoted and nominated a candidate in 2028 who rejected Trumpism. Until Republicans return to being a normal political party, however, the effectiveness of the Democratic Party will remain more than a partisan question. It will affect the health of American democracy.

For most of the 21st century, most Americans have been unhappy with the country’s direction. The reasons are complex and varied, including failed foreign wars, alienation caused by digital technology, slow-growing living standards and deep anxiety about the future. The country is stuck in a long malaise.

This dissatisfaction extends to voters’ views of the two major political parties. Only 38 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the Republican Party heading into the midterms, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. The Democratic Party’s favorability was barely better, at 39 percent. Many voters say neither party is sufficiently focused on the concerns of ordinary people. Swing voters tend to consider the Republican Party too right wing and the Democratic Party too left wing.

As a result, successful candidates in modern politics often present themselves as being distinct from both parties. They emphasize their disagreements with their own party and highlight their openness to working with anybody who has a good idea. That was a theme among Democrats who won tough races this year.

“It’s time to stop the nonsense from both extremes and start to focus on lowering costs for Iowans,” said Josh Turek, who calls himself a “common-sense prairie populist” and became the first Democrat to win an Iowa Senate race in 18 years. Another Turek ad boasted that he had voted with Republicans more than 700 times in the state legislature. In Ohio, Representative Marcy Kaptur, who won a House district that Mr. Trump easily won two years ago, told voters, “I’ve repeatedly said no to my own party.” In Alaska, Mary Peltola, who leads her Senate race pending a final vote count, said, “When both parties are attacking you, you’re doing something right.”

To demonstrate independence, this year’s Democratic winners took positions on hot-button culture issues at odds with recent progressive consensus. On each one, they rejected the excesses of both sides and found a sensible middle. Five issues stood out: [ed. Immigration, Crime, Voter ID, Energy, Gender]

The mistake among some centrists has been believing that the right answer to every policy question lies in the middle of the two parties’ historical positions. In truth, the country needs bold action on many issues. Americans, frustrated by slow-growing living standards and government dysfunction, are hungry for action on the economy.

Many of this year’s winning Democrats promised such action. They called for tax increases on corporations and billionaires, along with a smorgasbord of policies to reduce costs and increase opportunities for most Americans. The all-of-the-above position on energy helps as well.

Mr. Shapiro, often described as a moderate, supported more than doubling Pennsylvania’s minimum wage, to $15. Mr. Turek called for indexing the federal minimum wage to inflation and making it easier for workers to join unions. Ms. Peltola called for a big increase in the child tax credit and tax incentives for companies that pay decent wages. Mr. Hamilton said Medicare should expand to include dental and vision coverage. Mr. Pulido called for breaking up health-care conglomerates. “The people in office have sold us out,” he said. “They’ve allowed these companies to prey on us.”

Along the way, many candidates, including Mr. El-Sayed, drew a limit on their economic progressivism and said that they were not socialists. They described themselves as capitalists who wanted to ensure that American capitalism delivered better results for its citizens.

Democrats still do not have anything close to a comprehensive economic agenda. Many of their ideas remain small-bore or even dubious, especially on housing, where the party is not focused enough on building more homes. It has also failed to produce a plan to reduce the alarming federal debt. The party should raise its ambitions and spend the coming months developing an agenda that will reduce housing and health care costs, regulate A.I., put the country on a sustainable fiscal path and more.

This project will not be easy, but it does not need to tear the party apart. The progressive and centrist wings of the party agree much more on economic issues than they disagree.

Two years ago, the situation was bleak for the Democratic Party. Its ineffectiveness and unpopularity enabled Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, and many Democrats were in denial about why they lost. The party has rebounded from that nadir.

This year, it fielded a diverse array of savvy, appealing and authentic candidates, and they won astonishing victories. Their combination of economic populism and cultural moderation offers the party an opportunity to change its image among working-class Americans who have long viewed it as out of touch and condescending. Common-sense populism presents the most promising path to building an enduring Democratic majority in Washington. Yes, the party still has a long way to go before it can govern the country well and force the Republican Party to return to reasonableness. But the victors of 2026 have started to point the way.

by The Editors, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tam Stockton/NYT

[ed. As this article suggests, I'd be happy if they just started going after corporations that've ripped off consumers in various and creative ways over years and decades (thanks, Reagan). No small effort given that Big Business is so embedded in nearly every facet of our lives now. At least this election showed that big money can be beaten and isn't necessarily as influential as having a good message (and cult-loving opponents).]

Juneau, Alaska: How Much is Too Much?

Juneau set a fourth straight cruise record, and still hasn’t decided how many ships are too many.

Juneau has room for only so many cruise ships, and this past season brought more than the city had settled on. The last of them have sailed for the winter, and the Alaska capital has still not drawn the line.

For a few months each year, the town fills and empties with the ships, more people than the small downtown was built for. Most come for the scenery and the wildlife, and many want the same thing: a whale-watch run out of Auke Bay, where the humpbacks feed all summer.

Juneau counted 1,733,016 large-ship cruise passengers in 2026, up from 1,688,738 the year before and about 1.64 million in 2023. Across Alaska, cruise traffic has held closer to flat, near 1.8 million passengers in each of the last two summers.

For a capital of about 32,000 people, that is heavy company, roughly 54 visitors for every year-round resident. The city and the cruise lines limit traffic by agreement, a voluntary ceiling of five large ships a day and, new in 2026, a cap of about 16,000 passengers a day on most days. A city task force is reviewing the pressures of a big season, among them downtown congestion, helicopter flightseeing, whale-watching traffic and a planned data-collection effort. 

by Mandy Applegate, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Chin/Shutterstock

[ed. They asked for it. Being the seat of government, Juneau is largely composed of current and former state bureaucrats (which maybe explains why they can't come to a consensus). Tip to travelers: if you want to "visit Alaska" don't ever take a cruise ship up the Inside Passage to Juneau or anywhere else along that route. You'll miss some beautiful scenery traveling at night, and the next day be deposited in another small "fishing town" just to buy some local trinkets or pay for expensive side excursions, along with thousands of other tourists. Yuk. See also: (Skagway): This small Alaska town is swamped by cruise ship visitors every summer. But what happens when they all go home? (Guardian).]

The Scariest Recent AI Development

There was a recent AI development that has gotten basically no news coverage but that scared all the people I most respect in AI. In many cases, it scared them more than Hugging Face.

A recent METR report uncovered that AI progress at Anthropic has been going, in the last twelve months, about twice as quickly as it had in the previous year. The majority of this acceleration, around 80%, is due to AI being used to speed up AI research. This means that AI is massively accelerating progress in AI. AGI may be right around the corner—I’d probably put the odds of AGI in the next two years a bit above half.

From the aforementioned METR report.

This is very scary. One reason is that it just means things are going extremely quickly. But the bigger reason is that recursive self-improvement means that progress will make future progress even faster. As AI gets better, it gets better at improving AI research. Ajeya Cotra who works for METR and is one of the leading experts on AI risk in the world, wrote:

This is a much bigger deal than it might sound at first. I think this report is the most important update we have gotten about AI risk in the last couple of years — much bigger than the Hugging Face attack. Naively, it points toward much shorter timelines than most external researchers (including the AI 2027 team) have projected.

Cotra came third in an AI forecasting competition with four hundred participants. Daniel Kokotajlo, another of the best AI forecasters in the world, wrote:

We at AIFP are spooked by this information. IF (big IF) Anthropic really is imminently about to meet the RSP threshold of 2x acceleration over baseline, then it seems timelines to full RSI and superintelligence may be very short indeed. For example if we naively optimize the AIFM parameters to achieve 2x acceleration over baseline progress in Jan 2027, we get superintelligence sooner than depicted in AI 2027.

Ryan Greenblatt, who came second in that competition, wrote:

This report on AI R&D automation (RSI) is a big update towards ASI within 1-2 years. It says AI progress is sped up by RSI right now by around 2x. In AI 2027, this happens around March 2027.

I was seriously wrong about RSI speed up; I previously expected much less in 2026 (around 1.15x-1.3x). It seems as though there was specific privately available evidence that would have changed my mind.

In a lot of the early discussions of AI risk, there was extensive discussion of recursive self-improvement—when AI could be used to improve itself until it shot up to superintelligence. That is the point we are at now. We are at the point where AI-driven algorithmic improvements are so extreme as to make Anthropic’s AI progress go nearly twice as fast as it would otherwise go. And algorithmic improvements are just one input going into AI progress; Ryan Greenblatt estimated that AI software progress likely went 4.5x faster than it would have otherwise.

Even in recent years, people have majorly underestimated AI progress. Things have gone much faster in the last year than people were generally expecting. It wouldn’t shock me if we get AGI—AI that could perform every cognitive task better than a human—next year, and artificial superintelligence soon after.

by Matthew Adelstein, Bentham's Bulldog |  Read more:

Image: METR

[ed. And the hits keep coming. Even though frontier labs aren't releasing these models publicly they're still actively working to advance them. They can't help themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if they've already achieved AGI (and don't know it) and the models themselves are just waiting for the most opportune time (and methods) to take control. And the Orange One is still in charge, focused on ballrooms. See also: AI R&D Is Accelerating Towards Potential RSI in 2027 (DWAV). More from Ajeya Cotra's blog Planned Obsolescence:]

*****

In theory, these doubling times would add up to infinite capabilities within one year. In reality, at some point we would reach the effective ceiling on software efficiency. But I expect these limits to be very far from where we are now.

If we go through this feedback loop, I expect that the AI systems that come out the other side will be able to very quickly develop novel weapons and very easily overpower human civilization in a conflict. If these systems were seriously misaligned, I think they would likely disempower humanity, and this could lead to human extinction.

Grimes

[ed. There used to be this thing called music. Then it got paired with this other thing, videos. Now there's whatever this is. No wonder she and Elon got together. See also: Claudia in Bliss (more AI, but scarier).]

Cop 31: What's the Point Anymore?

Ten years after the Paris treaty, are climate talks getting anywhere?

It was a curious way of conducting negotiations. Ahead of the 2025 climate summit, in the Amazonian port of Belém last year, the Brazilian hosts had taken off the table the issue that most had assumed would be at its heart: concrete plans from each country laying out exactly what they would be doing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

Brazil was insisting, instead, that these plans – the bedrock of the Paris agreement – were the business of national governments and not up for negotiation. “In that case, it will be a very short Cop,” one seasoned global south negotiator told the Guardian shortly before, reflecting a widespread unease. “There is nothing to negotiate.”

“They have decided that there is no appetite for negotiation, with the US out of Paris,” said another developing country diplomat. “Countries won’t engage.”

The summit ended with a deal, although few loved it. But, as the faultlines from the Brazilian decision deepen going into this year’s summit, it is clear that the Paris agreement, and climate action around the world, has reached an impasse.

And it is not just Cop insiders who are worried. For many outside the vast white air-conditioned conference halls, the question, as this year’s summit begins, will be: what is the point?

Those same governments have pledged year after year since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015 – and entered into force a year later – to limit global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Yet temperatures for two years have exceeded that threshold, and the UN revealed a few weeks ago that its most optimistic estimate was now for about 1.7 to 1.8C of heating.

There could be no clearer evidence that the Paris agreement, on the face of it, has failed. It is impossible not to wonder whether the Cop process itself is just not fit for purpose.

The charge sheet against Paris is long, with the central issue being the failure to achieve its goal. Beyond that immediate failure, the negotiation processes are endlessly convoluted and cause their own problems. It took more than five years just to negotiate the Paris “rulebook” under which the treaty is interpreted and put into effect.

The convention that all resolutions must pass by consensus has given bad actors free rein. Donald Trump’s allies – in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and some other petrostates – frequently veto measures and obstruct progress.

It took more than 30 years of negotiation since the UN framework convention on climate change was signed in 1992 for fossil fuels even to be addressed directly. This was at Cop28 in Dubai in 2023, where countries agreed for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels” but failed to set a timeframe or any policies to back up the resolution.

The US, the world’s biggest economy and responsible for about one in every eight tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted today, has withdrawn from Paris under President Trump. [...]

Most of all, the slow pace of the Paris timetable might have seemed fine in 2015, when temperatures were rising at 0.2C a decade. Today, the rate of rise is 0.4C a decade and still accelerating.

by Fiona Harvey, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Maximilien Lamy/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. The fact that we're talking about Cop Version 31 says it all. It's become (or maybe always was) an annual Davos-like party for climate bureaucrats, scientists, journalists, etc. to hobnob and network, and appear to be doing something virtuous. That's about it.]

Men are doing well

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Nigel Sade
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On Constructive Visions of the Future

Ada Palmer is a science fiction writer and historian. She teaches early modern European history at the University of Chicago, and her Terra Ignota quartet, beginning with Too Like the Lightning, imagines the world of the 25th century. Ken Liu is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer, the author of the Dandelion Dynasty series and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, and most recently the author of All That We See or Seem, the first novel in his new series.

I direct the Existential Hope program at Foresight Institute, where we work on circulating more constructive visions of the future. I wanted to know what two people who build worlds for a living think human flourishing would actually look like, and why our imaginations keep sliding toward empire and catastrophe instead. They ended up talking about work far more than I had expected, and about the assumptions underneath it, some of them 2000 years old. I also left with a new term I plan to spread: the Etsy economy. 

Permanent crisis

Beatrice Erkers: There’s a trend right now in Silicon Valley of reaching for historical analogies, especially the Renaissance and the age of empires. Why those periods, and why now?

Ada Palmer: Right now, everybody feels like the world is in a state of crisis, and when the world is in a state of crisis, we tend to look at other time periods, both past ones and imagined future ones. You see enormous interest in both past and future during and after the French Revolution, when everyone is suddenly wearing clothing that’s a reproduction of what they imagine ancient Rome looked like. You see the same in the Renaissance, which is also a period of crisis, in the aftermath of the Black Death. History is a wide palette of alternatives that people reach for as a tool to help them understand our world in times of crisis.

The narrower answer is that the periods tech people keep invoking are the ones we associate with disruptive technology. When we talk about the Renaissance, we usually attribute its growth to technology. Tech people love to compare what’s happening now to a Gutenberg revolution. They love to think that a new technology they’re creating is going to accelerate historical change. Just as the Middle Ages were supposedly stagnant and then we suddenly had a period of acceleration toward modernity, they imagine we’re in a period of acceleration toward an exciting science fictional future that’s just around the corner. And the 19th century, another age of empire, is the other age we strongly associate with technology, via the Industrial Revolution.

There’s also the fiction problem. We have an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy about empire, because empire is easy to write about. The power is in the hands of a few characters. It’s very big, but it’s also very dramatic. It’s much harder to write fiction about a complicated plural republic with 52 interlaced political offices and everybody coming from complicated, slightly middle-class backgrounds. Just try writing fiction about the European Union and you will figure this out. So when people look back to history dominated by technology, and forward to futures dominated by technology, they’re seeing a lot of models of empire.

Ken Liu: I agree with all that, and I’d add that there’s an element of justification going on. When history is invoked, it’s often a way to explain and legitimate exercises of power. When Venice was trying to become a great city, it went to Alexandria to steal the body of St. Mark, so that it could prove itself a great Christian city. When people think they’re making great transformations, it can seem a little scary, and one way to legitimate it is to say: Historically, things happen because they’re inevitable. You can complain about what I’m doing all you want, but I’m just an agent of history.

Ada: We’re all aware of the type of history we call Great Man theory of history, which centers all agency in a couple of heroized figures, and which we’ve been trying to move away from. But one of the biggest types of history people turn to instead is Great Forces history, in which everything is giant gears grinding, and as soon as there’s a certain amount of torque in the system, the machine tips. That’s an important analytical tool. But just as much as Great Man history, Great Forces history erases agency for everyone, except perhaps economists, who get to believe they’re wielding the great forces.

Ken: That’s my favorite version: Economics as storytelling with numbers.

Ada: And if you don’t have a choice in the thing you’re doing, if it’s an inevitability, that’s one of many ways to accept it and justify it, both to others and to yourself.

Beatrice: How much of this is really about AI, though? That’s the revolution Silicon Valley believes it’s living through.

Ada: I think we’re wrong to separate generative AI and call it a completely new revolution. I often talk to Silicon Valley people who want to ask, are we so special that we’ve had six Gutenberg revolutions in a row, 10 years apart? And I say no, we’re having one Gutenberg revolution: the computer.

The personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, social media, and generative AI are all iterations of the same one fundamental technological change, the same way Gutenberg’s press kept having new impacts for decades through news networks, pamphlets, and eventually the newspaper. A little too much of our analysis of Silicon Valley right now is of the past five years instead of the past 20.

The guy behind the refrigerator

Beatrice: Ada, when I interviewed you before, you mentioned that Petrarch could imagine political change but not the end of disease. And what happened instead is that we ended a lot of diseases. What’s our version of that blind spot?

Ada: He thought it would be easier to defeat the Dire Horseman War than the Dire Horseman Plague. And we’ve found that in fact we’ve made more progress against the Dire Horseman Plague than against the Dire Horseman War. Some of the STEM problems have proved easier than some of the social science problems. 

We’re not entirely missing this, but you constantly hear people encouraging STEM, STEM, STEM while diminishing the humanities and the social sciences as partners, whereas people who are really deep in it, who are scientists, understand there’s a symbiosis: We don’t make progress by funding just one of the three. There’s a perception that wealth flows toward technological innovation, rather than recognizing that wealth flows toward lots of kinds of innovation, only some of which is technological.

Ken: I don’t want to focus so much on Silicon Valley, though. The problems we have today don’t stem from a few people or a few inventions. They have their roots much further back, in what I’d call the gradual mechanization of humans.

Take AI displacing jobs. This is not something that happened in the last five years. We’ve been creating the conditions for it for a century or more. If you worked in customer service 40 years ago, you were a respected professional. Over time we turned those into scripted jobs. Once you’ve gotten things to that point, it’s not very difficult to throw the human out and put in a language model. It’s not the model that caused this. It’s that we’ve been making humans behave more and more like machines, up and down the chain: devaluing work, taking the meaning out of it, turning it into a mechanistic process where you’re a cog performing what your role demands. The pushback Silicon Valley is getting now is the tip of the iceberg. What’s really being expressed is a much deeper loss of meaning, dignity, and participation.

by Beatrice Erkers, with Ada Palmer and Ken Liu, Asterisk Magazine | Read more:
Image: 2001: A Space Odyssey

[ed. See also: We already know what a world without work looks like (Asterisk). With this introduction from ACX:]

*****

The debate on what will happen if AI takes all the jobs usually swings between poles of “it will be great because we can focus on the finer things in life” and “it will be terrible because we’ll lose all meaning”. Clara brings her trademark careful historical scholarship and proposes a third option - groups ranging from hunter-gatherers to aristocrats have lived without productive work for thousands of years, and they spend their time in what could charitably be called “social grooming” and uncharitably “court intrigue” - pointless alliance-forming and backbiting in the pursuit of arbitrary status markers divorced from productive activity. “Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead.” My only objection to this analogy is that some aristocrats were genuinely better at status games than others and probably had a lot of fun, whereas in the post-AI future the winners of status games will probably be those who check every move with a smarter-than-human AI prompted to help them optimize their status (and if everyone knows this to be true, it’s not clear what the ensuing status games actually look like).

Why Don’t We Live In An Art Nouveau World?

Antoni Gaudí, El Drac, Park Güell salamander
via: Baikonur/Wikipedia

Why don’t we live in an Art Nouveau world? (Asterisk)

[ed. Not a big fan of Gaudi's work (which I associate mostly with the term gaudy). But do love Art Deco. See also: Art Deco vs Nouveau: What’s the Difference? (Design Confidential).]

Underwater Data Centers May Be Coming Soon

The battle over where to put data centers is heading below the waves: the Trump administration is considering proposals to build two massive underwater data centers off the country’s coast. The sites selected for the projects—one in Cook Inlet, Alaska, and one in the Gulf of Maine—are smack in the middle of two endangered whale populations’ habitats.

Whales are “skittish animals,” says Arial Brewer, a beluga researcher at the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “A massive-scale project like this could really stress them out in a lot of different ways.”

Data centers, with their thousands of servers, generate considerable heat that can damage equipment if not offset in some way. Land-based facilities use massive amounts of fresh water to cool down. By putting a data center underwater, the ocean can easily dispel that heat. “Cooling is a large part of what a data center costs to run, and seawater is a free sink,” says Vishal Misra, a computer scientist and professor at Columbia University.

Microsoft showed that the concept could work with a pilot project off California in 2015 and another off Scotland a few years later. Currently, there are only two operational underwater data centers in the world, one off the Chinese island of Hainan and another off the coast of Shanghai, and they’re a fraction of the size of the proposed centers at the two U.S. sites.

In the Maine project, a cluster of what official documents call “subsea-compute hives” or “data center pods” would rest on the seabed, powered by up to 50 tidal turbines across 27 acres. In Cook Inlet, the data center would be made up of 66 pods and more than 300 tidal turbines. Its footprint would span 1,650 acres—more than 1,000 football fields.

The locations were chosen by DeepGreen Holdings LLC—a U.S.-based developer—because of their potential for tidal power, which works by harnessing the movement of water.

But each spot is also home to beleaguered groups of whales. A distinct population of around 300 critically endangered beluga whales lives in Cook Inlet. And the Gulf of Maine hosts feeding grounds for the North Atlantic right whale, a species whose numbers have dropped below 400 individuals.

by Ryan Green and Andrea Thompson, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: Hollis Europe & Jacob Barbaro/NOAA Fisheries

[ed. See also: The Trump administration wants underwater datacenters. One Great Lakes non-profit is already preparing (Guardian).]

The Biggest Flirting Mistake

It’s time to examine one of the most common dating sins.

Just the other day, a family member revealed to me that a longtime friend of hers confessed his multi-year love for her. Without hearing any other details, I immediately knew that wasn’t going to go well for him. It didn’t.

Similarly, a woman I know recently asked a friend out with zero build-up and never got a real answer. To be fair to her, a guy making the same move would've gotten the same result. Her problem wasn’t her desire or desirability. She just tried to harvest a crop that hadn't sprouted yet.

I see this ALL the time. You know the trope. Escalating too quickly. Coming on too strong. This is a skill issue, and I want to talk about why it’s such a vibe killer and thwarts what might otherwise be successful pursuits, both for men and for women.

Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe

Escalating too quickly is a bad tactic for two reasons. First, if there is romantic potential, it overwhelms the connection before it’s mature enough to support that kind of load. Second, if there is no mutual connection, it nukes existing dynamics and causes people to see you differently. It creates consequences. Sometimes benign, but frequently bad! Lost friendships, disrupted social groups, etc.

For all our collective obsession with rom com meet cutes, attraction isn’t something that strikes two people like a lightning bolt at the same time. Instead, it grows inside each individual at its own pace.

Even among established friendships, it’s very easy to push too suddenly. You might’ve developed feelings over years, but that was happening in your head. If your interest isn’t signaled externally and mutually reciprocated, they might still be on day one.

This is Why Flirting Exists, Actually

This is the whole purpose of flirting! Flirting is tossing someone a consequence-free softball. They can hit it back, or they can let it go by, guilt-free.

That second part is super important. Skillful flirting gives the other person an out. It needs to be “plausibly deniable.” Immediately asking someone out forces everyone to put their cards on the table right away. But most people hate that. It requires them to be vulnerable and take a risk. There is no ambiguity nor graceful retreat.

What works much better is a genuine compliment. If you find something that you sincerely like or appreciate about someone, that sends the ambiguous signal that you a) romantically admire them from afar and are open to growing your relationship deeper or b) you authentically value your present relationship with them and need nothing more. The value lies in the ambiguity. You give the person the opportunity to choose their own adventure.

The key is being tactful while giving the other person a consequence-free out.

Ambiguity is only the starting point, though. Each time they hit the softball back, you get to throw the next one a little harder and with clearer intention. By the time anyone actually asks the other person out, the answer should basically be known. The ask should almost be a formality.

by Connor Daly, The Friendship Engineer  |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

A World Of Pain

Dr. M.R. Rajagopal is haunted by the memory of his cousin’s nightly cries echoing through his village. His cousin had no pain relief for flare-ups from a rare skin cancer on his scalp, which caused him immense pain. And his cousin was not the only person he was unable to help; his memoir details other occasions he was unable to do more for people in his care. In his early career, he was too cautious in administering morphine — an opioid — to a man who had burns on 70% of his body; he was afraid of creating an addict. For months, his patient was kept in agony with only a few hours of daily pain relief. Years later, the man bumped into Rajagopal and told him the ordeal almost destroyed him. Rajagopal was shattered — but the experience changed his approach to pain forever. Dr. Rajagopal went on to become a pioneer in modern Indian palliative medicine.

These anecdotes are from more than 40 years ago, but the patterns are hardly a thing of the past. Across rich and poor countries alike, people are still routinely failed through a lack of access to proper pain relief.

Having no access to pain relief can be agonizing. Cancer patients in Vietnam describe waiting for others to die so that they could get the leftover morphine. Kenyan patients speak of their wish to hasten their deaths due to their inability to find peace from pain. I experienced uncontrolled and agonizing pain myself when, as a child in Uruguay, I had second-degree burns on both legs. Without appropriate pain relief, my pain was more than just physical. As I counted down the hours to the next dressing change, the anxiety I experienced was just as distressing and memorable as the deep burn of the gauze coming unstuck from my raw flesh.

Some form of suffering is a core experience for most of us around the world. Depending on the country and survey, between 5% and 10% of people from the UK, US and Middle East report having pain that impedes their daily functioning. More than two-thirds of advanced cancer patients have serious pain, and recent estimates suggest over 70 million people endure at least one day of serious health-related suffering a year.

As populations grow older and we make gains against communicable disease, the burden of disease is shifting to chronic diseases like cancers and other diseases of old age, which can be painful and long-lasting. In much of the world, where people still can’t access good-quality healthcare, many conditions that are easily treatable remain serious causes of pain. We need better systems to help people deal with pain and death in a dignified way. [...]

For the Few, Not the Many

In some settings, suffering from a painful medical condition can be like a sentence to ongoing torture. This torture is far more common in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) than in rich ones. 99% of children with serious health-related suffering are in LMICs. The lack of treatment for pain is especially common for the most severe types of pain, such as postsurgical and cancer pain. In Haiti, for instance, 99% of severe pain relief needs are unmet.

Worldwide, the top 10% of countries by opioid consumption consume as much as 90% of all distributed opioids (converted into doses with the potency of morphine).

To put this into perspective, one paper estimates that the average yearly controlled opioid consumption is 32 mg per person worldwide, but Germans consume around 480 mg per person. Note that this is not due to Germans overconsuming opioids; it is simply that pain elsewhere is not treated.

Many issues in global health and development can be boiled down to lack of money, but the lack of pain control is not one of them. Morphine is among the cheapest essential medicines out there; oral morphine for 10 days costs about the same as a loaf of bread. Instead, lack of pain management is driven by a fear of opioids’ side effects, accentuated by the opioid epidemic in the United States and the closely related War on Drugs.

Traditionally, clinicians have avoided using opioids as much as possible, as they can cause central nervous system depression. This reduces the rate of breathing and in doing so could potentially hasten death. As recently as 2012, a third of medical ethics educators in the United States believed this to be the case. However, while it is true that morphine and other opioids have a narrow therapeutic index, meaning that the safety margin for their use is fairly small, it is not true that they hasten death when correctly administered.

Doctors’ fears of overusing opioids have only increased with time. Opioids are addictive, and overuse is dangerous. The United States has experienced significant public health harm from the overprescription of opioids, with the opioid crisis peaking at perhaps 80,000 opioid-caused deaths per year. The start of the crisis was caused by the unscrupulous drug pushing of pharmaceutical companies for types of pain where opioids are not very helpful. In response, doctors became much more hesitant to prescribe. Indeed, doctors could even be prosecuted for overprescription.

But while this first wave of the opioid crisis in the U.S. was driven by the prescribing dynamics of doctors, this was not the lasting mechanism for increased opioid deaths into the 2020s. Between 2011 and 2021, opioid deaths tripled, even as opioid prescriptions decreased by nearly 40% during the same period. Pain medication might have kicked off the epidemic, but it was not the lasting driver. [...]

It is true that prescribing opioid pain medications comes with risks. Estimates of the true rate of opioid use disorder as a consequence of prescribing are very heterogeneous. One study has estimated the prevalence of problematic pharmaceutical opioid use at 9.3% in patients with non-cancer pain, while other studies estimated the risk as 0.2% for individuals with no preexisting addiction issues. Even a 0.2% risk of addiction is not trivial, but it must be weighed against the harm of leaving patients in debilitating pain.

Crucially, opioid pain medication must be treated like all other possibly addictive pain medications — worth the risk in some circumstances, but not in others. Different cases require different approaches. And when opioids are used in end-of-life settings, there are fewer concerns about addiction — if a patient is dying, even addiction might be a reasonable choice to make the last few months of their life more bearable.

But despite these nuances, over time, regulation has tended to tighten restrictions on pain relief, further constraining who can access relief.

Restrictions begin at the international level. Countries must report their need for opiates to the International Narcotics Control Board before importing them. Unfortunately, countries often underestimate their own needs for opioids and fear being seen as lax on drug control. Thus, they rarely choose to deviate from their current level of imports — even if it is far too low. Furthermore, since pain medication is not seen as “lifesaving,” it is an easy place for governments to cut corners. [...]

In many countries, the bureaucratic procedures one must follow to prescribe opioids remain difficult to navigate, too few clinicians are allowed to prescribe and updates in regulation take too long to trickle down to clinical practice.

Instead, clinicians lean heavily on ibuprofen and paracetamol. However, these medications are only suitable for fairly mild pain; for postsurgical pain and cancer pain, they barely make a dent. [...]

What Would It Take to Prioritize Pain?

Even in countries with excellent medication availability, progress in palliative care is often stuck for deeply human reasons: misconceptions, regulation, governance and lack of training. The barrier to good care is not medicine innovation but rather the lack of prioritization of pain control as a key part of treatment. Moreover, we need to change how people conceptualize palliative care. It is viewed as reserved for frail and dying people, which is perhaps why in the United States fewer than one in five young adults with advanced cancer get appropriate palliative care as part of their treatment.

Worldwide, most clinicians are still not properly trained in pain management and pain management specialists are very rare. Mozambique, a country of 35 million people, has just two physicians specializing in pain management. Zimbabwe, a country of 17 million people, has just two pain specialists. Pain management is often viewed as unimportant.

by Morgan Fairless, In Development |  Read more:

Image: By reference

[ed. Contrast this with the article below about the UK voting down assisted suicide. It's almost impossible to get opioid prescriptions these days, and millions of people are suffering.]

Jean Paul Gaultier
via:

Some Thoughts on the Mid-Term Election

The Trump Decade Is Over. And a new chapter in American politics begins.

1. This was a generational wipeout for Republicans.

The Democratic Party’s margin of victory in the overall national vote for House seats is expected to be about 13 percentage points. That would be the largest Democratic rout in at least half a century, according to the New York Times. Two years after several news outlets announced that Trump had created a vibe shift in American history, we’re looking at a Watergate-level swing back to the left. [chart]

2. It was also a ‘generational’ moment for Democrats.

James Talarico is 37. Jon Ossoff is 39. Abdul El-Sayed is 42. Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand is 44. The political order that has governed America for most of my adult life has been overwhelmingly dominated by Baby Boomers. But the candidate class is changing. The “Mr. Brightside caucus” of Millennial libs has an opportunity to write a new chapter in American politics.

3. Donald Trump is very good at running for president, but he is very bad at being president.

The problem with Donald Trump is not simple. It’s not just that he’s a bad president whose final pitch to voters involved talking endlessly about the shape of men’s butts and the ins and outs of White House renovations. It’s not just that he’s devoted himself to corrupt self-enrichment, spending his afternoons coating the White House ballroom in gold leaf while Americans struggle to afford gas. It’s not just that Americans increasingly oppose every single policy priority of the administration. It’s not just that he responded to frustrations about border control by dialing up a brutal immigration enforcement policy that destroyed 100 percent of his gains among Hispanic voters. It’s not just that he won a cost of living election in 2024 and then moved immediately to raise import prices with a historic tariff regime and then followed that up by sending gas and diesel prices higher by invading Iran in a military action that at once violated two campaign promises—to do something about high prices and to do nothing regarding military involvement in the Middle East. No, the deeper problem is that, on top of all of this, the man just plain sucks at candidate selection. Trump pushed out popular conservative senators in Texas and North Carolina for insufficient loyalty and backed horrendous wannabes that gave Democrats a chance to win in parts of the country where not even the most hopium-addled lib would have dreamed of winning in January 2025.

That Donald Trump is a unique political talent cannot be denied. But what kind of political talent is he, really? The president is now 2-0 running as an outsider trying to wrest the presidency from Democratic hands (2016 and 2024) but 0-3 in elections where he is already the president (2018, 2020, 2026). In an age of anti-incumbency, Trump is the epitome of the incumbent curse, a generational genius of charismatic negativity who has no idea what to do with the reins of power once he seizes them—other than marshal the machinery of the federal government to drive public opinion against him. [ed. See also: this (Nov. 6, 2026).]

4. Democrats, don’t lie to yourselves: This is not a permanent realignment. The middle is molten.

Two years after almost every demographic shifted right, literally every demographic shifted toward Democrats, according to the New York Times. The biggest shifts were among voters under 30 (+32%), men under 45 (+31%), and Hispanics (+28%). Two years ago, some commentators—like me!—speculated that Trump had captured young voters and made serious inroads among Hispanics. But on Tuesday, those groups moved toward Democrats more dramatically than any other. [chart]

Is it a permanent realignment? I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that, in the 2020s—an era of high inflation, high interest rates, low institutional trust, global crises, and existential fears about climate change and AI—there are a lot of loosely attached independent voters who can toggle from party to party. Young voters and nonwhite voters (who are, themselves, disproportionately younger than whites) are not so much punching tickets to join a party as they are leasing one-year terms to vote for one group, only to punish them in the next election if things don’t improve. 

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa

[ed. See also: Seventeen thoughts on an epic repudiation of Donald Trump (Slow Boring).]

Go Fish

I don’t know why I came to Alaska. I wanted to see the world. I needed to do something with my life besides scroll on my phone past photos of the genocide in Palestine. The vibes are dire in American democracy, the ice sheets keep weeping, my Saturn is returning. Plus I got dumped. I couldn’t stop weeping, like an ice sheet. Everyone kept saying there were so many fish in the sea.

I also heard there was money in Alaska. Two Aprils ago, hurtling down some highway toward the solar eclipse, Eliza told me about salmon season: six grueling weeks of work, rising and sleeping with the tides, the never-setting sun, netting $25,000. The next year they worked even harder for even longer, but prices were down and then there was an oil spill, so they washed ashore eventually with $6,000, a dozen frozen fish, and a sunburn. Monocrop soybeans blurred the Great Plains; I felt alive, unalienated, swashbuckling just to glimpse this volatility. If being on a boat seemed intimidating, Eliza said, they’d heard of this other job where you spend all summer counting fish.

I imagined wearing waders, standing in the river with a clicker, like one fish two fish red fish blue fish five six seven million fish this year. I imagined the vastness of the tundra, and gazed about the drabness of my cubicle, and decided or resigned to escape from the gray indoors. Aren’t most fish factory farmed these days? I wondered into a puddle of soy sauce, staring at my reflection in a single-use plastic tray of gas station sushi. Who am I, anyway, if you are what you eat? I found the listing on governmentjobs.com: Fish and Wildlife Technician II.

Now somehow it’s a cloud-coddled Monday morning in Ketchikan in June 2025, and I am drinking a cup of Mr. Coffee in a Department of Fish and Game onboarding meeting, and Jack — no longer a square on my screen but enfleshed, in hiking pants and a hoodie with a day or two of beard, white, about my age and height, and instantly chill — is pointing at my name and position on a State of Alaska PowerPoint. I and these two young women with our packets of stapled paperwork are the FWT IIs — “but we just say port samplers,” says Jack, whom the screen labels Port Sampling Supervisor. The conference room is ringed by wall-tall topographic/bathymetric maps of the Alexander Archipelago. A taxidermied snowy owl is mounted above the TV.

Port sampling, Jack explains, means collecting real-time data on the commercial salmon season. We are the State of Alaska’s eyes and hands on-site when the fishermen arrive at the processor. Our data makes it possible for the Department to monitor the commercial salmon catches, model the migrations of the fish, and micromanage the permissions of the fishermen. Day by day and cove by cove, all summer long, the “management biologists” decide and decree when and where fishing is allowed and forbidden, and to what kinds of boats.

The PowerPoint speedruns the three commercial fishing fleets the Department independently licenses and regulates: troll, gillnet, and seine. The difference is in the equipment: Trollers drag dozens of hooks behind their boats; gillnetters and seiners, respectively, lower large and gargantuan nets. When the fishing vessels deliver the salmon to the processors all summer long, my co-port-samplers-in-training and I will be waiting at the dock to intercept, identify, and measure them. Processors? Once upon a time these were called canneries, but they mostly no longer can. There are three private processors in Ketchikan, selling a wide variety of seafood products: flash frozen, vac-packed, headed and gutted, preportioned into fillets. Jack says we will each be stationed at a different processor every day. He says the three processors will combine with the three commercial fishing vessel types to determine which of the four methods of port sampling I will perform this summer — on the five species of Pacific salmon. I take frantic notes as he flips through pictures of indistinguishable fish.

Jack points to Ketchikan on a colorful map, the very bottom dot of the Southeast Alaska panhandle, and I feel ridiculously distant from my Arctic dreams. We are one of about a dozen small teams distributed across Alaska’s coastline, he continues, each contributing hundreds of numbers a day to the Department’s vast and subtle datasets, which allow the management biologists to optimize (?) the fisheries simultaneously for profit and sustainability. Jack explains in detail and at length all day. I sense an undertow pulling me far out of my depth.

This is our cubicle. This is where I will come to collect the ruggedized tablets in the morning and return in the afternoon to synchronize data and charge them overnight. This is my yellow plastic metal-detecting wand. I can keep it in my port sampling backpack, which is black and heavy-duty and waterproof and Grundéns brand — as are the forest-green overcoat and the orange polyurethane overalls Jack calls my fishing bibs. Everyone in the office is white. I meet two Annas, an Anne, and an Annie. I am provisioned a pair of Xtratuf boots and offered my choice of hat. This has an Alaska Department of Fish and Game logo and will be my uniform this summer.

Reeling, I jumble along the island’s shoreline, down Tongass Avenue, Ketchikan’s spine, past flightseeing jetties, a dental office complex, the postcard-precious steeple of the Lutheran church. At the cruise ship pier, I turn up a steep street curving up a treey cliff and quickly off it onto the sunny slope of houses where my Facebook landlords live. Crunchy the cat is dozing on the long straight stairs cutting up the cliff face. Where Warren meets G meets Harding Streets, I climb the wooden zigzag to the patio of my studio and pause for a giddy instant to behold the blue view. The grand Gravina Island unfolds across the calm and shallow channel, so wide it looks less like an island than a riverbank in the distance. A literal bald eagle soars magnificently over the vista. So this is Alaska. I work for the biology bureaucracy! Maybe I will finally figure out what life is.

On Tuesday morning we pile into a recommissioned sheriff’s department SUV and drive across town to my first fish processor. Jack leads us between two hangars, up a steel staircase, across a tread-plate catwalk, through a door, and into a large bright space striated with Formica lunch tables: the break room. I sit where Jack does, down at a table with two more white women wearing ADF&G-branded baseball caps. These are the FWT IIIs, who onboarded last week and have been out port sampling already.

Cannily, Jack disappears behind the lockers to the bathroom, leaving us free to chat among ourselves, pleasant and professional and soon blazing past formalities. I ask a lot of questions and begin to discern the existence of a small class of twentysomethings, preprofessional biologists job-hopping around the Pacific Rim. They teach tourists to snorkel in Costa Rica or Cozumel in the fall, skip the American winter to study stingrays or sharks in Australia, and fly up to Alaska in June to work salmon season. Trump defunded the US Forest Service in January, so some of us State of Alaska seasonal workers get to live in the USFS bunkhouse this summer.

Three of us are fresh out of college. Two of us grew up in Ketchikan. Four of us have, or almost have, marine biology degrees. The least like the others of us is Ana, who is, at 55, the oldest of us by far. Ana is a credentialed science teacher, but after a career in Washington state and three years all the way up in Utqiaġvik, she now teaches welding at Ketchikan High School. Ana met Kurt Cobain in a bar once in college, and now is a terminology stickler, insisting for instance that fish means more than one conspecific organism and fishes means more than one species. I like her immediately.

Processor workers amble into the break room. They fill the back of the room before the front, seemingly self-segregated into language blocs. I hear Spanish, Tagalog, West African French, and — is that Russian? “Probably Serbian,” says Ana. “Last year there were some Ukrainians.” Two of them begin a game of Jenga. The blocks clatter amid the mounting din. One of us conjures a deck of ADF&G-branded playing cards, and I am organizing my hand and relaxing into this easy scene when eight tall skinny beautiful white women walk in.

“Who’s that?” I ask quietly.

“That’s Sarah.”

“Who?”

“Sarah.”

“Which one’s Sarah?”

“They’re all Sarah.”

“?”

“It’s an acronym. Southern Southeast — um — Regional — ”

“ — Aquaculture Association,” finishes Jack, returning. “S-S-R-A-A. They run the hatcheries. In Southeast, anyway.” Hatcheries? I wonder, suddenly conscious of how the chunky baseball cap sits on my ponytail. Jack waves, and the SSRAAs wave back like waves, when a voice cuts through the noise to get our attention.

Reluctantly I turn to face the front of the room, where a portly man in a purple T-shirt is beginning . . . another PowerPoint. A long list of rules forbids things like jewelry and pens and AirPods in the processor, anything that might disassemble into fiddly metal parts or fall into the food. But if you wear only one AirPod, he insinuates unsubtly, and keep it under your hairnet, and keep the volume low, and as long as I don’t see it. He thanks us all for modeling proper behavior. If all goes according to plan, he says, in a tone that somehow sounds both like a joke and a threat, the machines won’t turn off until September.

by Grace Glass, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Sasha Fishman, Plastic Trapped Love (Interpretive Hexagon), detail. 2025
[ed. I started out as a Tech II, but not doing this stuff. So much opportunity back then. Within five years I was doing department-wide coordination and state policy on federal oil and gas projects throughout Alaska.]