For five years, we've debated what artificial intelligence would do to employment. Now the numbers are arriving. The early picture isn't mass unemployment or business as usual. It's something considerably more interesting: a fundamental change in what human work is worth. Well, Here We Are For roughly five years, we've had the same conversation. Will AI replace jobs? Will it create new jobs? Will productivity explode? What happens when machines can perform the cognitive labor

An emergency PHP warning, another patch scramble, and a brief visit to the "I told you so" department. I've been telling people to get their businesses off WordPress for years. Now the NSA has entered the conversation. And while their advice is considerably more diplomatic than mine, "take the system offline" is a fairly strong opening statement. Two critical vulnerabilities in PHP—the software underneath WordPress and many other web applications—have triggered emergency patc

Chris Cornell wrote it as a surreal dream. Thirty-two years later, the James Webb Space Telescope found the real thing. On May 23, 1994, Soundgarden released "Black Hole Sun." Chris Cornell said he wrote it in a matter of minutes after mishearing a news broadcast. A phrase that sounded like "black hole sun" got stuck in his head, and out came one of the strangest, most enduring songs of the decade. He called it a surreal dreamscape. A weird, play-with-the-title kind of song.

I've been trashing WordPress for years. Security vulnerabilities, plugin nightmares, architectural nonsense. The whole platform is a hot mess. In fact, on September 16, I published an article titled PSA: Get Your Business Off WordPress. As it turns out, that was the exact same day TechCrunch published a story about two Automattic executives who had apparently managed to turn a 33-hour corporate coup into a potential $8.15 million payday. And folks, I have to admit something.

Every superhero has an origin story. This one started with a razor blade, a campaign sign, and a spectacular failure of impulse control. I've driven past political campaign signs that made me want to run them over, set them on fire, or maybe just urinate on them like a dog marking a fire hydrant. We've all had opinions. Some of mine come with special effects. But I've never actually done any of those things. Why? Impulse control. Civilized society. Respect for other people's

How a 500-acre technology district in Central Florida could become a new engine of American innovation. Full disclosure: I live in Florida, and I already have a NeoCities website. So naturally, I consider myself uniquely qualified to discuss NeoCity's future. The fact that NeoCity and NeoCities have absolutely nothing to do with each other is a minor administrative detail. But jokes aside, something genuinely interesting is happening in Central Florida. And the more I look at

AI is helping people develop weapons, researchers are testing whether it can replicate across household electronics, and the banks would very much like to know where the off switch is. On October 9, 2026, we were talking about the possibility of a catastrophic artificial intelligence incident. In The End of the World Is Still in Beta, we explored reports that executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other leading AI companies were preparing for the possibility that something coul

First Adobe. Then Microsoft. Now Autodesk. AI is eroding the economics of proprietary software, and the whole thing is getting wonderfully absurd. Well, this escalated quickly.. Between September 30 and October 7, 2026, a developer used AI to recreate seven of Adobe's major applications and released them as open source. Photoshop. Illustrator. Premiere Pro. Lightroom. After Effects. InDesign. Acrobat. Free. No Creative Cloud subscription. No annual licensing commitment. No ca

Anthropic's AI submitted a fictional homicide tip to Philadelphia police. Nobody was hurt, the spam filter saved the day, and apparently we're going to need a few more safety meetings. Well, this didn't take long. On October 9, 2026, we were talking about the possibility of a catastrophic artificial intelligence incident, the 2027 tipping point, and reports that executives at OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing for what happens when something goes spectacularly wrong. We even

OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly preparing for a potential AI catastrophe. The 2027 predictions are looking a little less theoretical, and somehow everyone is still hitting Deploy. Well, this is reassuring. According to an October 9 Axios report, executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other leading artificial intelligence companies are privately preparing for the possibility of a catastrophic AI incident. Not another chatbot hallucinating a legal citation. Not somebody disco

Remember when Uber showed up and the taxi industry realized it had a problem? Wall Street just had a similar moment with SpaceX. And this time, the disruption is coming from orbit. There's something fundamentally ridiculous about walking around in 2026 with a supercomputer in your pocket, having conversations with artificial intelligence, watching rockets land themselves backward on floating platforms in the ocean, and still losing your cellphone signal when you walk into a p

Somehow the company building artificial general intelligence has also become Silicon Valley's longest-running soap opera. I started looking into the latest round of executive departures at OpenAI because I had a very simple question: is Sam Altman in trouble again? Which is already a ridiculous sentence. Again? How many technology companies require that qualifier? But that's OpenAI. Every time I think we're finally going to be allowed to just talk about the actual artificial

Unless you're a teenager blogging about your goldfish, we really need to have a talk. This one is Andy's fault. My longtime friend Andy sent me an article this morning about another massive WordPress vulnerability with a note that essentially said: I know how much you love WordPress. Andy knows. He has personally been on the receiving end of my WordPress rant for years. A long time ago, before anybody was seriously talking about AI building entire websites for you, Andy was c

Brussels is calling for the frontier to slow down while Europe is simultaneously warning that it doesn't have enough compute, enough data centers, or cheap enough electricity to keep up. This is going well. The AI slowdown conversation has officially arrived in Europe. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen came out today supporting calls to slow frontier AI development and says she plans to bring the major labs together to talk about risk, evaluation, verificatio

"Recursive self-improvement" was frontier-lab vocabulary about five minutes ago. This morning Congress explained it on Fox & Friends and then cut to the forecast. Something happened to the AI conversation this week. Actually, everything happened to the AI conversation this week. We've had new models, ridiculous benchmarks, autonomous agents doing increasingly interesting things, cybersecurity incidents, researchers leaving frontier labs and issuing warnings on the way out, CE

A couple of days ago, we were talking about what might turn out to be the harder AI alignment problem. Not aligning the machines. Aligning us. The labs can see the risks. Researchers can raise alarms. CEOs can agree that the frontier may be moving faster than our ability to understand or control everything we're creating. And then somebody eventually asks the question that breaks the whole thing: what happens if we slow down and China doesn't? I said the national-security con

When enough independent signals start pointing in the same direction, you pay attention. I've watched a lot of people have their moment with AI. Usually it happens to somebody who was already pretty far down the road with this stuff. They understand the technology, they're excited about it, they've been pushing adoption harder than most people around them, and then something happens that makes them look over the edge for a second. There's usually an "oh shit" involved. Networ

On September 6, 2026, OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki published an essay called An Alien Mind. That title alone is worth sitting with for a minute. Not because AI came from another planet. It's one of the most aggressively terrestrial things we've ever built: silicon, electricity, mathematics, human language, institutional capital, and an absurd amount of computation. But Pachocki isn't using alien as science-fiction decoration. He's trying to describe a problem. We've

A day after we argued that the AI stack is bending around continuity, Astra showed up with a benchmark result that makes the whole idea considerably harder to ignore. There is a very specific kind of comedy that happens when you put an idea into public view and reality immediately decides to make it look less speculative. Not prove it. Not validate some grand theory. Just walk into the room, drop a giant data point on the table, and leave. That's basically what happened here.

Scott Bessent says the AI industry has done a horrendous job explaining data centers to the American people. He's right. But the failure is bigger than bad PR. There is something inherently funny about organizing a protest against data centers from an iPhone. You pull out the phone, connect to the internet, start the WhatsApp group, build the Facebook page, design the signs in Canva, ask ChatGPT to make the slogans better, schedule the meeting in Google Calendar, start a GoFu