“The more a system is in malaise, the more tempting it becomes to invoke the future.”
– Jonathan White, In the Long Run
04.03.2026 16:01
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“The more a system is in malaise, the more tempting it becomes to invoke the future.”
– Jonathan White, In the Long Run
There is data to support this: solo-founded startups went from 17% of all new startups in 2017 to over 36% by mid-2025. Solo entrepreneurs and small teams are already doing things that required entire departments three years ago. open.substack.com/pub/futures...
“With expertise more accessible and teams better coordinated, the organizational structure changes as smaller, specialized teams can now handle bigger workloads.”
– Sangeet Paul Choudary, Reshuffle
“AI models, constantly trained on organizational knowledge, enable different parts of the organization to coordinate around the same shared understanding.”
Learning from a weather app how to deal with uncertain futures acmeweather.com/blog/introd...
“The reality is that grinding kills creativity and big-picture thinking, even if it temporarily increases output.”
– Cate Hall, How to Be More Agentic
These aren't reactions to a software tool. They're reactions to stories.
In my latest newsletter, I wrote about the pattern, the evidence, and how it affects AI.
futureslens.substack.com/p/cultural-...
And it explains something I keep observing: when organizations struggle with AI, the resistance rarely has to do with the technology. It has to do with images people have been carrying for decades, unexamined. The Terminator. The job-stealing robot.
Sam Altman tried to rebuild the movie “Her,” down to Scarlett Johansson's voice.
This isn't science fiction vaguely inspiring technology. This is culture steering what gets built.
We've been imagining AI for over a century. Frankenstein in 1818. HAL 9000 in 1968. The Terminator in 1984. And these images didn't stay in the movies. Jeff Bezos built Alexa to sound like the Star Trek computer.
In 1922, the sociologist William Ogburn described how culture lags behind technology. With AI, the pattern inverted. I've started calling it “Cultural Lead”: culture got there first: futureslens.substack.com/p/cultural-...
“Minds aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind.”
– William Gibson, Neuromancer
“What we're living through is not a crisis of who does the work, but a transition in what the work is.” open.substack.com/pub/futures...
A critical futures lens on another hype cycle of “AI is coming for your job” open.substack.com/pub/futures...
“When tech leaders say we can’t stop progress, what they mean is, you can’t stop us.” James O'Sullivan, The Politics of Superintelligence
Matt Shumer's article, “Something big is coming,“ gives you ZERO insight about the future with AI.
It nevertheless displays a current mindset among some twentysomething white men in tech. And it shows you how our attention economy works. Draw your conclusions accordingly.
“The wider these cultural gaps grow, the more concerned I become. How many journalists have used a coding agent? How many engineers in SF have held a job besides code?” – Jasmine Sun jasmi.news/p/ai-populism
From what I understand, it's actually a deliberate choice with the quotation marks because the plain ones are important for coding. github.com/anthropics/c...
This hasn’t worked for me for ages. Got so annoyed that I wrote a script that connects to a hook in Claude Code that replaces the plain quotes with the proper ones.
“It’s about contingency. I help the client go where things are already going.”
– Hubertus Bigend
If you want to catch up on the latest developments around OpenClaw, Moltbook, etc. The Verge has a great feed of their articles around these topics: www.theverge.com/news/872091...
“The actual headline isn’t “the bots have formed a religion” or “the bots have invented their own culture”. The headline is: a bunch of humans have discovered a new way to be emotionally manipulated by interface geometry.”
“It has been extremely worrying to watch a large swathe of otherwise intelligent people online (who should know better), take leave of their senses. Absolutely one shotted by the whole thing. A mania induced by a badly-lit doll’s house.”
“All week I’ve been thinking to myself ‘I’m not going to write about Moltbook, I’m not going to write about Moltbook’. But I’ve found a work around! I’m going to talk about peoples reactions to Moltbook.” – Glad you did, Jay. thejaymo.net/2026/02/02/...
Reactivated my Substack newsletter for no other reason than it still being there: open.substack.com/pub/futures...
The reactions to Moltbook reveal far more about humans than about agents.
Read the summary of his winning essay here: www.noemamag.com/only-what-i...
“If we conflate the richness of biological brains and human experience with the information-processing machinations of deepfake-boosted chatbots, or whatever the latest AI wizardry might be, we do our minds, brains and bodies a grave injustice.” – Anil Seth
Neuroscientist Anil Seth, winner of the 2025 Berggruen essay prize, argues that consciousness is inseparable from biological life and cannot be reduced to complex computation.
Let's take a quick break during the Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw hype for a brief reflection on consciousness …