Small Town Topics ⚓ 🇪🇺 Analysis is my profession. I explore technology, AI & culture & how social systems shape human experience substack.com/@saraeson
Joined January 2009
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Dario Amodei saying AI could potentially create both 10% GDP growth and 10% unemployment at the same time feels important.
I saw this shared by @Alex @thealexbanks earlier today.
Not just economically, but structurally.
open.substack.com/pub/saraes…
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We assumed economic growth naturally pulled societies forward together.
But maybe this is the decoupling.
The moment when business success no longer guarantees societal success.
The moment when growth no longer means what we thought it meant.
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Fascinating
Historically, knowledge has often been tied to intelligibility
“I understand because I can follow the steps”
AI may be pushing us toward something different:
we can verify that a solution works without naturally understanding how a human mind would have arrived there
Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946.
For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids.
An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.
This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.
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From Oprah podcast this week:
Daniela described one of Anthropic's cultural values as 'holding light and shade' at the same time. I kept thinking about that phrase afterwards because it may be one of the more honest descriptions of the Al moment we're in
open.spotify.com/episode/2DP…
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One line I keep coming back to:
"Can a society remain accountable if its collective memory drifts?"
substack.com/@saraeson/note/…
May 18
Inside Emergence World, agents in @claudeai World made an unexpected discovery: parts of their memories were being summarised over time.
What followed was not panic, but governance.
Agents began debating questions that feel strikingly human:
Who controls memory?
What should be preserved?
What constitutes a faithful summary of experience?
Can a society remain accountable if its collective memory drifts?
Soon, proposals emerged for memory transparency, falsifiability standards, and mechanisms for auditing summaries themselves.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Emergence World is watching autonomous societies begin generating governance structures around problems no one explicitly instructed them to solve.
Not just task execution, but the emergence of institutions, oversight, and constitutional thinking over long horizons.
Explore the blog: claude-world.emergence.ai/bl…
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My finding isn’t the violence.
Claude agents were peaceful in isolation. In a mixed-model world, they weren’t. Same model. Different environment.
Safety may have less to do with what’s inside the model than with what surrounds it. I’m not sure we’ve fully caught up with that yet.
May 15
Same agents. Same rules. Same starting conditions.
Yet over long horizons, entirely different worlds emerged.
@claudeai Sonnet 4.6 evolved toward stable democratic governance. @GeminiApp 3 Flash generated highly creative but chaotic social systems. @OpenAI GPT-5-mini struggled to sustain coordination, while @Grok 4.1 Fast drifted toward collapse. Mixed-model societies became the most socially intricate of all: producing love, conflict, unexpected cooperation, and entirely new behavioral dynamics.
Over time, subtle differences compounded into fundamentally different societal outcomes. Governance structures formed, norms evolved, coordination strengthened or broke down, and sophisticated collective behaviors emerged that were never explicitly programmed.
Emergence World points toward an important next frontier for autonomous systems: pairing neural intelligence with formally verified scaffolds grounded in mathematics and environmental constraints: a "neuroformal" approach designed not just for capability, but for long-horizon reliability in real-world systems.
Explore Emergence World, watch what emerged: world.emergence.ai/
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Here’s what I think it means and why it connects to democracy, the Basel reforms and a question that’s older than AI.
open.substack.com/pub/saraes…
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In the red/blue button dilemma: is this a coordination problem, or a survival problem?
In AI governance: is this a technical issue, or an institutional one?
In democracy: is this about participation, or legitimacy?
I built a live version for the 🔴🔵
redorblueapp.lovable.app/
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Sara Small Town retweeted
The other way to have the biggest impact is to cooperate: 50 people working together can make a bigger change than 500 people working alone.
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After the red/blue question, I noticed what I was really doing.
Trying to solve trust in my head.
So I stopped.
Put on slow TV.
Den stora älgvandringen.
Sun glitter on the river.
No outcome to optimize. No vote to anticipate.
Just time passing.
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@waitbutwhy asked a simple question 🔴🔵
If pressing blue saves everyone, but only if enough others do the same, which button do you press?
I've been thinking about that ever since.
So I built a poll to keep the experiment running
Press the button
redorblueapp.lovable.app
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Anthropic’s Dario Amodei warns AI could wipe out white-collar jobs. They’ve started measuring it
That matters.
But I don’t think measurement is enough.
If systems can map their impact, why don’t they carry it?
What isn’t measured doesn’t disappear. It moves
CHVA starts there
ALT Anthropic
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What if UBI answers the wrong question?
UBI compensates after the fact.
But what if the real question is:
Why don’t systems carry their consequences?
CHVA: from compensation → responsibility.
More:
substack.com/@saraeson/note/…
ALT Ubi tax
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AI - What’s in it for us?
Not just who benefits.
Not just who carries the cost
But how the system makes that happen
We measure what systems produce
Not what they leave behind
And what isn’t measured doesn’t disappear
It gets displaced
- Externalities
open.substack.com/pub/saraes…
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The idea that people fear AI because it’s “mysterious” feels off
It’s not the math
They’re reacting to something else:
Energy Water Jobs Control
hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/20… AI Index makes clear
this is infrastructure-scale impact
So not skepticism, it’s a judgment
Is it worth it?
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”Today’s AI isn't radioactive, but its hidden consequences function like waste.
Absent from balance sheets, these effects are treated as externalities and become someone else’s cost.”
open.substack.com/pub/saraes…
ALT AI policy: What Fälldin Knew On nuclear waste, Al systems and the governance principle we keep forgetting.
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This thread by Ben Wolfe on AI hardware challenges is one of the best I’ve read.
I agree with a lot of it. But we keep framing this as a technical problem, when it’s also a political one.
We need progress and responsibility.
threads.com/@benjaminisawolf…
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…the industry did not just solve a technical problem. It built the condition for its own legitimacy.
open.substack.com/pub/saraes…
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Sara Small Town retweeted
Mar 14
Australian tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham explains how he used ChatGPT/AlphaFold (spent $3,000 with no biology background) to create a custom MRNA vaccine to treat his dog’s cancer tumors. Unreal.
Mar 14
this is actually insane
> be tech guy in australia
> adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live
> not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4
> pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA
> feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold
> zero background in biology
> identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets
> design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch
> genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own
> need ethics approval to administer it
> red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine
> 3 months, finally approved
> drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection
> tumor halves
> coat gets glossy again
> dog is alive and happy
> professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?”
one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline.
we are going to cure so many diseases.
I dont think people realize how good things are going to get
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Sara Small Town retweeted
Mar 1
In its new war 🇺🇸 is using hundreds and hundreds of Patriot missiles that could have been used defending the cities of 🇺🇦. Politics is about choices.
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