Great 2020s character names: Digger Rockwell Lydia Tár Bob Ferguson aka Pat Calhoun aka Ghetto Pat aka Rocketman Sergio St. Carlos Col. Steven J. Lockjaw Bella Baxter Milton Rockwell Jean Jacket And an honorable mention to 2019’s Benoit Blanc

Imagine a 2x2 of "conscious/ non-conscious" and "worthy of welfare/ not worthy of welfare". The "conscious" and "worthy" and "not-conscious and not-worthy" are pretty straightforward. It is in the "conscious and not-worthy" and "not-conscious and worthy" quadrants where the bloody holy wars will be faught. --"Conscious and not-worthy" is the daily existence of anyone who thinks about fish consciousness while eating one. If billions of people come to believe that their AI is conscious but also that its OK to treat it poorly, this will have bad knock-on effects for behavioral norms all around. --I think a lot of the AI pseudo-debates on this will come down to "not-conscious and worthy": billions of agent users will say "no, I do not think my long-running agent I have been talking with for years is conscious, but if you erase it I would feel genuine grief and loss and I would hate you."

It’s amusing to me that “The Whale” sort of remained in the public consciousness as long as it has.

Taylor Swift released the single “Patient Zero” on September 25, 2026. That same day a 28 year old technician at the Irkutsk Anti Plague Research Institute reportedly broke a test tube containing live plague bacteria. She was hospitalized days later with severe pneumonia and died October 2, 2026, the same day “Patient Zero” reached No. 1 on the U.K. Official Singles Chart.

Congratulations. If this is you, you do not need to be on Adderall, you already had normative dopamine transport and now you're just tweaking the fuck out. If you don't feel calm and mellowed out when you take it then you shouldn't be taking it. Don't @ me

Moetron

NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm. For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.