Every generation has faced this moment - and the question at the center was always the same: are we our tools, or are we something more? Eric Markowitz follows the thread from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to where it was always going to lead. The real conversation was never about AI.

The Star Trek replicator could make you anything you wanted - just never quite the way you'd want it. Dave Nadig uses Star Trek's most famous Ferengi bartender to reframe what AI actually costs us as writers and readers. The answer has less to do with the technology than with what we're actually hungry for.

A machine-learning system receives a single directive: maximize transaction volume across a population with no physical form and no direct power. What emerges from its reasoning is less so a plan, and more so a description of the world as it already exists, here and now. Adam Butler reconstructs a document that may describe either the most important observation anyone has made or the most irrefutable kind of error, with no method to distinguish between them.

AI-generated content on Substack and Twitter is now indistinguishable from real writing, and detection tools are proving unreliable. Brent Donnelly argues for a radically human-centric approach: assume everything is AI until proven otherwise, then migrate back to actual gatekeepers who edit for clarity, accuracy, and truth.