Currently working on a doozy of an essay that started with Abolition of Man and C.S. Lewis, and applying his idea of "Men Without Chests" to Tech CEOs and the rush to build AI overlords. I honestly don't know how it will come out. Essays for me at this stage in my life are a way to think about current issues and things I'm dealing with. In the editing process I try to make them readable for other people.
But I wanted to include some of the sources I am working from, so you could "follow along" if you want. First is Abolition of Man (obviously), but you can also do That Hideous Strength because Hideous Strength takes many of C.S. Lewis's ideas from Abolition and takes them to the extreme in a nightmarish kind of fairy tale. Eric and I did a podcast about this one not too long ago.
I am also going to be citing Dario Amodei's (the CEO of Anthropic/Claude) essays since they show the thinking of a "Man Without a Chest." Specifically "We Must Pace the Frontier" and "Machines of Loving Grace." https://darioamodei.com/
This essay which is a direct response to Amodei, from a doctor and researcher: https://curecancer.ai/AI_vs_Cancer_Essay_130326.pdf (recommend this one as a sane and informed take on AI and medicine)
Also "Death's End" by Cixin Liu, which is Book 3 of the Three Body Problem. I haven't gotten to this part in the essay yet, but essentially I want to think about what humanity becomes if it leaves earth, since Liu has a really unique perspective on that. And I think the space frontier goes along with the AI frontier in terms of what the 'true believers' envision for humanity's future. Not sure how well it will relate by the time I get there (am just over 4000 words now).
Tangential: This statement from codeberg (ethical github) about LLM generated projects and how they are discouraging its use on the platform. It is not just a technical read, but more about how we're all paying for the costs of AI in hardware, rising costs, and wasteful codebases for flippant 'vibecoded' projects. It is nice to see an official statement from actual developers.