Exotic redemptions

On its way from Copenhagen to Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Airlines flight ET725 makes a technical stop in Vienna, creating an exotic opportunity to travel on points between Denmark and Austria on a wide-body aircraft. Despite seeing two available seats, I think reason has prevailed for now, and instead I am exploring different Pågatåg options across Skåne before finally making it to Helsingborg.

Working on my article on the political economy of biogenic hydrocarbons, I am once again reminded of the enormous uncertainty surrounding all these long-term projections of the future, given how rapidly artificial intelligence is evolving and its potentially dramatic implications for the cost of machine labour. That is assuming, of course, that the future will be anything at all like the present. Just the other week, 1,367 researchers and engineers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind signed another open letter warning about the risks associated with increasingly automated AI development. As before, the problem remains one of global coordination and broader catch-up as open-source AI models become ever more potent as well.