News Items

News Items

Consequential Measures.

The end of visual fact.

John Ellis
Oct 10, 2025
∙ Paid
22
1
1
Share

“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — David Barboza, founder of WireScreen and former Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times.


Get 14 day free trial


1. The arrival of Sora, along with similar A.I.-powered video generators released by Meta and Google this year, has major implications. The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it. Society as a whole will have to treat videos with as much skepticism as people already do words. (Source: nytimes.com)


2. The New Yorker:

The idea of a permanent underclass has recently been embraced in part as an online joke and in part out of a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality. In an A.I.-dominated future, those with capital will buy “compute” (the tech term for A.I. horsepower) and use it to accomplish work once done by humans: anything from coding software to designing marketing campaigns to managing factories. Those without the same resources will be stuck with few alternatives. A sense of dread about this impending A.I. caste system has created a new urgency to get ahead while you still can.

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to News Items to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2025 John Ellis
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture