The Secret Ingredient.
AI successionists.
“The first email I read, every morning, is News Items.” — Rick Cordella, President, NBC Sports.
1. Sigal Samuel:
“I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.”
This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea of creating a “Worthy Successor” — an AI so impressive, so beyond the mere human, that we’d actually want it to replace humanity.
“You’re a brave man for entering this room!” Dan Faggella, an AI market researcher and organizer of the symposium, told Carson. “You’re in probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.”
The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct. (Source: vox.com, danfaggella.com)
2. Daron Acemoglu:
Using AI to do what humans cannot do, so that humans can expand what they do, is more productive than mimicry. In a future scenario where AI increases, rather than displaces, human capabilities, electricians would be aided by AI diagnostics, nurses would consult AI in interpreting symptoms, and teachers might use AI to personalize instruction for each student.
Optimists and industry insiders might respond that automation-first AI can still benefit everyone, provided that redistributive policies keep pace. But this argument has a poor track record. Four decades of digital automation have already concentrated gains at the top, hollowed out middle-skill work, and produced disappointing aggregate productivity growth. There is little reason to expect that an even more powerful round of automation, deployed by an even more concentrated industry, will end differently.
And the global stakes are even greater than those in the US. For billions of people in the developing world, where a decent job is the only reliable path out of poverty, an automation-centric AI agenda is a recipe for disaster. We can and must demand a different design.
Perhaps the biggest failing of today’s AI industry is its refusal to recognize any of this. The handful of people unleashing this technology on the world are guided by an ideology of control (over humanity) and by a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans. (Sources: nytimes.com, project-syndicate.org)
3. New Scientist:
Mathematicians have never been so sought after by the world’s richest people. At universities across the world, academics are seeing their colleagues mysteriously disappear and join private companies. Some of these companies are household names, like OpenAI and Google, but others are newly formed and just months old, hoping to capitalize on a moment in which mathematics is seen as the secret ingredient with which to improve artificial intelligence – which may in turn transform mathematics itself…
In recent decades, mathematicians have come up with various systems with which to verify whether a proof is correct. The most popular of these systems is a programming language called Lean, which mathematicians can use to translate their handwritten proofs into a form that can be instantly checked by a computer. This can help with research-level mathematics, where it can take an inordinate amount of time from already-stretched researchers to verify whether a proof is correct.
A similar problem now exists in computer programming, because large language models produce vast amounts of code that frequently contain small and hard-to-spot errors, which has reduced many human programmers to act as babysitters for AI outputs.
It is this latter category that companies like Axiom Math and Harmonic see as their way to generate revenue, as the available cash for solving tricky maths problems is small. Just as a mathematical proof can be verified as correct with Lean or a similar programming language, so too can computer software, mathematically proving that it is correct and contains no bugs. (Sources: newscientist.com, axiommath.ai, harmonic.fun)
4. A novel pill helped people with advanced pancreatic cancer live longer, researchers reported Sunday, raising hopes of long-needed better treatments for one of the deadliest types of cancer. “While not curing the cancer, it is a very large step forward,” said Dr. Zev Wainberg, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped lead the study. The drug is called daraxonrasib, and it blocks a mutated protein that fuels tumor growth in more than 90 percent of pancreatic cancer cases – a target that had eluded treatment for decades. The daily pills nearly doubled survival time, with fewer severe side effects, in a study that randomly assigned the experimental drug or more chemotherapy to 500 patients whose metastatic, or spreading, cancer had quit responding to prior treatment. (Sources: sciencealert.com, dana-farber.org, apnews.com, nejm.org)
5. Stat News:
There’s a schism in America’s drug business, playing out in punchy direct messages, feisty group chats, and the occasional heated in-person exchange.
The problem is China. Fledgling startups and pharmaceutical giants alike are addicted to Chinese drugs, filling their pipelines with would-be blockbusters developed at enviable speed and bought on the cheap. They’ve spent some $60 billion on Chinese molecules in the first three months of 2026 alone, according to state figures. That’s on pace to double last year’s total, which was already 10 times larger than the one from 2021.
