Five AI summer reads: material to help navigate the emergence of AI
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/five-ai-summer-reads/
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/five-ai-summer-reads/
Nothing says lazy summer afternoon quite like contemplating the future of human intelligence. While others are packing beach thrillers and romance novels, we've got something a little different in mind. Our discovery team – the people look over the horizon at emerging tech and signals – have rounded up their favourite deep dives into what AI and digital technologies might mean for all of us. Perfect summer reading.
An article by Daan Juijn, Stan van Baarsen, Judith Dada, Maximilian Negele, Lily Stelling, Philip Fox, Alex Petropoulos, and Michiel Bakker
A call to action for Europe to embark on the most ambitious political agenda in the history of post-war Europe. Europe 2031 is a five-year scenario about Europe’s slide into irrelevance, how AI could drive this, and what must be done to avoid such a fate.
Europe 2031 first lays out some of the major missteps in AI that Europe has taken since 2025. This provides a grounding in reality and gives credibility to the rest of the essay. The future five-year scenario that follows is a frightening, speculative and yet still a believable picture of what might happen, providing a warning shot to Europe of what may be in store. If you want to understand some of the potential consequences of an AI future dominated by the US and China, Europe 2031 provokes some much-needed soul-searching on the issue of sovereign AI and is a must-read.
With the US government’s suspension of access to Anthropic’s Fable in the name of national security, and Anthropic’s own description of Mythos as highly capable in cybersecurity, the release of this essay feels very timely.
A speech by Cory Doctorow
A speech on the ‘post-American, enshittification-resistant internet’ for the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany.
Cory Doctorow’s idea of “enshittification” has certainly captured the public imagination. But what I think is more interesting here is that he has spotted an opportunity to create an unusual alliance of security hawks, entrepreneurs and activists to break US dominance of the internet.
With the US looking like a less reliable ally, world leaders are increasingly worried about digital sovereignty. Doctorow makes the case that the nations of the world should repeal their anticircumvention laws. This would allow them to modify US tech helping them better build their own independent tech sectors.
A book by Sarah Wynn-Williams
A scorched-earth memoir from Facebook’s former director of global public policy, charting her journey from true believer to horrified whistleblower across seven years inside Meta.
This is a book about the kinds of people who have power over AI and what they’re willing to do to make money. Secret censorship tools for the Chinese government, private-jet scheming and a leadership team she describes as carelessly holding the world in their hands while genuinely not seeming to notice the body count (her account of Facebook’s role in Myanmar is not a beach read). Misogyny, sexual harassment and skin-peelingly cringeworthy moments abound. And as you absorb the dozens of moments replayed, it becomes clear that Facebook’s toxicity was cultural rather than caused by a few bad apples. Engagement at all costs, including catastrophic global consequences. If you want to understand how technology gets governed, it’s not in a white paper - it’s in who’s on the plane.
Because the cast of people leading tech has barely changed. They’ve just swapped out social media for AI. As billions of dollars are thrown into the AI fire, we need to know who is calling the shots. And also because Meta tried to prevent the book’s publication and have since placed a gagging order on the author, which just makes it all the more thrilling.
An article by David Shariatmadari
An analysis of the way LLMs write, how AI is already shaping the way humans think and communicate, and the implications for English language and literature.
Some of us cringe when we spot an ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ formulation or em-dash, but the more we’re exposed to AI content in our daily lives, the more its idiosyncrasies are seeping into our language and fundamentally changing the way we speak and write. This article questions whether we are comfortable with that. Critics argue AI is flattening human communication: when filtered through an Anglo-American centric model, we lose the individuality of tone and the nuances of culture. Others say that language is constantly evolving in response to changing times, while novelists question whether the complexity of the human experience can ever be communicated by a machine. A human wrote this, but do you believe me?
Jamir Nazir recently won the overall Commonwealth short story prize for a piece accused of being AI generated, raising questions about how good we are at spotting AI prose.
An article by Kyle Chan
A look at how China's approach to the AI race is distinct from America's. While the U.S. is focused on frontier AI labs driven by the pursuit of AGI, China's industrial policy is focused on efficiency, adoption, and getting AI physically embedded into various parts of its economy, such as manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries.
This piece makes the case that China isn't really competing on making the smartest models, although it is catching up to the frontier rapidly. Instead it’s optimising for cheap, efficient models that can run on limited hardware and are more easily deployed. The article makes the case that tokens (the units of data processed by AI) are becoming a raw commodity, the way oil or electricity were in previous industrial revolutions. The country that produces and consumes most of them affordably and at scale has the potential to see large impacts. With its cheap, subsidised power and open AI research environment that allows labs to quickly iterate based on other labs' findings, China has a strong hand.
In the backdrop of the U.S. government's recent export controls on the latest frontier models, the article shows an interesting contrast in how the governments are approaching AI.
Read more about the discovery team’s work using intelligence about the future to change practice today here.
