27 free resources on this topic. Everything here is free and hand-picked. You can also search within this topic.
The public departure statement Sofia Liguori published on October 20, 2026, her last day at Google DeepMind, written in a personal capacity, explaining her disillusionment and reasons for leaving.
An October 2026 essay by Steve Yegge on a pattern he sees emerging in how enterprises adopt and pay for AI coding tools.
An October 2026 Cosmonaut essay by Nicolas D. Villarreal revisiting his 2023 predictions about AI and arguing that artificial general intelligence is a real possibility with major implications for class politics.
An August 2025 essay by Anthony Moser arguing for outright opposition to generative AI rather than qualified criticism, with links to reporting on its environmental, bias, and cognitive harms.
Clara Collier's essay in Asterisk Magazine on what people will do if AI surpasses humans at economically necessary labor.
togelius.blogspot.comA 2026 blog post by AI researcher Julian Togelius on anti-intellectual attitudes in how AI is discussed and used.
togelius.blogspot.comAdded Oct 11, 20260 opensA free long-form essay by Alexander Wissner-Gross and Peter Diamandis sketching how accelerating AI could tackle grand challenges in medicine, energy and industry over the next decade.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's 2024 essay describing how powerful AI could transform biology, neuroscience, economic development, governance and work if its risks are managed.
An essay from the Cosmos Institute arguing that the AI age demands a new kind of technologist who combines building with philosophical reflection.
October 2026 essay by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) addressed to psychologist Steven Pinker, responding to Pinker's views on AI risk and laying out the author's counterarguments.
Rich Sutton's March 2019 essay arguing that the biggest lesson from 70 years of AI research is that general methods leveraging computation ultimately prove most effective, by a large margin. Sutton walks through prominent cases — computer chess, Go, speech recognition, and computer vision — where approaches built on human knowledge were outdone by search and learning methods that scaled with computing power. He attributes the pattern to the steadily falling cost of computation and warns that relying on human knowledge tends to complicate methods in ways that limit scaling.
Essay by linguist Emily M. Bender on Medium arguing against framing AI ethics and AI safety as a "schism." The page blocked automated reading, so this description is based on the title and author.
Essay arguing that software architecture is about making good decisions easier on a timeframe you can reason about — startups, banks, open source projects and large companies each face different time horizons and constraints, and many architecture disagreements are really disagreements about what timeframe is reasonable.
Medium essay from the All Humans Are Human publication. The page blocked automated reading, so this description is based on the title only.
An essay by Venkatesh Rao (Contraptions newsletter) arguing that the Effective Altruism movement\u2019s framing of AI safety has become a problem in itself: \u201cEA promises to solve AI Safety. Now we have two problems.\u201d Rao draws on nearly two decades of writing alongside the rationalist community, and frames the piece as personal history as well as argument. Rao\u2019s Contraptions newsletter (formerly Ribbonfarm) was tagged \u201cpostrationalist\u201d by Scott Alexander.
An essay by anthropologist Dr. Hilary Agro arguing that debates about technology stay irrational because so many people depend on screens for comfort and relief, and so defend them rather than question them.
Why I recommend it: Free to read. This is an opinion essay with a clear point of view, not a research paper — read it as one argument to think with.
Ben Hylak argues that as AI agents start negotiating with each other on our behalf, our privacy will depend on how well those agents handle social situations.
Why I recommend it: An opinion essay by a startup founder, not research. Good prompt for thinking about what you let an agent share.
An essay by SE Gyges examining whether the online rationalist community around AI risk behaves like a religious movement.
Why I recommend it: A critic's personal essay. Read alongside the rationalists' own writing on LessWrong so you hear both sides.
A long technical essay that probes the Jev model with roughly 10,000 API calls and reasons out how it is likely built, correcting popular claims circulating on social media.
From the site: I probed Jev with 10,000 API calls to work out roughly how it’s built, and why most of the grifter takes on X are completely wrong.
Why I recommend it: Free to read in full. A good example of testing a claim yourself instead of repeating hot takes — useful if you want to sound informed about new models without overstating what is actually known. The conclusions are the author's inferences, not confirmed by the model's makers.
Noema Magazine essay on how generative AI is reshaping creative work and value — what an abundance of output does to originality, pay and the meaning of being a creative professional.
Why I recommend it: If you work in a creative field, read this before you decide how to position AI in your own pitch.
The Argument essay arguing that much of the current AI debate misreads the problem: delegating decisions is the intended feature, not an accident, and that reframing should change how we govern it.
Why I recommend it: Read this alongside the optimistic AI takes — holding both views is what makes you sound credible on the topic.
Writing of Adam Elkus on technology, security, AI and political violence — long-form essays connecting computing history with policy and human values.
Why I recommend it: Follow for the slower, historically grounded take on AI debates.
CreativeApplications theory piece on predictive capital — how forecasting systems and data models shape markets, labor and creative practice, and who benefits from prediction.
Why I recommend it: Dense but rewarding — helpful vocabulary for talking about data and power without sounding alarmist.
Essay from Anthropic's CEO arguing for how the pace of frontier AI development should be managed alongside safety and societal readiness.
Why I recommend it: Read the people building these systems in their own words, then read their critics. Both are part of an informed view.
An essay on how AI exposes the cultural debt embedded in org charts, leadership habits, and unexamined processes.
Why I recommend it: This piece nails why AI adoption is less a technology problem and more a culture-and-power problem. Essential reading for anyone leading a team through change.
An engineer's essay on how cheap AI-assisted building encourages teams to ship more software than they can maintain or justify.
Why I recommend it: The best argument I have read for restraint. If AI makes it easy to build everything, deciding what not to build becomes the real skill.
Essay arguing that generative AI raises the floor of output while flattening what makes work distinctive.
Why I recommend it: A good counterweight if you are tempted to let AI write everything in your search. Polished is not the same as memorable.
