Intro

We’re deep into the second half of the September and it means things are getting busier around here. After spending most of August in a calmer mood, now I need to enter fully into #1000mphClub mode. Which usually means I also need to finish going over my toolbox and make sure everything is set and updates are made where it needed.

Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.

Mission Control

Inbox: 80
RSS Reader: 1531
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1

Still working on that AI article. Hoping to finish it this week, otherwise I’ll end up going way too deep.Started working on designing two workshops for upcoming gigs. Will talk about those more soon.Need to put some time aside to work on couple of ideas I have for Tuhaf Gelecek and get in touch with people.Also need to finally finish couple of blog posts I’ve been thinking about publishing here before things get even more busier.Know Where You’re Standing

Thinking about futures and foresight as a practice and how I should develop my approach makes me spend so much time about what kind of pitfalls and limits you can face if you’re not careful enough. Combined with my philosophy background, this has been my recent rabbit hole/obsession for a while.

One of the mistakes I see many people are doing is the lack of awareness of where they’re standing. Whether we want it or not, where we’re standing mentally, socially, economically, politically, and geographically puts certain limits on what we can see and understand about things and their futures. When you’re thinking about a certain development limited by where you’re standing, you assume the whole world is same as you and the future will be shaped by the conditions you live in. Which is probably the worst way to practice forecasting.

I have two examples I think a lot about this issue. First one I came across I think last year, in which someone who’s very loved in more lefty tech criticism circles was talking about why speech-based interfaces were completely useless and no one wants something like that. It might sound like a normal argument if you’re living in Europe or have a similar circle of friends. But when you look around the world, you’ll see your experience is not the norm. You can see how elderly people prefer talking to their devices instead of dealing with screens or figuring out interfaces and menus. Children learn navigating those devices by talking to them before they learn how to read, and will expect to do that when they get older. Plus, I know privacy is a major concern when you need to talk to your device in public but when you take a public transport in Turkey, you can see why that’s not a big deal for many people.

Another one is the general discourse about AI on the internet. If you spent some time in social media platforms during the last year or two, you know how it became something polarizing and impossible to discuss with nuance. One thing I see more and more is the fact that the “anti-AI no matter what” sentiment is limited with a very well defined Western based group of people and rest of the world is much more open to a nuanced approach and benefitting from it. This limited mindset plus social media dynamics causes so many misunderstandings about the technology and how research about it interpreted. You may think most people hates this technology if you limit your perspective with this group but more global data shows the contrast clearly.

Plus, just being around people can show you this is not a black and white situation. When I was in İstanbul recently, I heard someone having a chat with a barista telling her she can ask ChatGPT about the diet she was talking about, instead of recommending her to Google it. In the meantime, I heard a middle school student warning her friends to use it in a way to get the answers they need quickly, so that ChatGPT won’t consume so much water. But if your only perspective about this technology is limited by the internet discourse and people who are fixated on hating it and everyone saying even remotely positive about it to gain some internet points, you can never see where the world is going.

I can easily give you more examples about every major issue you can think of. Where you’re standing and how you’re experiencing certain things are important to you on a personal level but this doesn’t mean that whole world experiences it the same way. We live in a world where there are billions of people, standing in different places with different backgrounds and different problems and priorities.

If you’re serious about understanding the world and where the future can go, you need to be aware of where you’re standing and make sure it doesn’t limit your sight. I don’t expect everyone to be this way but seeing so many people who are taken seriously on these issues making the same mistake over and over again annoys me in an unreasonable way. Even though I know that this will not change anytime soon because people are scared of the messy complexities of the world and they need someone to tell them a comforting story.

Song of the Week

Snarky Puppy is a great band and I love their drummer Larnell Lewis but Cory Henry with his solo is the main reason why I love this song.

Reading Log

“There is no excuse in this year 2025 for stories that don’t link to primary sources; and yet, most don’t, meaning they aren’t to be trusted. I give you Evans’s Epistemic Lemma: if they don’t link to primary sources, they aren’t reporting on them accurately.”

Why 95% of AI Commentary Fails – by Jon Evans

“And Extremely Online young Americans are, in their own way, just as intertwined with global culture as young Nepalis are. Everyone on Earth under 30 was basically born into a world where that’s always been the case. Obviously that’s going to change how geopolitics works! And American lawmakers clearly don’t understand that (yet).”

Global politics happens on Discord now

“Our work is crucial to the future of AI alignment research. If the alignment problem is the first step to safe superintelligence, the alignment alignment problem is the zeroth step. Without solving this challenge, we risk a future where the sheer catastrophic scale of misaligned reports on AI alignment imperils all human life on this planet or, worse, exposes the majority of AI alignment research as a big waste of time.”

The AI alignment alignment crisis

Outro

There’s a busy week ahead of me, which is a good thing to be honest. If you’ll need me, you know how to find me.

See you around!

If you want to work together to make sense of what's ahead, Tuhaf Studio is open for new clients. You can also get in touch with London Speaker Bureau Türkiye if you want to hire me as a speaker or panelist. If you want to become a regular supporter of my public work and help me create more, you can visit my Patreon. Thanks!