Machine Culture – Thesis | An ecological guide to the AI apocalypse (www.machineculture.io)

Machine Culture is a new Substack and podcast that launches with an essay framing AI governance through an “ecological” lens—an antidote to the eschatological debates that dominate much of AI discourse. Rather than fixating on binary apocalypse-or-utopia narratives (paperclips vs. post‑scarcity), the author urges a pragmatic, pluralistic view: AI is many technologies with diverse trajectories, shaped by cultural co‑evolution, economic forces, geopolitics (e.g., risks from conflict over Taiwan), and slow diffusion of capabilities. The project challenges infinite‑expected‑value reasoning that sidelined decentralized, bottom‑up governance and diverts entrepreneurial effort from concrete technical progress toward grandiose societal remaking. For practitioners and policymakers the essay’s implications are concrete: treat AI as an ensemble of applied systems, prioritize granular policy distinctions, and focus resources on high‑impact, grounded work (the author cites “more AlphaFold, less WeWork” as an exemplar). It highlights emergent orders—how human micromotives and the AI arms race interact—and warns of fat‑tail opportunities and threats even if superintelligence remains uncertain. The project will pursue interviews and ethnographic inquiry (podcast “Deep Tracks,” “Model Convos,” etc.) to map how AI reshapes norms, institutions, and decisions from boardrooms to war rooms, advocating governance that adapts to cultural evolution rather than locking into apocalyptic narratives.