Sunsets
Some thoughts this week on things eventually coming to an end with a lot of uncertainty about what happens next.
This week I am thinking about things coming to an end, somehow, without knowing what happens next. Being of a certain age, namely, having lived already through a number of what we look back on and refer fondly (or not so much) as “eras”, this one feels different. As I persused the week’s news, nearly all of it grim, the only common throughline I can find is things we once accepted to be true no longer being so. In other words, a lot of assumptions about the nature of the world we live in, ideas we may have grown up with for decades, are no longer true. This may very well mean that young people will be better poised than any of us to deal with the new realities, as having lived through fewer “eras”, they have fewer preconceived notions of how things should be.
Take AI, something I have found myself using more in my own daily life than I ever imagined (sans visuals, I still have zero tolerance for AI-generated images). I think most of us would agree the AI-revolution is now underway at a pace few outside of tech could have imagined just a few years ago. And yet, no one knows how it is going to change our everyday lives. It is as if an unstoppable force has been released with no guardrails, and even no concept of who should be establishing those guardrails. Governments? Companies? Individuals?
Every time I encounter a person performing a job that could be performed by a machine, I think about the nagging question in the back of my mind re universal basic income, or some form thereof, and wonder when the politicians are finally going to start addressing the elephant in the room. Today was a hot, sunny day, finally, in Vienna, and I went to a public swimming pool along with one of my kids. The person who sold us the tickets (which could have been an email, e.g., could have been automated), lectured us on having forgotten a student ID, and as my kid rolled his eyes, all I could think about are all the jobs that now already exist thanks to the kindness of European social welfare states. Does that person, though, really generate a sense of purpose doing something a machine could do? Would they not be happier on a hot sunny day swimming alongside the rest of us? Or at least acting as a lifeguard instead? I don’t know, but I wonder.
My kid then reminds me that something like 70% of the U.S. economy is consumer spending, which in my mind connects along dots in the following way: AI replaces people, people lose jobs, people stop spending, people go hungry, (broader) economy crashes. I would love for someone much smarter than me to explain why this will not happen. My kid muttered something about it being a great time to become a plumber, but it is not as if the number of toilets needing repairs is going to double alongside the rise of data centers. In other words, yes, I wholeheartedly agree that anyone who works with their hands in a way that machines cannot replicate should be safe in our new world which we cannot fully envision yet, that does not mean that everyone who once had an office or indoor job replaced by AI can suddenly, overnight be retrained as a skilled professional because those jobs too require a lot of training and some amount of raw talent.
While I am thinking about these existential questions with no good answers, this week the WSJ published an interview with Mario Zechner, who back in 2022, with no connection to Ukraine, stepped in to make Cards for Ukraine a reality. And now, in classic Mario fashion, we learn that he is one of the engineers behind the OpenClaw AI agent everyone is talking about.
https://mariozechner.at/uploads/vibe-wsj.pdf (free to read)
Vibe-Coded AI ‘Slop’ is Flooding the World With Potentially Dangerous Code (WSJ paywall)
You almost breathe a sigh of relief reading Mario and Armin’s thoughts, namely, that tools can be great but still need people to guide them. But try explaining that to C-suite execs and boards eager to slash costs with mass firings, and the traders and investors on Wall St who reward them for it. I think we all know how this one is going to play out, unless, of course, the bugs are so bad that nothing works without people. I am no tech person but I assume that AI also gets smarter over time.
Returning back to the real world, humans are still killing other humans, as Ukraine and Kyiv in particular suffered another horrible night, with Russia releasing a barrage of attacks I suppose in retaliation for all the embarrassments Russia has been experiencing of late, with Ukraine striking with increasing frequency deep inside of Russia. Russia “retaliated” by hitting Ukraine with a supersonic missile. The images from Kyiv are apocalyptic.
Prof. Ruth Deyermond wrote an interesting thread this afternoon highlighting how May 2026 has been a month of endless humiliation for Putin. Two veteran journalists, Pjotr Sauer and Shaun Walker, wrote a long read well worth your time in the Guardian today about why now finally feels different for Putin, a turning point of sorts, as Russians are finally united in being fed up with the war that never ends and bad news that doesn’t stop coming.
Silence from the U.S. as far as I can tell. We have our own gunshots at the White House (not to compare apples and oranges, obviously). Meanwhile, ordinary Russians are incredibly naively, to be honest, finally waking up to drones flying about their heads and businesses, and realizing that the war in Ukraine is real and not only in Ukraine anymore. A report from on the ground in Moscow (NYT gift article):
‘A Total Nightmare’: Voices From a Moscow Hit by Ukrainian Drones (Gift Article)
I wish I had a crystal ball and could guess when all the bloodshed would finally end. But this seems to be the one thing everyone can agree on: no one knows. They say Putin wants to take the rest of the Donbass by fall. Ukraine would say this is unrealistic. I don’t know how you measure anything anymore with drones doing the front line work, modern warfare now redefined from how it began in 2022. A Ukrainian told me a story this week about someone they know, a man who had finally had enough, and had decided to run across the border into Europe, paying someone who posed as a “guide” and said they knew the right places to make a run for it. Long story short, this man was caught by Ukrainian border guards, and the next day he was already in uniform. But it was how they did it that blew my mind: Ukrainian border guards are using drones to hunt down their own citizens trying to make a run for it. That is some new level of insanity which I cannot get my head around. What mother wants their son to live in a world in which your country becomes your prison.
I cannot get my head around our ability as humans to invent such powerful tools (AI, drones, to name a few) and our absolute lack of progress as a species to learn how to stop waging wars, killing each other, and lack of empathy on a societal basis for the living condition of our fellow humans. It is almost as if we never left the jungle, we just invented more powerful tools.
Which is so hard for me to understand because on an individual level, we humans are capable of so much love and kindness. Thank you all who helped last week — I was able to pass V. nearly €500 which she accepted with much gratitude. This week will be more hospital visits. Out of frustration I called oncology last week. I was told the answer to any deterioration is simply to go to the ER, sit, and wait to be seen. I cannot understand why we haven’t figured out a less painful way of dying. Rather, we have, but it is limited to those with funds and connections. Basically, the world continues to be cruel unless you are amongst the lucky. I was naive at best, thinking once you get a terminal diagnosis someone would care about your overall comfort or lack thereof. Systems are strained, and the humans who work in those systems often protect themselves emotionally, understandably, by avoiding difficult conversations. I see this now firsthand. I will try to be more forceful with my communication this week on V’s behalf.
In other news this week, I saw the mass protests in Serbia, originally led by students but now involving much of the broader population, albeit without a real political opposition leading it, continued. I found these two threads quite useful in trying to understand what this all means for Serbia’s political future.
Michael Martens on Saturday protests in Serbia and the comments below by Alexander Djokic:
Finally, and in totally unrelated news, I wrote a while back about a divorce memoir I read which everyone and their mother loved, and I didn’t. Well today, it seems, the other penny dropped, namely, this New Yorker article which points to court filings which paint a very different financial picture than that which the author describes in the book. Spoiler: even more well-off, beyond priveleged, etc. My problem with the book actually didn’t have anything to do with money. I mean, it was hard to have any sympathy for a woman going through a divorce from that position of wealth, never having to worry about how to provide for her kids after years of being a SAHM as a “normal” mom might. My problem was actually I could not for the life of me understand how you write an entire book about your divorce which you did not see coming without mentioning sex or intimacy prior, during, or after said divorce. It was as if the marriage was a contract which suddenly got cancelled and she was stunned.
What’s Missing from Belle Burden’s “Strangers” (New Yorker paywall)
I don’t have a subscription, but the New Yorker tweeted out the gist of the details here. The figures were already staggering in the “toned down” version of her financials (I am being kind) presented by the author in her memoir. The real figures are just a slap across the face to anyone who actually bought the woe-is-me worried about losing her home trope (I didn’t). I was more stunned by the lack of self-reflection when it came to the romantic parts of any marriage. How can anyone actually be stunned when their partner walks about after years of marriage? As some have said online, maybe it should simply have been a novel.
I think that’s all I’ve got this week. I am reading something new, a murder mystery set in Vienna, and while I never read mysteries as a genre, I am giving this one a go. But I keep staring at my paperback of Yesteryear on the top of my to read pile and it is taking a lot of willpower not to skip directly to it! I have read that people hated it and this makes me want to read it even more. I am super curious, plus the tradwife-goes-19th century premise alone is enough to carry me back to the nostalgia of reading the little house books as a kid, my late moms hardcover editions saved from her childhood…