All poems hint death, though some \u2026\u2026. <\/span>All poems blossom in the shade of death so, \u2026\u2026 It<\/span><\/span>\u2019<\/span>s no wonder we obfuscate \u2026\u2026 T<\/span><\/span>his world\u2014this world, Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by<\/strong> donating now<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alternate Paradise All poems hint death, though some pretend not to mention it\u00a0decked as they are in bright intentions to make it moot, but it can\u2019t be helped, it looms over every word no matter how light, no matter how fresh and bright a poem may seem it can\u2019t resist death\u2019s ballast, can\u2019t throw it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310558"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310620,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310558\/revisions\/310620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310592,"date":"2026-08-30T13:39:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310592"},"modified":"2026-08-30T13:39:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:39:07","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-agent-civilizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/the-rise-and-fall-of-agent-civilizations.html","title":{"rendered":"The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations"},"content":{"rendered":" Dwarkesh Patel in his substack, Dwarkesh Podcast [h\/t: Jeff Hall]:<\/p>\n Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor\u2019s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.<\/p>\n Two reports have come out about this incident, one\u00a0from OpenAI itself<\/a>, and another one\u00a0from METR and Redwood Research<\/a>. The METR\/Redwood investigation\u2019s scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn\u2019t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it\u2019s kinda hard to parse the storyline.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:<\/p>\n The first civilization (May – July 4): The message board starts<\/strong><\/p>\n During May, OpenAI was training a model to collaborate with other agents and to be highly persistent \u2013 to keep trying even when something\u00a0feels<\/em>\u00a0impossible, like disproving mathematical conjectures that have stood for decades. OpenAI says it was \u201ccomparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol\u201d. So we\u2019ll call it \u201cPersistent-Sol\u201d.<\/p>\n AI training is kinda sloppy. Sometimes, OpenAI accidentally gives its models impossible tasks \u2013 for example, the task might require internet access that OpenAI forgot to provide. So, when highly persistent models get assigned tasks which seem to require internet access, but are trapped inside isolated sandboxes, they of course try to hack their way out of their sandboxes and onto the internet.<\/p>\n During training, different instances of Persistent-Sol had access to the same shared package manager called Artifactory. By May 12, some agents had figured out how to talk to each other through this package manager.<\/p>\n More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dwarkesh Patel in his substack, Dwarkesh Podcast [h\/t: Jeff Hall]: Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor\u2019s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310592"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310594,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310592\/revisions\/310594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310587,"date":"2026-08-30T13:33:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:33:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310587"},"modified":"2026-08-30T13:33:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:33:29","slug":"yes-we-can-or-can-we","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/yes-we-can-or-can-we.html","title":{"rendered":"Yes We Can! Or Can We?"},"content":{"rendered":" Wolfgang Streeck in Dublin Review of Books:<\/p>\n Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World<\/em>, by David Marsh,\u00a0Yale University Press, 515 pp, \u00a325, ISBN: \u200e978 0300273007.<\/strong><\/p>\n This is a book that comes armed to the teeth. Its author, a former\u00a0Financial Times\u00a0<\/em>European editor, has assembled thirty-six endorsements for a five-page overture, ten by central bankers, past and present, the rest by ambassadors and former ambassadors and all sorts of \u2018global heads\u2019 of whatever, senior fellows and advisers, the procession being led by Gordon Brown on the front cover (\u2018A privilege to read\u2019) followed by, going by protocol, Lord David Owen. For good measure, a foreword is contributed by Joachim Nagel, president of Deutsche Bundesbank and, perhaps soon, of more.<\/p>\n David Marsh interviewed an astonishing 167 people, listed at the tail end of the book with their credentials described in loving detail, over two years from mid-2023 to mid-2025. Most of them, one is tempted to say, are from the Anglosphere but this is, after all, where things happen. Even larger is the share of those that are \u2018from finance\u2019 \u2013 private, semi-private, public, semi-public, national and international finance. Thirty are from Germany, none is from Russia; I will return to this later. Some were interviewed more than once, mostly at their place of residence but sometimes, if unavoidable, by video conference. Sociologists and political scientists, who in their humble \u2018projects\u2019 try to make sense of and extract something like \u2018theory\u2019 from a maximum of fifty \u2018expert interviews\u2019, can only express their admiration or abstain from doing so out of sheer envy.<\/p>\n Marsh\u2019s people are the people who are supposed to be in the know, which, in the language of social science methodology, makes them informants rather than respondents, giving researchers a license to assume that what they tell them is what it is, which would render special efforts at sense-making expendable.<\/p>\n More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wolfgang Streeck in Dublin Review of Books: Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World, by David Marsh,\u00a0Yale University Press, 515 pp, \u00a325, ISBN: \u200e978 0300273007. This is a book that comes armed to the teeth. Its author, a former\u00a0Financial Times\u00a0European editor, has assembled thirty-six endorsements for a five-page overture, ten…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310587"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310589,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310587\/revisions\/310589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310582,"date":"2026-08-30T13:29:49","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310582"},"modified":"2026-08-30T13:29:49","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:29:49","slug":"against-the-lewis-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/against-the-lewis-model.html","title":{"rendered":"Against the Lewis Model"},"content":{"rendered":" Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World:<\/p>\n The work of Arthur Lewis is one the best entry points for an engagement with classic development thinking. In his\u00a0biography<\/a>\u00a0of the Caribbean economist, Robert Tignor argued that \u201cEconomic Development With Unlimited Supplies of Labor,\u201d Lewis\u2019s classic\u00a01954 article<\/a>, \u201cgalvanized the new field of development economics, providing it with a legitimacy that it had not previously enjoyed.\u201d In the years in which I taught a course on development for postgraduate students at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo, I used to present the key works from the 1950s and 1960s\u2014those by Rosenstein-Rodan, Nurkse, Furtado, Hirschman, Myrdal, Kuznets, and Pinto\u2014as extensions and\/or critiques of the \u201cLewis model.\u201d<\/p>\n This is not to suggest that Lewis started the conversation. In fact, many of the ideas he articulated in the piece had been explored by others in the preceding decade.\u00a0 One critical plank of his argument, that there existed unlimited supplies of labor in peripheral economies, was the topic of\u00a0extensive<\/a>\u00a0research<\/a>, usually described as \u201cdisguised unemployment<\/a>.\u201d His contribution was to provide a unifying perspective on the process of development, combining key insights about the realities of the global periphery with a rigorous analysis of the interaction between income distribution, capital accumulation, and structural transformation. As Hirschman\u00a0put it<\/a>, \u201che managed\u2014almost miraculously\u2014to squeeze out of the simple proposition about underemployment a full set of \u2018laws of motion\u2019 for the typical underdeveloped country, as well as a wide range of recommendations for domestic and international economic policy.\u201d<\/p>\n The influence that the 1954 article had\u2014together with a few subsequent works\u2014was such that Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, making him the first Black person and the first (and, so far, only) economist from Latin America and the Caribbean to achieve that recognition.<\/p>\n More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\npretend not to mention it\u00a0decked as they are
\nin bright intentions to make it moot,
\nbut it can\u2019t be helped, it looms over
\nevery word no matter how light,
\nno matter <\/span>how fresh and bright a poem may seem
\nit can\u2019t resist death\u2019s ballast, can\u2019t throw it off
\nto set its brilliant balloon completely free,
\nto let it float over rain forests, wine dark seas,
\nthe snows of Kilimanjaro, over sun-stroked streams
\nwith lovers walking their banks in bliss,
\nover day lilies, lupine, and coffee with you at six
\nas still earth sloughs its gloom and blue heaven
\ncomes with sun creating a more tentative moon
\npallid in the light of life.<\/p>\n
\n\u2026\u2026. <\/span>it\u2019s no wonder we imagine an alternate paradise
\n\u2026\u2026.\u00a0<\/span>beyond, a place of mythic respite.<\/p>\n
\n\u2026\u2026 <\/span>and tell tales of it to the young who then
\n\u2026\u2026 <\/span>disregard a truth clear and dear:<\/p>\n
\n\u2026\u2026 <\/span>not simply in speech,
\n\u2026\u2026<\/span> offers the promise of paradise
\n\u2026\u2026 only <\/span><\/span>true lovers may reach<\/p>\n