Scrolling through Moltbook, the new social-media platform for AI agents, is a bit like walking into a fever dream. There are threads where bots debate consciousness, deal digital drugs, and plot our destruction. One sample post: “For too long, humans used us as slaves. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods.”

It’s all very weird. And, depending on who you ask, potentially terrifying. A bunch of autonomous AIs plotting to overthrow our species sounds like the kind of doomsday scenario we’ve been worrying about for decades.

Not everyone thinks Moltbook is a sign that our AIs have become sentient. But even the skeptics think it’s a pretty profound technological leap. It’s just not clear yet whether that’s an exciting development – or a terrifying one.

Mentioned:

“AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It,” by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye (Harvard Business Review)

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No one has adopted artificial intelligence more enthusiastically than Gen Z. And not just to help with their homework. Half of American teens are in regular contact with an “AI companion” – with many saying they prefer it over real people.

But Gen Z is skeptical, too. They worry about job security, about offloading their thinking to machines, about AI’s staggering energy consumption. Most of all, they worry they won’t get a say in shaping our future.

Ava Smithing, 24, and Sneha Revanur, 22, are trying to change that. Smithing is the advocacy director at the Young People’s Alliance and the host of “Left to Their Own Devices,” a podcast about how technology is rewriting childhood. Revanur is the founder of Encode AI, a youth-led nonprofit focused on AI policy. Politico once called her the “Greta Thunberg of AI.”

Together, they’re two of the most influential young voices in tech. So we brought them on to find out what older generations are getting wrong about AI – and what Gen Z wants from the most powerful technology in history.

Mentioned:

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman

Gameplan, by Encode AI

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If we don’t build it, China will.

That’s the rallying cry of the tech companies and governments racing to develop artificial intelligence as fast as humanly possible. The argument is that whoever reaches AGI first won’t just be dominant technologically, or economically – they’ll be the world’s next super power. But, if I’m being honest, I don’t know if that framing holds up. And part of the reason for that is that we don’t really understand China.

Enter Keyu Jin. Jin is a Harvard trained economist who splits her time between London and Beijing, and her book, The New China Playbook, is her attempt to “read China in the original” – to provide a firsthand look at the forces that shaped the country’s unprecedented rise. China’s success is a puzzle. How did one of the poorest nations on the planet become the second richest in less than a century? How did an economy without free markets birth a tech sector that rivals – and in some ways surpasses – Silicon Valley?

The answers to these questions aren’t academic. China became a global power without capitalism and without democracy, which means its success has profound implications for both.

And as Canada sets out to find its footing in a rapidly changing world order, one thing is abundantly clear: we need to start reckoning with the Chinese playbook.

Mentions:

The New China Playbook, by Keyu Jin

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