Most frightening and/or depressing story: Planetary boundaries – they are breached, beyond breached, and getting way too big for their breeches. But in all seriousness, this report does a nice job of collecting a lot of depressing scientific evidence in one relatively compact package. It is somewhat of a paradox that the fossil fuels and fertilizers our civilization depends on for food are also responsible for pushing our civilization past a lot of the safe boundaries. If the disruption in supply of those fuels and fertilizers doesn’t starve us to death in the short term (“the risks are skewed to the downside“, says IMF), we get to continue worrying about the planetary boundaries in the medium term. A major financial market correction if the investor class suddenly loses faith in AI is another worry in the short term, but also see below.

Most hopeful story: AI may be get us back to the level of productivity growth we enjoyed between roughly 1995 and the Global Financial Crisis. I didn’t realize the extent to which we have had not one but two lost decades in terms of productivity growth.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had fun re-reading some of the classic H.P. Lovecraft stories for the spooky season, along with a few by his contemporary pen pals Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. They’re creepy in a fun way, and often funny because it is obvious to the reader that the narrators blunder into obvious traps, over, and over, and over again. One can point out the inherently racist world view Lovecraft obviously had, while still enjoying the stories, which I believe were meant to be thoroughly entertaining and not to push any particular agenda.