Is 2026 the year Embodied Intelligence goes viral? I don't know, but I will be tracking it for sure. Also: this is the last #WeeklyPlanet of the year, and likely the last one for a while since I need to recover from all this daily/weekly posting.
Today’s #WeeklyPlanet is on the Second China Shock - China’s increasing dominance of renewable energy, batteries, EVs etc.
With AI, the financial and technical bubbles are easy to see: hyperscaler capex + the faith that more compute = AGI. The cultural bubble is subtler: it's the sense that AI is about to rewire our shared life - how we imagine, create, argue, govern, and even who "we" includes. #WeeklyPlanet
AI has captured our imagination. Skeptics counter that expectations outrun evidence. Neither fully explains why the hyperscalers are pouring extraordinary sums into data centers. To see the pattern clearly, it helps to place AGI inside the longer arc of cognitive capitalism. #WeeklyPlanet
AI isn't emerging into an empty field; it's arriving at the end of a long arc of economic transformation - the era of cognitive capitalism, where value comes from the organization of knowledge, communication, and attention rather than the fabrication of physical goods. More in today's #WeeklyPlanet
When Sam Altman admits we're in an AI bubble while seeking a trillion dollars for data centers & Geoff Hinton meets the Pope to discuss whether AI threatens human dignity, we've wandered far from normal market speculation. There are at least three potential AI bubbles. More in today's #WeeklyPlanet
I am back to metabolic sovereignty in the #WeeklyPlanet after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty. TLDR; the Anthropocene is:
- An exercise in metabolic sovereignty for all humans
- Human-wide metabolic sovereignty has unfortunately justified an sharply unequal metabolic pyramid.
Today's #WeeklyPlanet sums up my emerging understanding of compute sovereignty, i.e., a nation’s ability to maintain autonomous control over the computing infrastructure – data centers, cloud platforms, and semiconductor chips – that underpins modern AI.
If sovereignty today is about governing the flows of food, water, energy, information, then power is migrating from palaces and parliaments into pipes and datacenters. Energy is the tempo-maker & energy sovereignty is about who controls life under modern conditions, and on what terms. #WeeklyPlanet
Metabolic sovereignty is the power to organize and regulate the flows of energy and information that make life possible. It fuses two forms of control and autonomy - energy sovereignty and compute sovereignty - into a single architecture of power.
More in today's #WeeklyPlanet.
In 2025, a handful of technology companies are engaged in what may be the most ambitious infrastructure buildout in human history. The hyperscalers are investing approximately $400 billion this year in data center infrastructure to power artificial intelligence.
More in today's #WeeklyPlanet
The Electrostate is ascendant but its precursor isn’t going away anytime soon. I’ve been reading and writing about the petrostate for the past week, and I want to bring those pieces together into one story. #Petrostate #WeeklyPlanet
#WeeklyPlanet @theweeklyplanet.bsky.social
BREAKING NEWS
As Americans flock to Rednote. The Rock gets excited thinking Red Notice is getting an extra boost in popularity.
#rednote #Rock #Netflix #tiktok #weeklyplanet #supremecourt
Check In: Nosferatu (2024)
www.imdb.com/title/tt5040... #weeklyplanet @theweeklyplanet.bsky.social #nastyfartfoot
To all the #GreatMates that recently followed me, be sure to check out my starter pack and feed for our favorite podcast @theweeklyplanet.bsky.social !!
#weeklyplanet
It's the spookiest time of the year, and I'm not just talking about tax time #weeklyplanet
