Episode 54 Bonus (Oct 2026): From the Care of Bodies to the Care of Minds; Library Journal, October 27, 2026

 Dave Lankes, Library Journal ; Episode 54 Bonus (Oct 2026): From the Care of Bodies to the Care of Minds

"This special bonus episode is from a keynote address delivered at the opening of the new ESSECI Public Library in Cuneo, Italy, at the end of September 2026. “From the Care of Bodies to the Care of Minds” explores what libraries can and must become in an age of generative AI, declining trust, and profound changes in how people create knowledge. Dave argues that libraries offer something machines cannot: accountable human relationships grounded in community. He calls on libraries to move beyond repositories of information and become platforms for conversation, cultural heritage, creativity, and collective action."

Gulliver fans celebrate three centuries of Jonathan Swift’s classic satire; The Guardian, October 28, 2026

 Rory Carroll, The Guardian; Gulliver fans celebrate three centuries of Jonathan Swift’s classic satire

"In March 1726, an Irish clergyman visited London and arranged for a courier to deliver a manuscript to a publisher under cover of night. The dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin knew his novel would cause trouble and wanted to publish it anonymously.

His name was Jonathan Swift and the story was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. The satirical work was published that October and is better known 300 years on as Gulliver’s Travels.

An immediate sensation, it skewered Georgian pretensions and entered popular culture through translations, children’s versions, comics and films. The anniversary is now being celebrated at Swift’s alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, and at events around Ireland.

Exhibitions, festivals, seminars, art competitions and workshops are exploring the origins of Swift’s masterpiece, its retelling through a feminist lens, and its prophetic depiction of a society in thrall to a form of artificial intelligence...

Gulliver’s experiences in Laputa, a floating island dedicated to arts and science, resonated with our era’s anxieties about technology, said Douglas. Its inhabitants seek to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and obtain knowledge via an “engine” of wires, handles and paper that can produce tracts on philosophy, poetry and mathematics “without the least assistance from genius or study”."

The Blog Post That Set the AI World on Fire; The Atlantic, October 16, 2026

 Matteo Wong, The Atlantic; The Blog Post That Set the AI World on Fire

"For the past 24 hours, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with a 26,000-word blog post by the AI researcher Nick Cammarata. The document has been called the “the most important essay,” “the most important result,” and “the single best piece of news” of the year, or in the history of AI research—or, perhaps, ever. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded it. Cammarata makes a series of bold, almost astonishing claims about the nature of AI that, if true, would upend some of his industry’s basic assumptions about the very thing it is building. And after months of AI-hacking sprees and mounting public backlash against the industry, many people see Cammarata as offering a glimmer of hope when it comes to not just understanding but also controlling the technology being unleashed on the world.

Boiled down, Cammarata’s main contention is that generative-AI models are not actually black boxes, contrary to the common perception that these systems are so big and labyrinthine as to be nearly impenetrable. In fact, Cammarata argues, there is a relatively clear path toward understanding them. If that’s the case, the material significance could be tremendous: It would provide a way to map AI models’ inner workings and, in turn, perhaps prevent them from wreaking all sorts of harm—autonomously hacking companies and sovereign nations, encouraging users’ delusions, appearing to deceive AI researchers themselves. There is an entire field of research, called “mechanistic interpretability,” devoted to the study of just this."

Q&A: The “collision” between AI, your brain, and society; MIT News, October 15, 2026

  Peter Dizikes, MIT News; Q&A: The “collision” between AI, your brain, and society

In a new book, Professor Eric So explores how the technology affects our thinking skills.

"As artificial intelligence use becomes more widespread, scholars are working to understand its effects on the people who use it. MIT Professor Eric So offers one of the most complete syntheses yet, in his new book, “The Collision: What AI Does to Us,” published this month by W.W. Norton. Recognizing that AI offers opportunities to complete work faster, and in some cases has been turned into useful domain-specific tools, So nonetheless looks at the costs of relying on it too broadly. He contends that heavy use of AI can lead to a kind of cognitive atrophy, in which people fail to develop and retain essential thinking skills. In general, he says, evidence shows that our ability to learn gets dramatically better when we wrestle with material, work through initial failures, keep iterating, and in the process acquire better thinking skills while retaining more knowledge. 

These conclusions are drawn from recent research by So and others, in academia and industry, including analysis from AI firms themselves, such as an Anthropic study showing that about half of queries from college students were low-effort queries for simple answers. So also weaves personal reflections into his narrative — having long studied financial markets and behavior, he is familiar with analyzing how new tools and information affect our decisions. MIT News talked to So, who is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Global Economics and Behavioral Science in the MIT Sloan School of Management, about the book."

Character.ai Files For Bankruptcy—Disney Bids $20 Million After Copyright Dispute; Forbes, October 13, 2026

Siladitya Ray, Forbes; Character.ai Files For Bankruptcy—Disney Bids $20 Million After Copyright Dispute

"AI chatbot platform Character.ai, which faced lawsuits over teen suicides and copyright disputes, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday and announced it had received a $20 million opening offer to license some of its intellectual property from Disney—which previously accused the the AI company of unauthorized use of its copyrighted characters...

In a statement, Character.ai said it had voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to enable a sale of its assets."

Can Trade Secret Law Protect Indigenous Knowledge?; Law360, October 9, 2026

Ivan Moreno , Law360; Can Trade Secret Law Protect Indigenous Knowledge?

[Kip Currier: It's intriguing to see trade secret law (re)considered as a potential means for enabling indigenous communities to secure protection of their communal knowledge.

My Bloomsbury book Ethics, Information, and Technology (2025) has extensive separate chapters on Indigenous Knowledge and Intellectual Property, as well as AI.]

"As the U.S. and other countries struggle to agree on new international protections for Indigenous knowledge, trade secret law is drawing renewed attention as a possible solution for material that communities actually keep confidential."

Peter Thiel's new Antichrist warnings; Politico Decoded, October 8, 2026

 CALDER MCHUGH,  BRENDAN BORDELON,  CHRISTINE MUI and  SAM SUTTON , Politico Decoded; Peter Thiel's new Antichrist warnings

"Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is sharpening his warnings about the Antichrist — which he sees as a force that could harm technological development — according to exclusive recordings obtained by Calder. His new comments come as AI races ahead and public concern over its risks grow.

Thiel began a closed four-part lecture series in Nashville last week, returning to a theme he explored in San Francisco last year before taking similar talks to Paris and Rome. Nashville is emerging as a hub for the tech right.

Decoded obtained recordings of his first two Nashville lectures, delivered on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5, and compared them to exclusive transcripts of his San Francisco talks. The structure is largely unchanged, and Thiel invokes religion to argue that regulation of the AI industry is evil — a notion that has taken hold among key factions of Silicon Valley investors."

Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.; The New York Times, September 29, 2026

 Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times; Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.

"The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?"

Behind the Curtain: AI's existential legal crisis; Axios, October 2, 2026

 Jim VanderHei, Mike Allen, Axios; Behind the Curtain: AI's existential legal crisis

"No industry has ever documented its own foreseeable risks as loudly as AI.

Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading the public warnings of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: They told the world it was dangerous. They told the world it was moving too fast. Then they unleashed it and sold it to your kid.

No industry has ever taken so much copyrighted work and left behind so much proof.

Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading OpenAI's own files to a jury: They trained on a pirated library. They renamed it to something blander. Then they deleted it when the headlines got hot...

The big picture: The fights are no longer theoretical. They're underway, in discovery and headed toward juries. Early verdicts and settlements capture the risk for the biggest players.

1. 🤖 Chatbots are being treated as products, not speech. Unlike social media companies, they likely can't hide behind Section 230, which protects platforms from liability for what users post — not what the platform itself creates. 
2. 📖 Copyright is a massive problem. Anthropic already paid the biggest copyright settlement in history, $1.5 billion to authors and book publishers, and now music publishers and news media want a piece."

Swedish Company Uses A.I. Likeness of Greta Garbo in Ad; The New York Times, October 1, 2026

Isabella Kwai, The New York Times; Swedish Company Uses A.I. Likeness of Greta Garbo in Ad

"An ad for a Swedish manufacturing company released this week turned an A.I.-generated likeness of Ms. Garbo into a company spokeswoman."

LIBRARIANS on LIBRARIES; The New York Times, October 1, 2026

 Elisabeth Egan and John Maher,Photographs by Lyndon French, The New York Times; LIBRARIANS ON LIBRARIES

"This year, Americans are marking the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. The nation’s librarians are celebrating a milestone too: the 150th birthday of the modern American library.

A lot has changed since the American Library Association was established in 1876 — even just over the past decade. The library has gone from a building full of books to arguably the most versatile civic center in any community lucky enough to have one.

We spoke with dozens of librarians at the A.L.A. conference this summer in Chicago. They came from rural towns and major cities, elementary schools and universities, local branches and big government agencies.

These librarians want you to know that they don’t sit around reading all day. They want you to know about book bans and budget cuts, but also about career counseling and crafting groups and pop-up medical clinics.

They want you to worry, the way they worry, about artificial intelligence, looming legislation and harassment of their staff. But most of all, they want you to know what the library really is: a safe place for people to gather around books, ideas and one another.

Here’s what librarians had to say, in their own words."

Pope warns against 'losing humanity' to AI machines; BBC, September 24, 2026

Hugh Schofield, BBC; Pope warns against 'losing humanity' to AI machines

"Pope Leo XIV has issued a warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) at the start of his four-day visit to France.

The pontiff cautioned against "losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines" in wide-ranging remarks to Church and state officials at the Élysée Palace, following an hour of talks with President Emmanuel Macron.

Leo made a similar warning earlier this year when he spoke of the need for AI to be "disarmed" in the first major teaching document of his papacy.

In his May appeal, he mentioned the slave trade in relation to AI, suggesting that the world was in danger of normalising the exploitation of people once again."

Is A.I. Above the Law? Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own.; The New Yorker, September 21, 2026

Jill Lepore , The New Yorker; Is A.I. Above the Law? Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own.

As the Copyright Act turns 50, the Copyright Office looks back at how the law has evolved; Federal News Network, September 23, 2026

Terry Gerton, Federal News Network; As the Copyright Act turns 50, the Copyright Office looks back at how the law has evolved

"Terry Gerton So Miriam, 50 years is a big birthday for anybody, but always for a law. What are the big things that people should know about the copyright law itself?

Miriam Lord Well, and a little bit of background about how it came to be, with instrumental support from the Copyright Office, Congress passed the Act to modernize copyright law for a rapidly changing world. It was signed into law on October 19th, 1976, so we’re celebrating a little early. The principal provisions took effect in 1978. The Office implemented the act, administers the act which includes the registration and recordation systems, and worked with Congress on amendments over time. When it was passed, the act broke new ground by making the copyright system more accessible to creators and users of creative works. And it continues to provide a framework that promotes the office’s constitutional mission."

Trump reveals millions of dollars' worth of share deals in big tech and AI; BBC, September 23, 2026

 

Dearbail Jordanand

Francisco Velasquez

, BBC; Trump reveals millions of dollars' worth of share deals in big tech and AI

"US President Donald Trump has disclosed millions of dollars' worth of stock market trades made during July, including in firms from Elon Musk's SpaceX to tech and AI giants such as Microsoft.

According to official documents, between $6.5m (£4.8m) and $31m worth of stock in Microsoft was sold on behalf of Trump, while they show purchases of between $165,000 and $400,000.

Across more than 1,000 trades, shares were bought and sold in AI company Nvidia and software firm Palantir, a contractor with the US defence department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the filing shows."

Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, September 23, 2026

 

Ezra Klein

Produced by Rollin Hu

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far

"I think one of the fundamental questions this gets at is: What is intelligence? Before you can even think about what it means to have intelligent machines, what is intelligence to you?

Well, there’s a technical formulation of intelligence. First of all, when people talk about intelligence and thinking and all of these things, of course there’s no formal definition for most people. But in the field of computer science, there is a formal definition, and the formal definition is perception, which is perceiving the world and understanding it.

Two, which is reasoning — reasoning is the ability to decompose any scenario and anything that you see, any experience, into more elemental parts.

And then third is planning toward an objective. That fundamental formulation applies to agentic systems, it applies to robotic systems — applies to self-driving cars.

And so you could see the industry building it layer by layer by layer, step by step by step, to the point where we now have what we perceive as intelligence."

Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise; Axios, September 19, 2026

Sara Fischer, Kerry Flynn, Axios; Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise

"The Department of Justice's statement of interest supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in the New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit surprised critical agencies like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office, sources told Axios.

Why it matters: Statements of interest allow the government to declare an official position on a legal matter in private lawsuits. While not binding, they can hold significant weight and help persuade cases.

Zoom in: The Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft argues AI firms illegally stole their copyrighted works to train their large language models, and that AI-generated outputs unlawfully produced market substitutions.

• The DOJ's SOI argues copyrighted works to train models should be considered fair use because that practice is new and transformative, but also says outputs aren't necessarily covered by that same legal argument.
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• Unlike many SOIs, no career antitrust attorneys signed the filing alongside senior DOJ officials.
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Between the lines: Publishers have criticized the claims in the SOI, including the idea that enforcing copyright laws is too cumbersome and would threaten America's AI dominance over foreign rivals."