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This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .

Some readers are undoubtedly upset that I have not devoted more space to the wonders of machine learning—how amazing LLMs are at code generation, how incredible it is that Suno can turn hummed melodies into polished songs. But this is not an article about how fast or convenient it is to drive a car. We all know cars are fast. I am trying to ask what will happen to the shape of cities .

The personal automobile reshaped streets , all but extinguished urban horses and their waste , supplanted local transit and interurban railways, germinated new building typologies , decentralized cities , created exurban sprawl , reduced incidental social contact , gave rise to the Interstate Highway System ( bulldozing Black communities in the process), gave everyone lead poisoning , and became a leading cause of death among young people. Many parts of the US are highly car-dependent , even though a third of us don’t drive . As a driver, cyclist, transit rider, and pedestrian, I think about this legacy every day: how so much of our lives are shaped by the technology of personal automobiles, and the specific way the US uses them.

I want you to think about “AI” in this sense.

Some of our possible futures are grim, but manageable. Others are downright terrifying, in which large numbers of people lose their homes, health, or lives. I don’t have a strong sense of what will happen, but the space of possible futures feels much broader in 2026 than it did in 2022, and most of those futures feel bad.

Much of the bullshit future is already here, and I am profoundly tired of it. There is slop in my search results, at the gym, at the doctor’s office. Customer service, contractors, and engineers use LLMs to blindly lie to me. The electric company has hiked our rates and says data centers are to blame. LLM scrapers take down the web sites I run and make it harder to access the services I rely on. I watch synthetic videos of suffering animals and stare at generated web pages which lie about police brutality. There is LLM spam in my inbox and synthetic CSAM on my moderation dashboard. I watch people outsource their work, food, travel, art, even relationships to ChatGPT. I read chatbots lining the delusional warrens of mental health crises.