It’s live! If you want to check out my cosy, competitive mystery game based on the lives of Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and the X-Files, it’s in this issue of Sprigs & Kindling!

BABES, WAKE UP! THIRTEEN STANDALONE CARVED FROM BRINDLEWOOD GAMES JUST DROPPED

Happy Friday! I’m heading out to the Gauntlet Writing Retreat tomorrow, so it’s lots of packing today.

I haven’t even read this and I already know how valuable it is. CfB MotW is the most slam-dunk idea ever. Waiting patiently for the call to write 3E.

I love Slow Horses so much. Is it weird I consider it a comfort watch?

Again, you would not give someone connected to the military-industrial complex a “surviving under capitalism” pass.

The easy answer (and likely the correct one, but go with me here) is people have to survive and therefore shouldn’t be judged for the job they need to put food on the table. But that is implicitly minimizing the dangers posed by AI, and therefore unsatisfying as a rationale.

Again, I’m not trying to be controversial here. I think this is something we have to figure out.

Or do you broaden the circle and say it also includes people who work for companies building the infrastructure, like a contractor working on a data center, say, or someone who works at a chip manufacturer?

And so are only the folks who work at Anthropic, et al, open to criticism here?

Is it a question of how directly connected an organization is to AI? If I knew someone worked at Lockheed Martin, I would (fairly, I think) be able to call that person an enabler of war crimes because Lockheed makes weapons.

And to the extent we give that a pass, where’s the line? We used to insist people who worked at Meta quit their jobs rather than be complicit in the election-rigging they were doing by working there. Is AI different than that?

Right, but it would also be pretty rich if you found out someone hard-charging against AI on social media also worked at, say, Meta, right? Like, where’s the line?

A thing I wonder about (genuinely—I’m not trying to be controversial): are you complicit if you work at an organization that is all-in on AI, even if you yourself are personally against it?

Remember Elsagate? I wonder if those kids, who would all be around 12-15 by now, are totally fucked up.