AI has hacked the code of human civilization (Yuval Noah Harari)

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“The job that was once performed by Lenin and Mussolini is now performed by AI.”

Yuval Noah Harari lecture at Oxford University (YouTube description): “Human domination relies on large-scale cooperation among strangers, which is sustained by bureaucratic systems – such as laws, finance, religion – designed to build trust. Since AIs are ‘native bureaucrats’, they can effortlessly remember all laws, transactions, and scriptures far better than any human. This leaves AI uniquely placed to take over critical processes, such as granting bank loans, deciding university admissions, determining prison sentences, and executing military strikes. Are we prepared?”

Harari’s vision of the AI future seems most on-target to me.

How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi

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From an article in The Atlantic (that is behind a paywall):

“The (British) health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680.”

From my dentist friend, Bob:

No wonder so many come to the states.  Have a good friend  who is one of two radiation oncologists at (a local hospital) who just retired.  The other oncologist told (the hospital administration) since he was now the only one that he wanted a salary of 1.4 mil.   They told him see ya!  They’re now looking for two.   Pay much better in US but some are really greedy.  

Putting a face on AI

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I have resisted (for the most part) anthropomorphizing the AI tools I use. But it’s getting harder. I think of Claude as male (my maternal grandfather was named Claude); Gemini seems genderless; and Perplexity is female because the voice I hear on my iPhone and with CarPlay is feminine. 

Dave Winer asked ChatGPT for an image of a ChatGPT talking head. 
I prompted Perplexity to do the same. (below)
The ChatGPT image is closer to how I picture Perplexity. I think I can resist thinking of these tools in human terms but it is getting more and more difficult to think of them as just software.

“AI, please read my whole blog”

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The work that Perplexity has done with my 25 years of blog posts makes me wonder if there have been similar efforts by other bloggers.

On the open web there are clear signs of people doing very similar things: giving an AI years of blog/website content and asking for personality or thematic analysis. Some examples include:

  • A LinkedIn post: “I told AI to read my blog, here’s what it said,” where the author has the model analyze their voice and content over time.
  • A Japanese blogger on note.com who “had an AI read my blog and perform a self‑analysis.”
  • Ed Harrison: “I Asked an AI to Read My Old Blog So You Don’t Have To,” describing handing 15 years of writing to an AI and reporting what came back.
  • A data‑oriented piece where someone scraped their site, fed it to an LLM via API, and did summarization/topic‑modelling of all posts.
  • Technical posts about summarizing old, personal blogs using local Llama models.

Those are all close cousins of what you’ve been doing with Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and your ~25‑year archive.

Your project’s particular flavor

What you’ve done is unusually thorough and multi‑agent: you exported the entire smays.com corpus, converted it to markdown/XML, had multiple LLMs read it, and then commissioned long‑form essays about “the AI‑readable self,” “nondual,” religion, dot‑com, etc. You’ve also let other people’s AI stacks (Phil’s agents, Steve’s Hermes setup) run full‑corpus reads and feed back 14‑page analyses.

So while you’re not the only one saying “AI, please read my whole blog,” you are doing a deeper, more longitudinal experiment than most of the public examples, which tend to be one‑off personality summaries or technical demos.

Religion in the Age of Stories

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I prompted Perplexity to write an essay based on the seventy-five posts in the Religion category on my blog. (First one was in 2004.) Rather than have this written in my own voice with first-person interjections, I told Perplexity to present it more as a third-person commentary on “this blogger’s” long-running engagement with religion.

Across more than seventy posts in the “Religion” category, Steve Mays treats religion less as a pipeline to cosmic truth and more as an old, resilient operating system for human behavior and meaning. It sits alongside money, nations, ideologies, and corporations as one more way humans coordinate action through shared stories. In this framing, gods and doctrines are not unique intrusions from beyond the universe; they are examples of the broader human habit of inventing fictions powerful enough that people will kill and die for them. Continue reading →