Driverless mules

The Future Is Like Pie #60

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
August 06, 2026

I wasn’t feeling any poems this time around, so instead here’s a photo I took in Nahant, Massachusetts, where the seagulls are enormous and will engage in any and all forms of bullying for the mere chance to look at a french fry.

Beehiiv, the platform I use for this newsletter, sends me an email every month letting me know how many subscribers I’ve gained and how many I’ve lost. The numbers are always quite low in both cases—despite beehiiv’s assumptions, growth is not my goal!—but it’s always been a net positive. Four subscribers in, one out. Seven subscribers in, three out. Maybe the numbers in are a little higher if I circulated the subscription link that month.

The point here is the consistency, and the fact that, after my last post—and for the first time—I lost more subscribers than I gained. And, I think not coincidentally, that post had a lot of links to essays about AI.

I could be wrong! It could just be the natural ebb and flow of reading on the internet. Or maybe there was some other way in which I failed to optimize some aspect of this endeavor. But it wouldn’t surprise me if folks opened the email, saw those two damned capital letters, and not-today-sataned the entire deal.

We are all sick of it. I am sick of it. Believe me when I say I don’t go out looking for essays about AI, and that I would rather talk about literally anything else. But I’m also operating in an industry/society that has completely lost its mind. We no longer know how to talk about other things; there are no other things. I hate this timeline.

As Eric Bailey put it to me recently:

I put AI news in my newsletter because, well, it’s in the current zeitgeist and it is worth paying attention to the same way a dark cave with a lot of human bones scattered in the front is. It’s mysterious, dangerous, sometimes extremely interesting, but also it’s gonna fucking kill us.

As long as I’m working in tech, I’ll use this space to talk about working in tech. Right now, that means I read a lot about how we’re poisoning ourselves (hopefully balanced with a little levity). And more power to the folks who’d rather not hear it anymore! If you’ve found a place in this world free from AI discourse, save me a seat.

Like I was unfortunately saying

Notable bits from recent tech articles:

From “AI Economics for Dummies” by Andrew Singleton, in McSweeny’s:

Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit. Goldman Sachs builds an altar to Benjamin in their lobby and cuts out the heart of a junior analyst on it every Friday. They call it “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” The name isn’t catchy, but the event becomes a management favorite nonetheless.

From “The People Do Not Yearn for Automation” by Nilay Patel, in The Verge:

But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.

From “Forms don't love you back” by Rachel Coldicutt, in her newsletter Just Enough Internet (great name):

The formification of life helps me live two lives in the short term—which seems necessary to get things done and live from day-to-day—but it doesn't create a fairer society for working parents with desk jobs: it pushes care out of sight, allows work to take up more time, and increases the unseen mental load.

Lightning round

  • “When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it. […] The ending looks like this: one firm holding most of the surviving legacy American tableware names, a state monopoly case grinding through discovery, and the plant that made Pyrex for 132 years standing empty in western Pennsylvania.” [Worse on Purpose]

  • Brilliant: Husky Jackal Theater put on a stage play recreation of Terminator 2, with all the dialogue replaced by lines from Shakespeare plays [YouTube]

  • Also brilliant: I missed it in 2020, but apparently a bunch of celebrities stitched together a quarantine version of The Princess Bride for charity [YouTube]

  • An interactive map of the 2,115 data centers currently underway in America [PoweredByWho]

  • An informative and chilling and furious essay about women’s health, sexuality, and misogyny [Renee Stonebraker]

  • “The Dirt That Refused To Die” [Quanta Magazine]

  • “OverpAId is an Artificial Intelligence built from the ground up to do your CEO's entire job.” [overpaid.lol, via Eric Bailey]

  • Americans: Please call your Senators immediately and demand that they oppose KOSA—the misleadingly named Kids Online Safety Act will have horrific consequences for mass surveillance, free speech, free assembly, and what’s left of the open internet. [5 Calls]

August’s cause

I’m a regular supporter of World Central Kitchen, which does so much good all over the world. Just by donating to one organization, we can help out folks dealing with wildfires in America, the recent earthquake in Venezuela, and ongoing humanitarian crises in the DRC, Lebanon, and Gaza.

Buy my book

Someone recently asked me if Everyday Information Architecture was still in print! Oh, gosh—of course it is! Self-publishing is the real deal, and I keep a list of booksellers and distributors on my book site. Get it or gift it to your favorite designer, UX writer, content strategist, or product manager today!