My name is Kevin Roose, and I’m a technology columnist for The New York Times and a co-host of the podcast “Hard Fork.”
I’m writing “The AGI Chronicles”: a book on the inside story of the race to build superhuman AI. I believe that we are living through one of the most consequential technological projects in history. Every week, I hear stories about crazy technical breakthroughs and world-changing policy debates. Yet in an industry run on auto-deleting Signal chats, house parties, and Twitter anons, nobody seems to be writing anything down.
As a journalist, this stresses me out. Imagine if we had no contemporaneous records of the Apollo program, or the Manhattan Project. Think of how impoverished our collective understanding would be if, when we’re living in the fully-automated post-AGI utopia, no record of how it happened, when and how the key decisions were made, or who saw it coming first.
That’s why I’m writing this book, alongside researcher and collaborator
. And this newsletter is where we’ll share research and reporting tidbits along the way, plus early access to pre-orders and events when the time comes.Also, if you’re an AI researcher/policymaker/activist who wants to share your story, or have any personal artifacts collected from the race to AGI — photos, Slack threads, custom paperclips — please get in contact by email. (My default terms for this book are that all conversations are on background and unattributed.)
We’re working in public as much as possible, and I hope you’ll join me.
