1. OpenAI’s Atlas Wants to Be the Web’s Tour Guide. I’m Not Convinced It Needs One
In this hands-on critique, WIRED’s Reece Rogers navigates OpenAI’s new Atlas browser, probing how the Ask ChatGPT sidebar and “agent mode” reframe browsing as an AI-centric experience—and why wrapping every click in chatbot chrome often distracts more than it delivers.
“After a few days of testing OpenAI’s Ask ChatGPT feature in the Atlas Browser, I’m convinced that I want to surf the web alone. Sans sidebar. In peace.” (wired.com)
2. Generative agents will change our society in weird, wonderful and worrying ways. Can philosophy help us get a grip on them?
Philosopher Seth Lazar offers a 4,800-word meditation on the coming wave of AI agents—arguing that beyond familiar critiques of extraction and apocalyptic speculations, we must attend to how these systems will reshape norms, ethics, and our sense of agency in the next decade.
“While some of the more outlandish scenarios for catastrophic AI risk are hard to credit… next-generation models may enable the design of cyber attackers that are autonomous, highly functionally intelligent, and as a result more dangerous to our digital infrastructure than any predecessor.” (aeon.co)
3. From elevators to iPhones, the rise of pushbuttons has provoked a century of worries about losing the human touch
Rachel Plotnick traces the moral panics, nostalgic yearnings, and power struggles woven into the simple act of button-pushing—from 19th-century hotel call buttons to today’s touchscreen UIs—revealing how this deceptively trivial interface element carries rich cultural freight.
“Buttons represented entitlement and laziness, and button-pushing signified a hierarchical and unequal management style… critics imagined that the only way out for their main character (and for society more broadly) was to return to a world devoid of buttons.” (aeon.co)
4. Can AI design a typeface?
In Transform’s October issue, editor Jack Cousins sits down with Monotype’s Charles Nix to unpack the hype around AI-generated lettering, the technical and legal pitfalls of machine-made type, and why the core designer superpowers—crafting incisive prompts and curating output—remain unmistakably human.
“A lot of what we’re seeing in AI typography right now is, technically, lettering… strictly speaking, it’s creating static presentations of letters. We could… turn it into a font, but that’s still a really niche area.” (transformmagazine.net)
5. Apple Pioneer Bill Atkinson Was a Secret Evangelist of the ‘God Molecule’
Mattha Busby’s WIRED feature unveils how Bill Atkinson—the visionary behind HyperCard—spent his final years engineering safer, lower-dose 5-MeO-DMT vape pens and guiding a clandestine community through ego-dissolving journeys, blending his hacker’s rigor with a quest for transcendence.
“The same creative mind who affected personal computers so profoundly continued to influence human evolution through his efforts to make the miracle of ‘bufo’ safer and more manageable.” (wired.com)