Wisereads Vol. 127 — Oliver Burkeman's secret to happiness, Cory Doctorow on how the AI bubble will burst, and more

Last week, we shared Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, a recent addition to Standard Ebooks' catalog. This week, we’re sharing a collection of Robert Louis Stevenson's travelogues, documenting the many journeys of his own life.

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Science fiction author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow dissects AI’s bubble economics and labor fallout, discussing the role of creative workers and what will be left behind when this bubble pops. "AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

Psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander, author of the blog Astral Codex Ten, examines the legacy of comic writer Scott Adams and the mythos of the nerd psyche. "We’re all inmates in prisons of different names. Most of us accept it and get on with our lives. Adams couldn’t stop rattling the bars."

Oliver Burkeman, Guardian columnist and author of Four Thousand Weeks, makes the case for doing what enlivens you instead of pursuing growth through self-denial. "Life offers no prizes for being so good at deferring gratification that you accumulate a thousand uneaten marshmallows, then drop dead. At some point, you're going to have to eat a marshmallow."

Veritasium's Casper Mebius breaks down the physics behind ASML's incredible breakthrough in computer chip manufacturing and tours the machine that kept Moore's Law alive. "For 30 years, almost everyone thought that actually building this machine was impossible, and yet it exists."

Box cofounder and CEO Aaron Levie explains how AI agents amplify, rather than replace, core enterprise systems, arguing that "in a world of 100X more AI agents than people in an enterprise, the value of the systems of record and tools agents will use will go up, not down."

Boston University law professors Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey warn that AI imperils core civic institutions. "Institutions are society's machinery for coordinating complex, enduring,  adaptable, and beneficial human activity with specific purposes. ... Unfortunately, the design and function of AI systems undermine most—if not  all—of these institutional dynamics."

Before he whisked readers away to Treasure Island or explored the psyches of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson's first stories charted the course of his own travels: in a canoe, on foot, and in crowded emigrant ships.

This collection gathers his pioneering travelogues, from the lazy canals of Belgium and France in An Inland Voyage to the rugged Cévennes with a stubborn donkey, and onward across the Atlantic and over the American plains to California. Along the way he sketches innkeepers and gypsies, sailors and emigrants, old-world capitals and new Pacific towns, capturing a Europe on the cusp of modernity and a young America in motion, and always returning to the joys, hardships, and transformative magic of travel.

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this featherbed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for."

This edition of Stevenson's Travel Essays is available through Standard Ebooks. Explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Longtime photographer and writer Nadia Meli shares lyrical essays on creativity, identity, and anti-hustle living. From Your life is not a ladder: "Life is horizontal, unfolding, sprawling, vast. We don’t build life like a skyscraper. We cultivate life like a garden. Life is a space to plant. To tend. To root. To scatter seeds of experience, relationships, creativity, discovery, rest, play, effort."