In his sweeping 2025 year-in-review, the author Dan Wang makes an unsettling argument: The real danger of AI isn’t psychotic robots taking over the world, but how it’s compressing our sense of time to think in ever-shorter durations.
As Dan writes, in Silicon Valley today, conversations are increasingly collapsing into apocalyptic timelines. Leaders fixate on what to do over the next year, while often neglecting the harder work of extending timelines. Dan’s concern isn’t only that leaders think short-term, but that thinking around AI has become either utopian or apocalyptic, which makes long-term institution-building feel irrelevant.
In contrast, Dan argues China treats AI less as a civilizational endpoint and more as an input — something to be embedded into factories and industrial capacity over decades, rather than a single technology that determines history all at once.
“I am not a skeptic of AI,” Dan writes. “I am a skeptic only of the decisive strategic advantage, which treats awakening the superintelligence as the final goal. Rather than ‘winning the AI race,’ I prefer to say that the US and China need to ‘win the AI future.'”
Key quote: “I’m bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. As Sam Altman once said (and again this is fairly humorous): ‘AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.’ It’s a Pascal’s Wager, in which we’re sure that the values are infinite, but we don’t know in which direction. It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything. The big political and technological questions we need to discuss are only those that matter to the speed of AI development. Furthermore, we must sprint towards a post-superintelligence world even though we have no real idea what it will bring.”
Why everyone seems to be gambling now
A recent essay circulating on Twitter has a provocative premise: The reason why people are gambling more than ever — via sports betting, prediction markets, or stocks — is the result of perfectly rational behavior in a world that’s becoming increasingly irrational.
The author’s core claim is simple: the traditional bargain no longer works. Work hard, stay loyal, save patiently — and you’ll be rewarded — used to be a viable path. Today, wages lag assets and housing is out of reach.
When patience no longer pays, people stop being patient. What fills the void is agency. Casinos — broadly defined — offer something the modern economy increasingly withholds: the feeling that individual judgment might matter. Even if the odds are bad, gambling offers conviction, immediacy, and the possibility (however slim) of escape.
Key quote: “Every month brings new benchmarks showing AI matching or exceeding human performance on tasks that used to require expensive degrees and years of training. White-collar workers, or otherwise the financially aspirational, are watching the timeline shrink. Three years ago, ‘AI will replace knowledge workers’ was a thought experiment. Now it’s a planning assumption. Everyone’s asking when, not if, and the estimates keep getting shorter.”
A few more links I enjoyed:
The Era of the Business Idiot – via Ed Zitron
Key quote: “We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when ‘being good at stuff’ matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where “what’s useful” is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.”
The Lost Art of Leading – via The Beautiful Truth
Key quote: “Our culture is obsessed with leadership. From best-selling biographies and podcasts to conferences, coaches and consultants, the quest to unlock the secrets of great leadership is everywhere. The belief that better leadership is the key to individual progress and organizational success has fueled a multibillion-dollar industry. But for all the theory and all the investment, we seem no closer to the kind of leadership we actually need. If anything, the opposite is true.”
This article How AI is making us think short-term is featured on Big Think.