Science fiction authors in the order you want them to be right about AI:
Iain Banks
Becky Chambers
Martha Wells
Douglas Adams
Charles Stross (Singularity Sky)
Peter Watts
Charles Stross (Laundry)
Harlan Ellison
It does all makes sense, actually, but takes way too much effort to parse, like reading Shakespearian English.
One thing I mentioned in passing in my Fable post is that, for long running tasks, Fable starts to develop its own dialect as its many agents and tasks reinforce themselves and make Claudish language ever more Claudish.
You need to ask it to report out in plain English or this happens after 9 hours
The fact that Anthropic may take away subscription access to Fable in two weeks is weird & discourages investing in learning about the model.
Subscription use is how you figure out what the model is good for, since it allows experimentation. Only having paid access is limiting.
The New York Times published a roundtable discussion among Daron Acemoglu,
Dean Ball, Clara Shih & myself about the future of AI & who wins at work. I think it is a really nice overview of the core debates on the topic, and has some fun examples. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/m...
Both Anthropic and OpenAI mention the possibilities of slowing AI development in their latest "what comes next" in AI posts, but say they need to be an action coordinated across the entire world using as-yet-unidentified methods.
I've had access to Claude 5 Fable for a bit. A genuine jump in capability, I could feed it a 15 page design document for a project and it would work for 9+ hours and deliver terrific results.
But working with it is weird & weirder is coming
Lots of examples: open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...
Psst, buddy — fixer 4 is back, and it shipped the wire-up not the cop-out. Dodge a collision and never ride exports: the local badge scoped truthfully.
One reason you want AIs to be better writers is that there is a lot of writing even in software, and it is incredibly painful to hit a menu which is filled with Claudisms or ChatGPTish phrases.
No, AI, a report is not "what leaves the room" & analyses are not "every number makes its mark"
A year ago the closest thing we had to a general AI agent was o3.