The 2025 semiconductor tariff expansion and export control overhaul have created a bifurcated global AI hardware ecosystem. The immediate effect is higher costs; the structural effect is a technology cold war with a decade-long timeline.
NVIDIA's GPU monopoly, TSMC's foundry dominance, and the memory bandwidth wall are not temporary supply chain problems — they are structural constraints that will determine which nations and companies lead AI development for a decade.
The rate of improvement in frontier language model capabilities has slowed from the pace of 2022-2023. Understanding why the plateau occurred, and what the field is doing in response, reveals where AI development is actually headed.
The first phase of surveillance capitalism — behavioral data collection for advertising targeting — is well documented. The second phase, in which behavioral data is used for credit, insurance, employment, and social control, is less visible and more consequential.
AI systems have become extraordinarily good at producing outputs that look like thinking. This has led us to confuse the performance of intelligence with intelligence itself — a confusion with real consequences.
Facebook built its empire on a single idea: that mapping human relationships would be the most valuable thing in the history of commerce. The idea was right. The map was wrong.
The anecdotal evidence is becoming data. The indicators that the AI jobs disruption is accelerating — and what they suggest about the next eighteen months.
Prediction markets are pricing a 40 percent chance of significant labor displacement by 2028. The economists who study this most carefully are more divided than either camp admits.
TikTok taught us what the attention economy really is. Now that its fate is uncertain, we have to decide what we actually want from the platforms that shape our minds.
Selin Çelik··11 min
The Auguro Daily
The signals worth watching today
Every weekday morning: the signals emerging across geopolitics, markets, technology, and society — interpreted, not just reported.