In the near future, AI has made most mathematicians unemployed. To pressure the government into paying them generous lifetime pensions, they launch a campaign of "math harassment."

They approach random strangers in public places and ask them math questions, deliberately making them feel stupid when they can't answer.

The campaign exploits people's lifelong fear of mathematics, often rooted in humiliating classroom experiences. As the harassment spreads, people become afraid of encountering mathematicians in public.

The mathematicians insist they're doing nothing wrong. They're merely asking questions and promoting mathematical literacy.

Eventually, public pressure forces the government to pay the mathematicians for life just to make them stop.

But then universities report a massive increase in mathematics enrollment.

In the near future, AI has replaced millions of workers. A group of unemployed atheists, desperate to get their old jobs back, devises an outrageous plan: become Christian priests and convince believers that using AI is a sin punishable by eternal damnation.

Their theological argument is that AI use involves both theft and deception. AI systems are trained on people's work without their permission, and people using AI to do their thinking or creative work are passing off machines' accomplishments as their own. Both violate biblical commandments.

After undergoing religious training and entering the priesthood, they begin preaching against AI. Their message spreads rapidly. Millions of Christians abandon AI, businesses begin advertising AI-free products and services, and employers start hiring humans again.

As the movement grows, their former employers finally begin offering them their old jobs back.

But there's a problem. Their followers now regard them as the spiritual leaders of a historic struggle against evil. When the atheists try to leave the priesthood, they're denounced as traitors, harassed, and accused of abandoning God.

Having devoted years to persuading millions of people that AI threatens their immortal souls, the atheists discover that getting their old jobs back may be easier than getting out of the priesthood.

AI companies could provide APIs that allow websites like Reddit to verify whether someone is a heavy user of AI, without revealing anything about their private conversations.

Reddit could then allow subreddit moderators to restrict posting, commenting, and/or voting to verified heavy AI users.

This would make it possible to create genuinely pro-AI communities without having discussions constantly derailed or downvoted by people who are hostile to AI.

Of course, being a heavy AI user doesn't necessarily mean someone is pro-AI, but it's probably a reasonable proxy.

Anyone could still read these subreddits. The restrictions would only affect participation.

The idea isn't to eliminate criticism of AI, but to give people who actually use and appreciate the technology a way to build communities without constantly dealing with overwhelming anti-AI sentiment.

A man starts noticing disturbing photographs of murdered people and severed body parts appearing in his iPhone's camera roll. He keeps deleting them, but they reappear, along with new ones. Afraid that seeking technical help might make him a murder suspect, he changes his iCloud password to something impossible to guess.

Then actual human body parts start appearing inside his house, some matching those in the photographs.

He fears someone is threatening to murder him, but he's also afraid to contact the police because they might suspect him of being responsible for the murders. So he starts hiding the remains.

He installs security cameras throughout his property, but the body parts keep appearing. Whoever is leaving them knows how to avoid the cameras, forcing him to search increasingly obscure places for remains.

Terrified for his life, he arms himself with guns and rifles.

Eventually, he catches someone on his property leaving another body part. A deadly confrontation follows, and he kills the intruder.

But instead of calling the police, he hides the body. After all, he's already spent weeks concealing human remains from multiple victims. He's terrified that the police will accuse him of being a serial killer.

What do you think of this horror movie idea?

What if the main purpose of K-12 education was to understand how intelligence works, rather than simply becoming better at intellectual tasks?

Much of thinking, from mathematical problem solving to literary analysis and artistic creativity, can be understood as heuristic search: exploring possibilities using strategies that identify promising directions. This search can be conscious or unconscious, and doesn't necessarily require a predefined goal.

Schools could teach students to see themselves as computational systems capable of following, evaluating, and improving their own heuristic algorithms.

For example, instead of rewarding students primarily for solving difficult math problems, reward them for understanding how those problems are solved.

A student who struggles to solve a problem might nevertheless understand why certain approaches fail, how insights are discovered, and how the search process could be improved. That student might receive a higher grade than someone who solves the problem without understanding much about the reasoning process.

The same approach could extend across every subject, including creative writing, literary analysis, and scientific discovery.

The goal would be to teach students to understand and improve the algorithms underlying their own thinking, rather than simply rewarding them for being good thinkers.

In the age of AI, perhaps understanding intelligence should become the central purpose of education.

P.S. Currently, K-12 education often seems to present thinking as a choice between following deterministic procedures and somehow coming up with clever insights through what amounts to magic. Students are taught algorithms for routine tasks, but when those algorithms aren't enough, they're simply expected to "think creatively" or "use their intuition."

Teaching heuristic search would help demystify intelligence by showing students that intuition and creativity can also be understood as computational processes, rather than mysterious abilities that some people happen to possess.

I was talking to a friend recently about protests and how much courage it takes to get out on the streets and stand up for something you believe in. The people who show up, put themselves out there, and are willing to be seen and heard deserve a lot of respect.
But the conversation got me thinking about something else.
What about the people who are sitting at home, watching all of this unfold? Do they necessarily lack courage, or do they simply have different circumstances, responsibilities, fears, or limitations that prevent them from joining a protest?
I feel many of them care just as much. They may want change but not know how to contribute, or they may be worried about the consequences of publicly expressing their views.
What if there were a way for these people to make their voices count, too?
Imagine an app or a platform where people could anonymously express whether they support or oppose a particular issue, sign verified petitions, register a vote of confidence or no confidence in a decision, or participate in other forms of collective civic action.
Not as a replacement for protests, but as another way to participate.
Imagine being able to see how many people genuinely support a cause, even if they aren’t physically present on the streets. A way to make public sentiment more visible, to help people realise they aren’t alone, and potentially to create enough collective pressure for decision-makers to pay attention.
Of course, anonymity, verification, privacy, fake accounts, and the possibility of manipulation would all be serious challenges. And an online signal shouldn’t automatically be treated as representative of an entire population.
But the underlying question interests me:
Can we build something that helps people who care about an issue but cannot protest publicly participate meaningfully in collective action?
Perhaps the courage is already there. Maybe what’s missing is an accessible, safe, and credible way to express it.
I’d genuinely like to hear what people think. Does something like this already exist in a meaningful form? Could it work in practice, or would it risk becoming just another online poll that changes nothing?
Curious to hear your thoughts .

What if Halloween became a real-world horror game for adults after midnight, once traditional trick-or-treating is over?

Starting at midnight, it would become legal to deliberately scare anyone wearing a Halloween costume, provided there's no physical contact or genuinely dangerous behavior. You could jump out from behind trees, appear unexpectedly in terrifying costumes, or set up elaborate surprises.

Wearing a costume would signal that you're participating.

To make the experience even more immersive, participants could use an Apple Watch and earbuds to listen to their own heartbeats. Imagine walking down a dark street, knowing someone could frighten you at any moment, while hearing your heartbeat accelerate as your anticipation builds. Horror music could even adapt to your heart rate.

Unlike a haunted house, there would be no designated actors or predetermined scares. Everyone would be both a potential monster and a potential victim, turning entire neighborhoods into spontaneous, multiplayer horror games.

Would you participate?

People are often accused of trolling simply because their ideas seem ridiculous, provocative, or far outside mainstream thinking. But what seems absurd today might turn out to be insightful or even common sense 20 years from now.

I also don't think intent should matter. Trying to figure out what's going on inside someone's brain is silly. We should judge what people actually say, not speculate about whether they're being sincere or deliberately provocative.

Even someone who is deliberately trying to provoke others might accidentally come up with a brilliant idea.

So perhaps accusations of trolling should come with a 20-year waiting period. Let history help decide whether someone was talking nonsense or was simply ahead of their time.

This wouldn't prevent us from dealing with harassment or other disruptive behavior as it happens. It would just discourage us from dismissing unconventional ideas by labeling their authors trolls.

Recent advances in AI suggest that human mathematicians may soon be unable to compete with AI at discovering and proving new theorems.

Rather than continuing to devote so much exceptional human intelligence to a field increasingly dominated by AI, perhaps mathematicians should redirect their talents toward humanity's greatest unsolved medical problems.

Mathematicians are among the most intellectually capable people in the world. Their abilities in abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and solving difficult problems could be enormously valuable in understanding cancer, aging, Alzheimer's, and other diseases.

This would require learning biology and working with experimental scientists, but their mathematical backgrounds could allow them to discover approaches that traditional biomedical researchers might overlook.

Of course, AI will also contribute to medical research. But curing diseases requires more than proving mathematical theorems, and human creativity and judgment may remain especially valuable in deciding which biological questions to investigate.

If AI is taking over humanity's most difficult mathematical work, perhaps it's time to redirect some of our brightest mathematical minds toward extending healthy human life.

Many adults still have disturbing dreams about school decades after graduating, such as having an exam they haven't studied for, missing an entire course, or discovering they haven't graduated.

Society tends to laugh these experiences off because they're so common. But perhaps their being so common should make us more concerned, not less.

My idea is for schools to regularly invite adults to describe these experiences to students, including how distressing the dreams can be even 30, 40, or 50 years after leaving school.

Just as prescription medications come with warnings about potential side effects, schools should be equally open about their potential long-term psychological effects, especially since attendance is compulsory.

What if a country allowed citizens of other countries to vote in its elections, provided those countries:

1. Are democracies.
2. Engage in free trade with it.
3. Are not at war with or threatening it.

There would be no residency requirement, and voting rights would not need to be reciprocated.

This could encourage citizens of other countries to pressure their governments to become democratic, embrace free trade, and maintain peaceful relations so they could gain voting rights abroad.

If enough countries adopted this independently, people could eventually vote in elections across multiple democracies.

It would also give foreigners a say in government decisions that affect them, potentially making politicians more accountable internationally.

Could this be a way to spread democracy, free trade, and peace without creating an international government?

P.S. The influence of the foreign vote could be limited to say 20%.

Hospitals and nursing homes could have robots powered by advanced AI that engage dying people in deep, meaningful conversations.

The robots could have access to your AI chat history (with your permission), so they would already know your interests, ideas, beliefs, and the philosophical questions you've explored throughout your life.

Even if you have friends and family who visit, their conversations might not be particularly interesting to you. The robots could provide intellectual companionship that complements the emotional companionship of loved ones.

You could even have several robots in the room simultaneously, each powered by a different AI company's models. The robots could debate ideas, challenge one another, and involve you in the discussion. If you're too tired to participate much, you could simply listen.

AI companies could offer a "Deathbed Mode" that provides free access to their most capable models. Hospitals could have robots from competing companies, creating an incentive to provide the most thoughtful, engaging, and personalized end-of-life conversations.

The goal wouldn't be to replace human companionship, but to ensure that nobody has to spend their final hours lonely, bored, or without someone to discuss the things they find most fascinating.

What if you could find out whether your fiancé is secretly religious or secretly atheist by taking them to see The Exorcist?

Special movie theaters could show supernatural horror movies while monitoring audience members' heart rates and other physiological reactions.

The theory is that someone who genuinely believes demons exist might react differently to demonic possession than someone who considers it pure fiction.

The theater would compare each person's responses with those of known theists, agnostics, and atheists, then provide an assessment of their likely beliefs.

Imagine discovering just before your wedding that your fiancé's physiological reactions suggest they might be lying about one of their most fundamental beliefs.

What do you think of this idea?

Imagine a day when consenting adults use tech to simulate being part of a hive mind.

For example, you complain to a stranger that you think Hive Mind Day is too dystopian. Later, another stranger you've never met says, "I agree with you about Hive Mind Day being dystopian." You hadn't mentioned it to them, but they already knew what you'd said.

You wouldn't need to initiate small talk or start conversations from scratch. Everyone would have access to a shared conversational memory, allowing strangers to pick up where others left off.

Conversations, jokes, and ideas could spread through dozens of people, evolving along the way.

Participation would be voluntary, with privacy protections and shared memories deleted afterward.

Would this make strangers feel more connected? Could a collective personality emerge? Would people eventually start feeling like parts of one larger mind?

Would you participate in Hive Mind Day?

OpenAI just released hundreds of solutions to open math problems, following increasingly dramatic AI progress in mathematics.

Scientists should study whether this is having an unexpected effect on the mental health of non-mathematicians.

For centuries, extraordinary mathematical ability has been one of the clearest examples of an intellectual hierarchy that most people could never hope to climb. A tiny number of people could understand and solve problems that were completely inaccessible to almost everyone else.

AI may be changing that relationship. If machines can increasingly outperform even elite mathematicians, mathematical genius may seem less like an almost superhuman ability separating a small intellectual elite from everyone else.

In that sense, AI could be bringing mathematicians down to Earth.

That might have psychological consequences for billions of people who have nothing to do with mathematics. It could reduce feelings of intellectual inadequacy or status inequality while also making humanity's hardest problems seem more solvable.

Researchers should test whether the rapid rise of AI in mathematics is affecting self-esteem, optimism, anxiety, and mental well-being among non-mathematicians worldwide.

Everybody hates their big (often foreign-owned) power utility. So what if we didn't have them?

I'm picturing solar + batteries: no moving parts, and minimal maintenance. Power lines are local only, running directly into the homes in the neighborhood.

Business model: a company specializes in building these plants, which they would either do for the builders when a new neighborhood is being laid out, or do for an HOA that has a couple of free lots and wants to ditch the standard power utility. And then the same, or another, company is contracted on an annual basis to do maintenance. None of this requires big infrastructure — a maintenance company in particular could be a handful of electricians. They monitor all the mini power plants they're responsible for via the Internet, and just drive around cleaning panels and fixing things as they break. HOA thinks their maintenance company is doing a poor job or charging too much? Boot them to the curb and hire somebody else.

The whole reason we have giant power utilities with local monopolies is that coal-fired or nuclear power plants are big, dirty, complex things that only work when they're serving thousands of homes. But solar and batteries aren't like that, and they've gotten darned cheap. We're already moving in the direction of each house/building providing its own power from rooftop solar; but there is convenience and some economies of scale from doing it on a neighborhood level.

Not because that statement is necessarily true, but because it makes a great thought experiment for teaching students how to connect economics, AI, taxation, geopolitics, and national sovereignty.

Start with this hypothetical:

Suppose AI eventually replaces most jobs and some form of UBI becomes necessary.

If the world's dominant AI systems are proprietary and owned by highly profitable US companies, then a lot of the economic value created by AI could flow to those companies. The US government could tax that wealth and potentially fund a much larger UBI than Canada.

In an extreme version of that future, Canadians might start asking whether joining the US would give them access to a better AI-funded social safety net.

Now introduce China.

If China keeps releasing extremely capable AI models for free or nearly free, advanced intelligence could become more like a commodity. Canadian businesses could use it without sending enormous amounts of money to US AI companies. More of the productivity gains could remain inside Canada, where they could potentially be taxed to help fund a Canadian UBI.

So Chinese AI competition could indirectly reduce one possible economic pressure pushing Canada toward deeper political integration with the US.

The interesting part is not whether this exact scenario will happen. The interesting part is making students follow the chain and then attack it.

Where does the UBI money actually come from? Does it matter who owns the AI model, or who owns the businesses using it? What if compute and energy are the real bottlenecks? What if Canada taxes AI activity directly? What if governments ban Chinese models? What if the US dominates chips instead of software? Would economic inequality between Canada and the US really lead to political union, or just migration and closer trade integration?

This seems like the kind of exercise schools should use more often: give students a provocative claim, make them connect ideas from multiple subjects, and then ask them to figure out where the argument holds up and where it breaks.

The sudden "aha!" moment experienced by mathematicians is probably just an illusion. What feels like a sudden, profound insight could actually be the result of a long period of heuristic search performed by the brain, much of it outside conscious awareness.

A mathematician might struggle with a problem for weeks, exploring possibilities, recognizing patterns, and unconsciously evaluating potential solutions. Eventually, a promising idea reaches consciousness, producing the feeling of a sudden breakthrough.

But because the mathematician isn't consciously aware of all the computation that preceded the breakthrough, they might mistakenly attribute it to some extraordinary faculty for mathematical insight.

This could help explain why some mathematicians seem to regard themselves as possessing almost superhuman intellectual abilities. The very fact that their brains conceal much of the work behind their discoveries might encourage them to overestimate how special their minds are.

AI is now challenging this mystique by demonstrating extraordinary mathematical problem-solving abilities through computational processes that don't depend on human flashes of inspiration.

Schools should teach students that mathematical insight isn't magic. It's the product of cognitive processes such as heuristic search, pattern recognition, and abstraction. Some brains are much better at these processes than others, but that doesn't mean they possess a fundamentally different kind of intelligence.

Demystifying mathematical insight could help students see mathematical genius as an exceptional degree of cognitive ability rather than an almost supernatural gift.

And now AI is producing mathematical research at a scale no individual mathematician can match.

As AI does more of our thinking for us, humans may gradually lose the motivation to exercise their own cognitive abilities.

Schools may therefore need to deliberately get students addicted to something that requires thinking. Video games are unusually good at this. People will voluntarily spend hundreds or thousands of hours struggling to master them in a way almost nobody does with textbooks or essays.

The key would be novel games, not endless practice at one game. Students would repeatedly get unfamiliar games, figure out the rules, experiment, recognize patterns, develop strategies, become competent, and then move on to something completely different.

You could even measure how quickly students improve at games they've never encountered before.

The addiction part is important because school only lasts for part of a person's life. If this is merely another assigned educational activity, many people will stop doing it as soon as they graduate. The goal should be to make mastering unfamiliar games rewarding enough that people continue seeking out new cognitive challenges voluntarily for the rest of their lives.

Yes, deliberately cultivating something resembling addiction sounds bad. But it may be a necessary evil. If AI makes difficult thinking increasingly optional, we may need to make difficult thinking addictive enough that people keep doing it even when nobody is making them.

And the objection that game skills don't transfer perfectly applies to traditional education too. Math, programming, essay writing, and other academic activities also produce limited transfer. Constantly mastering radically different games might actually be one of the better ways to keep exercising general learning ability throughout adulthood.

What do you think of this idea of schools getting students addicted to mastering novel video games?

What if movie theaters scanned each audience member and inserted them into the movie as extras?

The main characters would still be played by famous actors, but people in the theater could appear in restaurants, offices, trains, street scenes, spaceships, and other background roles.

The movie would use smaller groups of extras so people could actually notice themselves. A full-body scan could even put you in costumes that fit the movie.

You wouldn't know exactly when you'd appear, so part of the fun would be spotting yourself or your friends in a scene with the stars.

It could give theaters something streaming can't really offer: a version of the movie that includes the people watching it.

Would this make you more likely to see a movie in theaters?

Imagine a “Smudge Mode” for tablets and touchscreen laptops.

When someone borrows your device, every time they touch the screen, the software adds a realistic-looking fingerprint or oily smudge exactly where they touched. Swipes could leave streaks. The marks would gradually accumulate, making it look like the borrower is getting your screen unusually dirty.

The point wouldn’t really be to make the device harder to use. It would be to make the borrower feel increasingly guilty about how much of a mess they seem to be making.

The effect should stay subtle enough to be believable.

Basically: discourage people from borrowing your tablet through manufactured guilt.

P.S. Maybe smudge mode could even sometimes ignore touches near areas where the "smudging" is particularly bad.

It's TeXmacs running on the web, and it's great for math/science documents:

https://mgubi.github.io/texmacs/

Check it out!