24. The Feed by Nick Clark Windo

I sat down to talk about a book. I ended up on a 30-minute rant about the end of human intelligence. Sorry not sorry.This week's pick is The Feed by Nick Clark Windo, and yes, I do actually talk about it, for about ten minutes, promise. But then two real-world quotes hijacked the episode entirely:Sam Altman on intelligence becoming a utility, metered out like electricity or water. And a (fabricated, but eerily plausible) Jeff Bezos quote about AI getting priority over humans for water access.Here's the thing that got me: The Feed imagines a horrifying future. But what Altman said isn't fiction. And the fear behind that fake Bezos quote isn't fiction either; data centers really are drinking our water dry, right now, today.That's scarier than anything a novelist can dream up. Because the people writing this future actually have the power to build it.So the book became a jumping-off point for the question I couldn't shake: can humanity actually self-correct? Can we stop stripping the planet bare before we hit rock bottom? Or will we only learn how to stop once we're already on the floor, organs failing, too late to matter?I don't have the answer. But I needed to ask it out loud.Book talk: minutes 0–10. Existential spiral: the rest. Come spiral with me.PS. The article I mentioned in the book: The Commodification of Intelligence: Jensen Huang on the Future of Human Value.