Nearly a century ago, classical scholar Milman Parry made an extraordinary discovery when he found the last of the great Yugoslav epic singers, composing 13,000-line narratives in real time without writing or memorization. Today, we're building AI systems that claim to accomplish a similar task - composing language token by token, and generating novel outputs from learned patterns. However, what Parry found in those mountains may hold the key to understanding and building the future of artificial intelligence in their much more humanistic tradition.

Rick Lake traces this lineage from ancient tradition to modern AI, revealing what the guslari can teach us about safety, efficiency, and what it means to compose at scale.

Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use Claude without explicit constraints on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Within hours, the Trump administration blacklisted the company. OpenAI, claiming the same principles, signed the contract that afternoon. This is not a story about defense contracting, so much as it's a story about the moment we hand a tool that talks to people who kill and realize we've already seen this movie a thousand times. Rick Lake traces the warning through the Golem, through Hephaestus' forge, through every myth and film that tried to tell us: the technology isn't the danger. The only danger, always, is the person certain he understands what he's holding.

Every generation has faced this moment - and the question at the center was always the same: are we our tools, or are we something more? Eric Markowitz follows the thread from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to where it was always going to lead. The real conversation was never about AI.

The Star Trek replicator could make you anything you wanted - just never quite the way you'd want it. Dave Nadig uses Star Trek's most famous Ferengi bartender to reframe what AI actually costs us as writers and readers. The answer has less to do with the technology than with what we're actually hungry for.