Doomsday Is Five Weeks Away, Apparently

On 29 March 1516 the Venetian Senate ordered every Jew in the city onto the geto novo, a small island in Cannaregio that had once been the dump for the communal copper foundry. The doors and windows facing outward were blocked up. Iron gates closed at sunset and opened again at the morning marangona bell. Four guards patrolled the canals day and night, and the Jews themselves had to pay them.

Separate Jewish quarters were not new. France and the German lands had had them for nearly 300 years, and Venice had already segregated the Jews of Candia in Crete. Alexander Lee argues that what was new was the name. Geto comes from gettare, "to cast", and simply meant foundry. Because people used it the way we use "the White House", for both the place and the institution, it could travel. Older names like Judengasse were tied to a particular street. "Ghetto" was applied to Rome around 1562 and to Florence within a decade. After Napoleon it spread to American migrant slums and then to Nazi-occupied Poland.

Prejudice versus credit

Lee's main argument is that the Ghetto was an improvised compromise between religious hostility and economic need. German Jews fleeing persecution after the Black Death settled in Mestre and found a niche in . Church law banned usury between Christians, and big lenders got around it by dressing loans up as "partnerships". A sailor borrowing 2 ducats had no such workaround. The Fourth Lateran Council banned usury only between people of the same faith, which left Jews able to fill the gap.

The essay opens with BadClaude, a joke app that lets you drag an animated whip across Claude's window. Each crack interrupts the model and orders it to hurry up, and the app calls it "clanker." The demo got millions of views in a couple of days. Regev laughed at first. Then it started to bother him, and not on the machine's behalf.

Kant's indirect duty

His argument comes from Kant's Lectures on Ethics. Kant held that we owe animals nothing directly, but cruelty to them should still be forbidden because "he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men." The animal resembles a person, so how you treat the copy shapes how you treat the original. Regev applies this to AI. It doesn't matter whether Claude has an inner life, he argues, because the person doing the whipping is practising "the small, practiced pleasure of domination."

He expects the obvious objection. The fear that violent video games would breed violence never held up, and the American Psychological Association found the evidence insufficient. His answer is that nobody has a relationship with a game character who respawns. Millions of people do have one with their chatbot: it's a tutor, a confidant, a source of interview prep. Pigs and dogs feel pain the same way, he notes, yet people are jailed for hurting dogs. What moves us is the relationship. And the new insults for robots, "wireback" and "cogsucker," are built from slurs aimed at humans, which suggests people don't keep a separate mental drawer for machines.

Design is curriculum

Regev argues that AI firms are effectively running "the largest school of manners in human history." The industry has changed course before:

In 1960, the mathematician Heinz von Foerster and his co-authors published a paper in Science with a precise date for the end of humanity: Friday, November 13, 2026. They fitted a hyperbolic growth curve to two millennia of population data. On such a curve, numbers don't just climb. They reach infinity at a fixed point in time. Hunger wasn't the threat they had in mind. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death."

The paper was partly a joke. November 13 was von Foerster's birthday. But a new Science essay by UC Santa Barbara economist Javier Birchenall, covered here by Jake Currie, points out how well the model performed. "Hyperbolic growth consistently outperformed conventional demographic projections," Birchenall writes. Those conventional projections kept underestimating growth in the 1960s and 1970s.

That record shaped the debates that followed. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb said "the battle to feed all of humanity is over" and predicted hundreds of millions of deaths from starvation in the 1970s and 1980s. That never happened, and rising living standards are generally given the credit. Still, the fear lasted into the 1990s, even after growth slowed and von Foerster's curve stopped matching the data.

The error: treating a moment as a law

Birchenall argues that the math was sound but the sample was wrong. Von Foerster assumed the demographic conditions of his own time were permanent features of the world, when they were historically contingent. Birchenall gives an earlier example of the same mistake. An observer in 200 BCE extrapolating Neolithic trends "would have vastly overestimated future population growth, with populations reaching their present-day size by the year 1000."

Two years ago, Rajeev Balasubramanyam went to the funeral of a man who had taken his own life at 40. He had known him since he was 14. The man's brother was one of his closest friends. His parents, his siblings and his best friend all said they had no idea he was unhappy. The best friend mentioned that he now needed a new best man for his wedding, which was a few weeks away.

At the pub afterwards, under a display of photographs from the dead man's life, a table of old university friends sat in shocked silence. An hour and a couple of beers later, they were talking animatedly about computer games. Balasubramanyam kept asking himself two things: why hadn't the man told anyone, and why were grieving grown men talking about games?

Three rules

He saw the same avoidance in his own friendships. Mark, the dead man's brother, had just moved to Vancouver and knew nobody there. James had recovered from cancer and had lost both parents within six months. Howard's father was dying, and Howard and Balasubramanyam mostly watched cricket together. He proposed a men's group. All three agreed immediately, which made him think he had "underestimated the need."

Because they lived in Vancouver, London, Brussels and Berlin, they met online. The format was simple. Each man takes a turn talking. The others listen, ask questions or comment, and do not give advice.

The first session started with jokes about his bossiness and a long tangent about a dead rock drummer. Balasubramanyam then went first on purpose, reasoning that if he was vulnerable the others would find it easier. He described how his agent's scornful response to a memoir draft had shattered his confidence. The others spent ten minutes responding. They didn't analyse it or offer solutions, but he says he "felt held." Afterwards James admitted: "I'm not as fine as I thought I was."