Hugin & Munin Journal

Recursive self-improvement is the mechanism behind many of the most dramatic forecasts about advanced AI. An AI becomes better than humans at AI research, helps create a more capable successor, and thereby produces a system even better at designing the generation after that. Follow the loop far enough and an intelligence explosion can seem almost inevitable. The loop, however, contains more than intelligence. Models still have to be trained. Experiments have to be run and interpreted. Chips have to be fabricated. Electricity has to be generated. Biological hypotheses eventually encounter cells, animals and patients. Becoming better at thinking does not make every other input to technological progress disappear. The more interesting possibility may therefore be not an unlimited intelligence explosion, but a repeated migration of scarcity. If AI makes sophisticated reasoning cheap and abundant, the bottleneck moves elsewhere: towards compute and evaluation, then towards experiments, ...

We have been working through Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films with the kids this summer, and Spider-Man 2 produced an unexpected result. They had quite liked the first film. The sequel frustrated them considerably more, and I understood why. On paper, Spider-Man 2 improves on almost everything I liked in its predecessor. It has the better villain, better action and probably the better central idea: Peter Parker discovers that being Spider-Man is ruining the rest of his life. The problem is that the film pushes that idea so hard that responsibility begins to look less like a burden Peter carries than a punishment the screenplay keeps inventing for him. Poster/DVD artwork for Spider-Man 2 (2004). Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Being Spider-Man Is Terrible The premise is genuinely good. Peter Parker, played again by Tobey Maguire, has discovered that becoming Spider-Man was easier than remaining Spider-Man. He is trying to study, earn enough money t...

Editorial image generated by the author. Europe occupies an unusual position in the semiconductor industry. ASML controls a technology without which the world’s most advanced chip factories would struggle to advance, while its long-standing partner ZEISS supplies the extraordinary optical systems inside its lithography machines. ASML describes ZEISS optics as a feature of all its lithography systems since the late 1980s . Europe also retains major semiconductor companies of its own, particularly in automotive, industrial and power electronics. Yet losing access to Taiwanese fabrication, American chip design, Korean memory or important parts of the Asian packaging ecosystem would still leave much of European computing exposed. The paradox exposes the weakness in treating European semiconductor sovereignty as synonymous with domestic fabrication. Europe cannot sensibly recreate the entire semiconductor industry within its borders, and trying to do so would consume enormo...

Medicine cannot remove human functions simply to discover which ones matter. Nature, disease and accident nevertheless produce cases that resemble experiments in subtraction. Some people carry damaging variants in both copies of a gene. Others develop without an organ, lose one through disease or surgery, or survive injuries that remove substantial parts of the body. Modern medicine creates another category by transferring biological work to drugs, prostheses and machines. These cases offer an empirical route into the question of what a human system actually requires. But survival is an ambiguous result. A person who lives without a structure has not necessarily shown that it was useless. Another pathway may have absorbed its work, development may have reorganised around its absence, or medicine may be supplying enough of the missing function to keep the larger system operating. The cost may also remain hidden until infection, injury, pregnancy, ageing or some other form of stres...

Editorial image generated by the author. On 29 August 2026, Icelanders were given a fairly modest choice. They were not being asked to join the European Union. They were being asked whether Iceland should reopen accession negotiations; if those negotiations eventually produced an accession treaty, the final agreement would have been put to a second referendum . They still said no. In a close vote , 52.8 per cent opposed reopening negotiations and 47.2 per cent supported it, on a turnout of 82.5 per cent. Sovereignty featured heavily in the campaign, but fishing carried particular weight: opponents feared that membership would weaken Icelandic control over quotas and access to its waters. There is nothing remarkable about a country deciding not to join the EU. What makes Iceland interesting is how unusually well it otherwise fits. It is wealthy, democratic, institutionally stable and already deeply integrated into European political and economic structures. Icelan...

A human being can lose an arm without losing any obvious part of their consciousness. The same is true of a leg, a kidney or one lung. Machines can also assume selected functions once treated as inseparable from particular organs: a total artificial heart can replace damaged ventricles and valves, extracorporeal support can temporarily provide circulation and gas exchange, and dialysis can remove waste and excess fluid from the blood. Taken far enough, these substitutions invite a disquieting question: how much of the body could disappear before the remaining system stopped being a person? The obvious answer is that the brain must remain. So long as the brain survives, we may be tempted to regard everything else as support equipment—biologically indispensable in ordinary life, but not itself the seat of consciousness. Yet a brain does not simply require oxygen and glucose. It develops and operates within continuous exchange with circulation, respiration, metabolism, hormones, immu...

I recently rewatched Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, because my children wanted to see the older Spider-Man films. I had not watched it in more than twenty years and remembered surprisingly little beyond the broadest pieces: the Green Goblin, the upside-down kiss and Spider-Man swinging between the buildings of New York. What surprised me was not how old the film looked, but how old its storytelling felt. The visual effects have obviously aged, yet that hardly bothered me. Stranger was the melodrama, the broad characters, the casual comic-book science and a film almost completely unembarrassed to treat all of it seriously. After two decades of superhero films becoming increasingly skilled at making absurdity feel normal, Raimi’s Spider-Man now seems to belong to an adjacent genre. I am not sure that makes it worse. But it does help explain why a film that was enormously successful in 2002 now feels so peculiar to me. Off...