Here, I discuss unconventional views about space, what it’s made of and its dimensionality.*

1. Is Space Made of Points?

1.1. The Standard View

According to standard geometry, space is made of “points.” Geometrical objects such as circles and squares are commonly defined as sets of points satisfying a particular description (e.g., “the set of all points in…

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A review of Frank Capra: A Life by Sam Wasson; 736 pages; HarperCollins, New York (October 2026)

Near the start of his massive new biography of Frank Capra, film historian Sam Wasson describes his subject as “the greatest American director who ever lived.” In the FDR era, that would have been an uncontroversial opinion. Between 1935 and 1939, Capra received the Oscar for Best Director three times. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He was the president of both the Screen Directors Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “Capra,” the novelist (and Spectator film critic) Graham Greene wrote in 1936, “has what Lubitsch, the witty playboy, has not: a sense of responsibility, and what Clair, whimsical, poetic, a little precious and à la mode, has not, a kinship with his audience, a sense of common life, a morality: he has what even Chaplin has not, complete mastery of his medium.”

Capra’s career foundered in the Fifties, but he was held in high regard for the rest of his life, collecting awards, continuing to play an important role in guild politics, and sitting for countless interviews. Then, in 1992, a year after Capra’s death, Joseph McBride published his long-awaited, meticulously researched biography of the director, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, and readers recoiled. McBride revealed that Capra was not a sweet everyman like the heroes of his films but an absolute bastard—a liar, a credit-thief, an antisemite, a political reactionary who kept a portrait of Mussolini on his bedroom wall, and “a gut-punching little man.” McBride acknowledged that Capra had made some excellent films, but he pointed out that much of what we call Capra-esque was, in fact, the invention of screenwriter Robert Riskin:

What Capra called his “formula” did not emerge until he began working with Riskin material in the early 1930s. His career before that point was scattershot and uncertain, that of a director in search of something to say. But once the formula had been established, Capra was content to repeat it, with minor embellishments, for the rest of his career, eventually to diminishing effect. ... Without Riskin, the formula became a straitjacket for Capra, one in which he struggled uncomfortably for years but could never manage to escape.

Though Wasson never says so explicitly, it’s clear that his biography of Capra is meant to correct the record. “By his own example, Capra led,” Wasson writes. “Working late into the night, he was the filmmaker his colleagues wanted to be, the winning embodiment of industry, kindness, patience, integrity, and—when he was called upon to exceed his managerial duties—talent.” That’s laying it on a bit thick, I think. Still, Capra could use a boost because he was, in his prime, an incredibly gifted filmmaker, directing some of the most luminous films to come out of Hollywood during the Great Depression, including Lady for a Day (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

Human activities that impact the Earth are often portrayed in a bad light. But a new study in Science gives us reason to be grateful for our newfound powers. Humanity seems to have interrupted the beginnings of the next glaciation—commonly known as an ice age. We have long suspected our activities might postpone the return of continent-sized ice sheets. The extraordinary suggestion now is that the process had already started, and that we stopped it.

Researchers examined the Barnes Ice Cap—the last surviving remnant of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet—on Baffin Island, high in the Canadian Arctic, and found that it began expanding again roughly 2,000 years ago. They interpret that renewed growth as the first stage of the next glaciation. Around 1960, however, human-caused atmospheric warming seems to have reversed the trend, and the ice began retreating. In their reading, humanity interrupted the next glaciation in its infancy.

We sometimes hear talk to the effect that the natural world was perfect until humanity started interfering with it, and that we are better off ourselves the less we interfere. But the record of the advance and retreat of the ice makes that an impossible position to defend. Technically, we still live within an ice age that has been going on for millions of years, because an ice age is simply any period when there are persistent ice sheets at or near the poles; in colloquial usage, “ice age” just means another cold glacial period. During an ice age, the climate alternates between long glaciations where the ice advances and shorter interglacials where it retreats. Agriculture, cities and eventually the modern world developed during the Holocene, the current relatively warm interglacial that began around 11,700 years ago. We should work to make it last as long as we possibly can.

During the last glaciation, the Laurentide stretched across the North American continent and well south into the United States, and in places was over three kilometres thick. At the last glacial maximum, roughly 20,000 years ago, global temperatures were about 6 degrees Celsius cooler than today. So much water was locked up on land that sea levels were more than 120 metres lower. Coastlines were displaced, northern landscapes transformed, and enormous areas that now support farms, forests and cities were buried under sheets of ice. Land just beyond the ice would not have been especially pleasant either, as great ice sheets generate their own weather. Cold, dense air drains down their slopes via gravity, producing katabatic winds that spill onto the surrounding country. Although the threat is not imminent, a return to such conditions would eventually be devastating for human settlements and agriculture. Canada would be frozen off the map, as would much of the northern United States and significant parts of Europe.

I.

Should safety-conscious employees at AI companies quit in protest, or stay and fight? The latest argument didn’t resolve the dispute, but it did get me in contact with organizers working on both sides.

Those planning to stay and fight are increasingly interested in labor organization. This doesn’t need to mean literal government-recognized Labor Unions. An existing group, Coalition Of Concerned AI Staff, is already helping support interested employees and investigating other models to do more. But it might involve using laws, rights, and tactics associated with the National Labor Relations Act and the labor movement.

You may remember stories of bitter unionization battles at places like Starbucks, but AI workers can probably route around that. The toughest labor disputes happen in fields where the employer could easily fire all the organized workers and replace them from a bottomless pool of faceless scabs: although this is illegal, everyone needs to be maximally lawyered-up to prevent it. But there are so few skilled AI researchers that these laws are hardly necessary; if a dozen top AI researchers threaten to walk, it doesn’t matter whether Section P Sub-Section Q forces the AI company to negotiate - the AI company will want to negotiate. This cuts through the red tape that intimidates workers in less blessed fields1; AI researchers could likely get away with only the package of rights provided by informal “concerted activity”, defined as two or more workers doing anything vaguely labor-activism-shaped. Just put up a sign somewhere saying “OpenAI Safety Union” and get at least two employees to stand behind it, and it counts.

(even the word “union” is unnecessary; if employees felt like it was too adversarial, they could call it “OpenAI Research Council” or something)

Once an organization existed, the law would ban the company from firing people simply for being part of it, or talking to other members, or planning demands or actions together. It also couldn’t fire workers for striking over workplace conditions2.

Does the “workplace conditions” requirement rule out most forms of safety activism? Not necessarily: many safety issues double as workplace issues, including whistleblower protections, auditing requirements, and safety team staffing. Most of all, fears of recursive self-improvement are naturally workplace-related: whatever else RSI does to the world, it will also automate AI researcher positions. This would be a popular starting issue that might attract even non-alignment-pilled colleagues.

But even if some safety issue has no workplace relevance at all, employees can still strike over it; they only lose their protection against being fired. And good AI researchers are worth tens of millions of dollars each and nearly irreplaceable, so AI companies are already averse to firing dozens of them at once. And any attempt to fire striking AI researchers would likely make national news and be a PR disaster. So the legal protection against being fired isn’t doing most of the work anyway, and AI employee organizations could strike over issues without direct workplace relevance if they wanted3.

What if employees think their company already does a good job prioritizing safety? Then they should organize in order to give their already-virtuous company more options. Negotiations between unions get less antitrust scrutiny than negotiations between companies, so workers can forge deals to slow research or prioritize safety even when executives’ hands are tied.

For example, suppose that OpenAI leadership orders its researchers to switch to a less-monitorable looped transformer design. A safety-conscious employee union might ask further questions, or mutually refuse to pursue this. If Sam Altman said that they had to build a looped transformer, or else Anthropic would build it first and beat them, the organizers could call up their friends at the Anthropic Employee Union and ask whether they would go on strike if Anthropic built a looped transformer. If the Anthropic Employee Union said yes, then the two unions could present a united front, and their companies wouldn’t have to worry about the other company racing ahead.45

Although on its own this has limited value - Meta or DeepSeek could still build the looped transformer - these union deals could also provide a standard that the industry could rally around, or a clear starting point for government intervention. In an extreme case, two unions could negotiate the beginnings of a pause deal, force it on their parent companies, and the government could take note and make it part of a future international deal.

What else could unions or union-like organizations work toward?

• Upholding normal protections around discipline and firing. In October, OpenAI fired three safety researchers after accusing them of leaking information on the company’s experiments with potentially-dangerous looped transformers; these accusations now seem to be false, with the most likely scenario being that OpenAI was angry about the leak and fired some people in the vicinity of the problem to make a point. If OpenAI employees had a union, the company might have to be more careful about firing employees under false pretenses.

• Holding companies to the commitments they made during September’s excitement around Pacing The Frontier, for example, demanding that they hire independent evaluators with employee-level access by such-and-such a time.

• Demanding transparency, eg about compute allocation as described here, or about the information necessary to measure the speed of recursive self-improvement.

• Acting as an independent voice holding companies to their commitments. This is another one that works even if (especially if?) employees already trust their company leadership. Currently, companies struggle to make credible promises because there’s nobody inside who can enforce them. A union that threatened to investigate or raise a fuss if a promise were broken could help executives be taken seriously.

If you’re interested, contact the people taking point on this, who I can vouch for as smart and trustworthy, at AIemployeeorganizing@gmail.com

II.

For people taking the other route - whistleblowing or quitting - my contacts recommend talking to Psst, a nonprofit that provides legal advice for concerned tech workers.

Whistleblowing is a fraught process. Your company has more experience catching and neutralizing whistleblowers than you have being one, and if you’re working on your own, then you will probably fail to cover your tracks (did you know companies look to see how many times different employees checked leaked documents, on the grounds that someone who’s agonizing about whether to whistleblow about them probably reads them more often than most?) Another classic mistake is to complain about something internally, then whistleblow after your complaints are not taken seriously; it’s not hard for companies to connect the dots and realize that the complainer and the whistleblower are probably the same person. Psst has more experience with this than you or your company, and can walk you through the process.

Even if you’re thinking of quitting, Psst may be able to help. You may have more options than you thought, like threatening to quit unless you get the thing you want. And if you do decide to quit, you may want to do it in the most effective way possible - make a splash on your way out, like Jacob Coxon did. This requires some basic media literacy, and Psst will connect you with the people who can give it to you.

Contact Psst by messaging @PsstLegal.01 on Signal on a personal device without any employer spyware. The person on the other end will be a lawyer, and your conversation with them will be confidential.

Whatever AI employees do, they should do it soon. RSI could start making them obsolete as soon as next year, so they may never have this amount of leverage again.

Treating the tragic affair as a psychotherapeutic problem, the university apparently will not consider whether Arday should have been appointed in the first place.