Four For Friday | February 20, 2026
LF208 Abolish philanthropy, nudges and chatbots, Solve Everything + Culture & Book of the Week
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Here are four nuggets of interest I’ve picked up this week, plus tips of the week: a tech culture lecture and an improv book.
1. Abolish philanthropy
Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen manages a $100 million grant portfolio. She thinks her job shouldn’t exist.
Her argument is refreshing and sharp: private foundations are sitting on $1.5 trillion, disbursing just 6.67% annually, siphoning funds from the public tax base, and providing political cover for the very inequality they claim to address.
In the spirit of Anand Giridhradas’ Winners Take All, this should be uncomfortable reading for those who have accelerated inequality via extractive capitalism, salving their conscience with tax free donations for buildings at business schools and hospitals with their names on it. As the Trump administration defunds nonprofits and a $124 trillion Great Wealth Transfer looms, we should be asking - what is private philanthropy for?
So What? Does philanthropy drive systems change for good, or delay it?
2. Abolish nudges
Behavioral economics had a great run. For nearly two decades, ‘nudges’ were the policy wonk’s answer to everything: auto-enroll employees in pensions, put fruit before cake in the canteen, make the default option the right one. Elegant, cheap, politically painless. Two of the field’s experts have written a book called It’s on You making the uncomfortable argument that nudges don’t just fail; they actively make things worse by letting corporations and governments off the hook for structural failures.
So What? Nudges let systems off the hook. Real health change requires structural reform, not better defaults.
3. Abolish chatbots
The Atlantic’s Lila Shroff has written the most accessible account yet of what’s actually happening in AI right now. The framing is perfect: Claude Code (and its consumer version, Cowork) doesn’t just talk to you — it does things. Her friend’s reaction after first trying it captures the shift well: ‘ChatGPT is like if a mechanic gave you advice about your car. Claude Code is like if the mechanic actually fixed it.’ We’ve moved from AI as information retrieval to AI as autonomous action.
The So What? Your sector will be disrupted. The only question is whether you’re building the new rails.
4. Solve Everything
It feels a little rude to have this magnum opus here at #4, but basically when you’re done with this you won’t have energy for anything else.
Alex Wissner-Gross and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis have published a blueprint audacious enough to make fellow optimistic Looking Forward readers feel we’re not really trying. They’re hoping it will have as much of an impact as the Machines of Loving Grace essay that Anthropic’s CEO published in 2024.
They argue that civilisation is in the midst of its fourth great revolution, this time against the scarcity of expert attention itself. Their central claim: by 2035, AI will “solve” entire domains in bulk, from biology to fusion energy, by making them compute-bound rather than genius-bound. The mechanism is the “Abundance Flywheel,” a virtuous cycle in which pre-committed compute, focused on hard public targets, triggers domain collapse, generates surplus, and reinvests into the next frontier.
By ‘domain collapse’ they mean when a field of knowledge tips from being an artisanal craft, dependent on rare human genius, into an industrial process anyone can access. The protein folding problem is a good example. For 50 years, mapping a single protein's structure could take a PhD student an entire year. AlphaFold effectively ended that era overnight. Now it takes minutes and costs pennies. The domain "collapsed" from scarcity to commodity.
The metrics are deliberately concrete. Success in medicine means Time-to-Therapy measured in hours, not months. In education, Learning Gain per Hour, verified 180 days later. In materials science, Time-to-Property compressed from decades to days. The 550,000 Americans on kidney dialysis, costing $48 billion annually, become Exhibit A for why organ manufacturing on demand is not philanthropy but arithmetic.
The essay distinguishes the “Muddle,” entrenched bureaucracy still paying for effort rather than outcomes, from the “Rails,” outcome-based contracts, targeting authorities, and compute escrows that actually drive progress. The former will absorb AI without changing; the latter will compound it into abundance.
The So What? AI rewards those who measure outcomes, not those who measure effort.
Historical Cultural lecture of the week: The Real World of Tech
Came across a thoughtuful person raving about the ‘Real World of Tech’. Author, physicist Ursula Franklin gave these five lectures on CBC Radio the same year the web was invented. She talks about "holistic" technologies that give the user control vs "prescriptive" ones that impose compliance. Feels fresh today! And btw, pairs neatly with the Atlantic piece above: she was asking in 1989 who technology gives control to. We’re still asking.
Book of the Week: Impro
Heard an interesting book recommendation from an ex-Palantir employee about a book they’re all encouraged to read: Impro. I'm listening to it now (Spotify's audiobook selection is making me doubt the need for my Audible subscription, btw), and it’s as kooky, interesting and mind expanding as promised.
That’s all for now - happy weekend everyone.
- Stephen